Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  “Wer kann Deutsch sprechen?” Who speaks German? the SS officer in charge of the convoy strode down the tracks shouting, as the cars were thrown open and the cowering prisoners blinked in the sunlight. Joseph Fimbel made the mistake of proving too useful. Once again, Brissinger says, he engendered distrust when actions inspired by a longing to help tragically backfired.

  “What are you going to do?” Fimbel brashly inquired of the German, after translating an order for ten of the prisoners to climb down from the train and strip off their clothes.

  “Shoot them,” the Nazi retorted.

  “No! I beg you, don’t do that!” Fimbel cried out, trying to marshal reason to save them. “Look, these are very old men. What is left of their lives will already be short. Why shoot such old men?”

  “Yes, of course, you’re right,” the SS guard said, his voice the essence of reasonableness. He ordered the original ten back on the train and pointed to ten of the youngest on board to climb down in their places to face execution.

  “Take me instead! Take me!” Fimbel insisted, already seeing the blood of young lives staining his conscience. But the ten were dragged off, followed by SS men carrying pickaxes and shovels. Gunshots exploded the peace of the forest.

  Those prisoners still conscious were pleading for water when the train reached Buchenwald, the notorious Nazi labor camp on the outskirts of Weimar where fifty-six thousand suffered and died. Among its eighty thousand survivors at liberation was Léon Blum, prewar France’s Jewish premier, who was blamed for defeat, condemned to life in prison by Marshal Pétain, and then, in 1943, turned over to Hitler.

  Upon arrival, Fimbel’s seemingly lifeless body was stripped and his Marist ring yanked from his finger before he was piled on top of a cart of cadavers headed to the crematorium. When a fellow inmate noticed him moving, he was revived, only to be sent with five hundred others to a grueling satellite camp to work in a salt mine where life meant beatings and torture, starvation and illness, topped off with a month-long death march in 1945, as the Nazis realized the Allies were coming.

  On September 11, 1944, when the American Army liberated Gray, clocks were restored to their proper French time. Three months later, the local committee of the liberation elected a Jew to serve as mayor. Joseph Fimbel, freed by Soviet soldiers, returned to Gray on May 23, 1945, weighing eighty-six pounds: the hollows of hunger were caves in his cheeks, and his shriveled skin was waxy and yellow. Like most of the clothes he had worn through his life, his striped camp uniform failed to cover his long, bony limbs. But Joseph Fimbel insisted on wearing those same wretched rags of the camp on his first night back in Gray, which he spent on his knees through long hours of prayer at Notre-Dame’s altar. He later arranged for a plaque to be placed at the entrance to the chapel in grateful dedication to Mary, the Holy Mother whose compassionate smile and promise of grace had sustained him throughout his descent into hell.

  This plaque would prove his only memorial in Gray, besides the portrait that hangs in the town hall gallery of mayors. On May 1, 1954, however, a decade after his arrest by the Nazis, the French government honored his actions by naming him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Fellow deportees from the Buchenwald subcamp appeared at the ceremony, expressing appreciation and lending witness to the courage and selflessness of Joseph Fimbel’s service to them in the face of tremendous personal peril. The grand rabbi of Lyon sent a message thanking him for individually saving at least sixty Jews, and the Germans, too, would later honor him for his postwar endeavors promoting forgiveness and friendship between the two countries.

  The Catholic mayor of Gray, Joseph Fimbel, was deported as a political prisoner to the concentration camp of Buchenwald near Weimar, Germany. (photo credit 10.1)

  “When Fimbel returned from Buchenwald, that’s when people recognized the work he had done, because during the Occupation, there was always a certain suspicion,” André Fick said, describing the day the Alsatian mayor finally won the respect he deserved.

