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

by Leslie Maitland

  As they strolled through town, they paid little attention to threats against Jews—TO KILL A JEW IS TO AVENGE A SOLDIER—scrawled in chalk on buildings and walls. Rather, they tried to find places to relax their guard about being noticed by someone who might report them to Sigmar. Roland took her exploring the city’s concatenation of hundreds of obscure, covered passageways known as traboules, which permitted the cognoscenti of Lyon to weave through buildings from street to street without being seen. These internal alleys were originally designed to enable silk workers to shield the delicate fabrics they carried from dirt and bad weather, and later would help hunted members of the Resistance elude the Gestapo. In hidden, decoratively sculpted interior courtyards between the traboules, standing against slim Renaissance pillars or under groined vaults of stone gothic arches, Janine and Roland found shadowy corners for sharing their love in the only privacy available to them.

  In the movie theater they hid in the dark in the last row and snuggled together under the coat that Roland brought along regardless of weather. Their hands and fingers went on adventures, sneaking past buttons and sliding through zippers, cautiously edging down uncharted ridges of muscle and bone, and into the warm, hidden places where once again they found one another. Wordlessly, they dissolved in kisses and imagined a future more glorious than any film on the screen. Though consumed with desire, they lacked a place to succumb to temptation, even had they both been prepared to reject the prevailing sanctions against premarital sex.

  One afternoon, they ventured into the Boîte à Musique in the passage de l’Argue, a covered arcade between the place de la République and the place des Jacobins. Above the long, narrow bar, the second-floor hallway was lined with a half dozen doors that each opened into a small cubicle where a faded sofa, a lamp, and a table provided a décor dictated by function: couples with no other space to spend time alone rented the closetlike rooms by the hour. When they entered the boîte, Janine was too embarrassed to climb the stairs with Roland, so he went up first, and she followed five minutes later. Upstairs, they were amused to discover that the door of each room had a small opening cut into the center, covered by a sliding wood panel, which permitted the waiter to pass drinks discreetly to the patrons inside. When the waiter knocked to alert them to open the service window, both Janine and Roland rushed to the door to peer into the hallway. At that moment, the panel slid open in the door facing theirs, and they found themselves staring directly into the face of the patron in the opposite room, who apparently thought the knock was for him.

  In one paralyzed moment of disorientation, Norbert and Janine stared at each other across the narrow breach of the hallway. Neither brother nor sister could muster speech under the mortifying circumstance that called upon them to acknowledge each other. Norbert’s glance darted back and forth between Roland and his sister, an older brother’s possessive sense of honor and outrage ablaze in his eyes despite his having been caught in the exact same position of compromised virtue. With Norbert still gawking in disbelief, Roland slid their panel back into place, and as soon as they judged the coast to be clear, they relinquished all plans for sexual intimacy and hurried back to the violet twilight of the place Rambaud, for fear Norbert would reach the parents before her. By getting home first and holding her tongue, she was able to strike a pact of secrecy and see it prevail.

  “What in hell were you doing in a place like that?” Norbert hissed to her later. To which she replied, unusually brazen, “I guess I was doing the same thing as you.”

  “But it’s not the same!” Norbert countered.

  “Oh, no?” she successfully bluffed. “Why don’t we ask for Father’s opinion?”

  Late that fall, anti-Jewish measures grew increasingly harsh, with the staggering fine of one billion francs imposed upon the Jews of France for their purported involvement in the killing or wounding of German officers in the Occupied Zone. Bombs felled synagogues in Paris, and the Germans arrested and interned one thousand prominent French Jewish professionals around the capital. On October 23, under orders of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, Jews were forbidden to emigrate from Germany or any area of Reich occupation. At the end of the year, the threat level soaring, Vichy announced that all foreign Jews who had arrived in France since January 1, 1936, would be rounded up and consigned to forced labor battalions or internment camps. If the Pearl Harbor invasion on December 7, 1941, and the U.S. declaration of war raised any spirits in France, Roosevelt’s prior refusal to enter the conflict in Europe, along with America’s closed-door policy toward refugees, gave Jews little hope that Uncle Sam would come to their rescue anytime soon.

  Less than two months later, in late January, when the rule went out to regional prefects to pursue the internment of all foreign Jews, Janine was seized by terror when, heading off to work one morning, she saw French police loading Jews on a truck. Fearing her parents had been arrested, she ran back home and raced up five flights of stairs to their silent apartment. She rang the bell, but nobody answered. Over and over, yet no one responded. Breathless and sobbing, she pummeled the door with her fists and cried for her mother, and then she collapsed against the wall in the hall, too drained to move until she heard a noise at the door and Alice poked out, still dressed in her nightgown with braids askew.

  “O mein Gott!” Alice exclaimed, as she dropped to the floor at Janine’s side. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Are you sick? Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I thought you were taken!” Janine wailed. “Why didn’t you answer the door? I was ringing and banging! On the street … I saw them forcing Jews on a truck! I was sure they got you and Father!”

  But Alice and Sigmar had simply stayed in bed, the only place to hide from the cold in their unheated apartment. From that moment on, Janine would board the bus to work every morning wearing the new double-breasted, fur-trimmed brown suit and matching brown coat that her parents had bought her in optimistic anticipation of leaving the country. To ensure their daughters would travel in style, they had taken another loan from Maurice and pooled their accumulated textile rations to have outfits made for the girls. That both chose dark fur-trimmed suits to descend well dressed in the unaccustomed heat of Havana proved how little they knew about its climate, as well as how quickly they hoped to move on to New York. With the fresh understanding that any Jew in France faced instant arrest at any time, Janine grimly determined to wear these fashionable new clothes to work every day so that wherever she landed, she would look like a lady when she arrived.

  Over the previous months, Sigmar had been quietly pursuing escape with newly desperate, fear-stoked obsession. It was only good fortune that having blindly waited in Europe for far too long, he finally sought the permits they needed a half step ahead of the effective enforcement of new regulations. His goal was to get all requisite permits approved in time to qualify for a sailing planned for mid-March. Tentatively, HICEM had their places reserved on the Lipari, a ship leaving from Marseille for North Africa; from there, another vessel chartered by the Joint out of Lisbon would take them to Cuba.

  In late December he had gone to a Lyon notary’s office with two Jewish friends—one from Freiburg, the other from Mulhouse. Both had to attest that they knew who he was and where he was from, in order to help him obtain a document to take the place of a birth certificate, which he could not hope to acquire from Germany. A week later, because being “stateless” they lacked valid passports, he had brought the family before police officials at the Préfecture du Rhône to apply for temporary safe-conduct passes permitting them to travel by train to Marseille and from there to leave France. On January 3, he had gained exit visas that would expire in three