  André also gained recognition, in 1958, when he was awarded the Military Cross of the Resistance in a ceremony on the town hall plaza. Yet, despite the passing of decades and Fimbel’s death in 1978, it remained his keenest desire for Gray to pay homage to the former mayor by dedicating a street in his name. When I volunteered my support to such a campaign, his wife shot him a look of definitive warning. This was clearly a road they had traveled before, and Marguerite did not intend to go back where it led or to revive the uncomfortable feelings the issue provoked for their neighbors, many of whom apparently still nurtured conflicted views on Mayor Fimbel’s performance in Gray under the Nazis.

  André Fick was decorated with the Croix de la Résistance in 1958. (photo credit 10.2)

  “Moïse Lévy has a street named for him, and he did far less!” André complained to his wife. A childlike tone of indignation made his voice quaver. “Moïse Lévy was the administrator of Gray for a much longer time, but in an époque that was bien banale, humdrum and peaceful. To do what Fimbel did for four years under German occupation, to save so many people—that deserves more!”

  Marguerite stared at him and did not reply. The petite white-haired lady was a serious force. After waiting in silence, André turned to me and threw up his hands. “My wife does not want me to pursue it, and I cannot go against her,” he said. “I would have liked to do it out of fidelity to him—my patron, my director, my teacher—out of gratitude to him.”

  Near sunset on that day of Gray’s races in 2001, after the last contestant had crossed the line, André Fick took me to the top of the town to the Basilique Notre-Dame. In retirement, he had become the church organist, and he was pleased when I asked to hear him play. Through the organ, he had continued serving the town while finding his personal form of devotion to Mary—not the one he imagined at twenty-three, in the thrall of his mentor, but one that he could fully express with a wife at his side. We arrived just as the priest was locking the doors, but with dispensation graciously granted, Marguerite and I followed her husband up the spiral stone steps of the fifteenth-century church into the organ’s high vaulted home. With little ado but evident pride in his church, André started to play, drawing the stops and pressing the keys. Music swelled through the nave, and the humming chords of his hymn rose through the restored bell tower to drift in the twilight, surprising the town that was spread out below us, preparing for dinner. His impromptu recital was a peaceful close to a day that had wakened to the tumult of athletes speeding through narrow Renaissance streets, crowds cheering at corners, and loudspeakers blaring. That evening, I would leave feeling grateful for the quiet bravery of all the Ficks and the Fimbels—people who risk their lives to wrestle with power in places whose names are not even footnotes in history’s pages.

  ELEVEN

  THE SUN KING

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY OF 1940, Roland Arcieri happily found himself alone in Lyon with a room of his own, the princely sum of 30,000 francs in his pocket, and the world at his feet. He was twenty years old when he maneuvered off the bus from Villefranche, and despite the burden of all his possessions, he felt buoyed by a new and electric feeling of freedom. The rest of his family had left Villefranche to move back to Mulhouse just the previous day. But he felt no self-pity as he crossed the bare ground of the place Bellecour at a time when even the Sun King looked lonely and cold atop his bronze horse in the square, and everyone else was celebrating with family members, making do with such feasts as rations allowed. Rather, as Roland prowled the city, now quiet and empty, he viewed its streets as his for the claiming. He discovered it all with the fresh eye of youth and a conqueror’s glee, undoubtedly equal to any sense of triumphant arrival that even King Louis XIV had known.

  Roland surveyed his domain in leisurely fashion. “No point in rushing,” he was known to joke with a shrug of the shoulders. “We’ll all arrive at the end of the month at the very same time.” He paused on the sidewalk beyond the barren sweep of the square and its simple border of skeletal trees that l
eft it begging for more decoration, put down his bags in front of a bookshop, and peered in the window. The shop was gated and closed. But as Roland stared into the gloom, it was almost as if he might already catch a glimpse of himself perusing book titles—works of biography, history, and literature, and even the odd, naughty bit of grivoiserie—browsing, unhurried, through stacks of books laid out on the tables, no longer bound to run for the bus to Villefranche at the end of the day.

  Ah, the pleasure of knowing his time was his own, finally freed from his father’s ten p.m. curfew and being called to account for every coin that fell out of his pocket. He was more than ready to dive into life, la bonne soupe, la grande liberté! Never mind his tight student budget or his father’s well-meaning yet tedious warning that the money he gave him was intended to last for two or three years. He took note of intriguing bars and cafés that he had never before had time to explore and permitted himself to thrill in the knowledge that everything strange would soon be familiar. Then there would be a new kind of pleasure—feeling at home in this elegant, cosmopolitan city, a man in the world, making his way. At last his life was truly beginning.

  He had come to Lyon for the ostensible purpose of studying law. This is what his father believed, and he therefore tried, at least for a while, to believe it himself. For the previous year, while commuting to classes, he had also fulfilled his military service by attending twice-weekly officer training sessions and made the one-hour trip to Lyon by bus every day. His family had decamped from Mulhouse to Villefranche six weeks after war was declared, when the textile firm that employed his father and uncle acted well in advance of any invasion to shift some operations out of Alsace. The firm had mills in Villefranche, a small commercial, industrial town northwest of Lyon, chiefly distinguished as capital of the Beaujolais winemaking region.

  Here, as part of the company’s managerial class, the Arcieri brothers resettled in style in a spacious villa just a bike ride away from a stretch of the Saône that was verdant and tranquil. The house was not far either from the lively main street, the rue Nationale, which rolled over a hill through town like a great wave, bereft of trees or even the simple appeal of a planned public square. Except for the local church and a few houses of historical merit, the street’s unbroken façade of four-story buildings with shops on both sides included little of any real interest or beauty. Still it drew out the crowds for the ritual promenade in the evenings, which served here, also, as prime entertainment with the promise of people meeting each other.

  In this provincial milieu, a young man like Roland did not go unnoticed. Tall and exceedingly handsome, he exuded an air of brooding reserve and poetic detachment that only added to his allure. Conversely, he could transform the slightest occasion into a party by way of his own wholehearted, delighted engagement, and as the only son between two loving sisters, he responded to women with natural charm. His silken attentions were validating without being demanding, and by always displaying impeccable manners, he put women at ease. Innately, he knew how to make them feel lovely and wanted, reflecting their most attractive view of themselves.

  Before long, the young man who had shyly shared first kisses with Janine as they lay in the river reeds of Mulhouse fell under the spell of a woman a decade older than he. The moral distinctions that strictly confined the sexual rites of his generation would not have allowed him to take advantage of a respectable, inexperienced girl. But when the beautiful wife of a high-ranking French reserve officer called up to war invited Roland to sample a full range of intimate pleasures, he could find no reason not to accept. Set aside was the fact that her absent husband happened to be one of his father’s important business associates.

  She was a former haute-couture model from Paris. Roland suspected she’d met and married her textile magnate through a thread in the weave of fabric and fashion, expecting a life of luxurious privilege. With her husband at war, however, she was bored and cut off in her place of safekeeping in crusty Villefranche, sufficiently bored, it would shortly be clear, to risk introducing a special young man to the petaled secrets that bloomed in her bed. Within a few months of the Arcieris’ arrival, she had picked Roland out on the rue Nationale. But it was his father, Emil, who inadvertently brought them together by hosting a company dinner that first Christmas in town where they wound up sitting across from each other. Before the main course at the city’s best restaurant, her wriggling toes were creeping under the cuffs of the young man’s trousers and brashly teasing their way up his calves. She smiled and daintily sipped at her wine and exchanged pleasantries with all of the guests, company people with their spouses and children, even as she pursued her adventure.

  After the New Year, she approached Emil at the office to ask a favor. She was planning an extended visit to Lyon, she said, and wondered if she might borrow Roland to help with her luggage on the train to the city. There was too much for a woman like her to manage alone. But when Roland showed up at her door as requested, he was nonplussed to discover she had already sent her baggage ahead and so was encumbered only by a small alligator train case and a high-strung fox terrier named Pepi. She insisted nonetheless that Roland come along, and when they descended in Lyon and reached her hotel, she was pleased to invite him up to her room. In the period that followed, instead of pondering inheritance law, Roland attended his own private classes in a subject of far more immediate interest. This understandably helped to chase Janine from his thoughts and succeeded in making the drôle de guerre all the more drôle as long as it lasted.

  The Arcieris assumed they were safe in Villefranche until the fighting broke out the following spring of 1940, and when the Germans arrived within twenty miles of town, they reacted in terror with everyone else. Loaded in two cars and a truck filled with bolts of company fabrics, the Arcieris joined the mass exodus, traveling over the volcanic peaks of the Massif Central, southwest toward Toulouse and the border of Spain. When they ran out of gas, they readily measured and traded yard goods for distance, the fabric that always paid them their wages serving them now directly as money. Indeed, its value was even more reliably stable than the teetering franc, given the fact that the country itself stood naked and shuddering while the Germans pursued their relentless assault.

  By June 19, 1940, five days after the Germans took Paris, Lyon declared itself an open city, avoiding attack by permitting the Wehrmacht to enter without opposition. The same day, a swastika flew over the entrance of its ornate city hall; German military bands exultantly marched on the place Bellecour with tubas, trumpets, drums, and trombones; and the beloved place des Terreaux with its opulent Bartholdi fountain and outdoor cafés was transformed into an assembly point for enemy troops and the spot the Wehrmacht selected for parking its trucks. Before the Germans’ withdrawal from this first occupation of Lyon the following month, ten thousand French prisoners of war would be locked into its Part-Dieu barracks and most then deported to face nearly five years in prison over the border.

  The Wehrmacht parked its trucks on the beautiful place des Terreaux behind Lyon’s seventeenth-century hôtel de ville (city hall). (photo credit 11.1)

  With the unexpected fall of the country, the Arcieris returned to Villefranche, where they remained until almost the end of the year, when their company summoned them home to Mulhouse. The armistice, by shifting the border once more and labeling Alsatians as Germans again, placed the Arcieri sons, Roland and his younger cousin André, at new risk. Although born in the period Alsace was French, they could now be forced to take up arms for the Führer. But Roland’s parents would not play along: they decided instead to leave him behind in the Unoccupied Zone, where the hazards of being twenty years old, fit, and Alsatian were far less likely to result in his being sent into battle. André, then sixteen, would return to school in Mulhouse, his parents convinced that before he reached the age of conscription, the British would also cave in to Hitler and the war would be over. It was thoroughly inconceivable to them that four years later, England would still be toughin
g it out with the help of its allies, and André would be caught in the carnage of Hitler’s attempt to overtake Russia. Among 130,000 young Alsatians forced to fight for the Reich, André made it back, but there were 36,000 others who would never return.

  As 1940 drew to a close, before going back home, Emil arranged the details of life for his son in Lyon. He rented a room in a war widow’s apartment in a sedate part of town, secured him a part-time job in a notary’s office, and urged him on with his study of law. None of which Roland would have chosen: the widow’s apartment remote and confining, the job ill paying and dreary, and the law a subject of dubious value in a world where authority devolved from force of arms. Who, Roland wondered, decided these matters, all the harsh new rules and restrictions that popped up every day in official pronouncements from Vichy? Where was the law endorsed by the people that gave Germans the right to dictate from Paris? That empowered Pétain—a man Roland viewed as a senile, self-righteous, sanctimonious toady—the right to act on behalf of the nation? Just days before, Pétain had banished from Lyon its beloved mayor, Edouard Hérriot, who had served in that post for thirty-five years, but had opposed the armistice with Hitler and abstained from the parliamentary vote that granted the marshal unlimited power. No, from Roland’s perspective, the law didn’t make much sense anymore. “Le droit mène à tout,” his father had told him. The law leads to everything. To which Roland had retorted, “Oui, le droit mène à tout—à condition d’en sortir!” Yes, it leads to everything, on the condition that you can escape it.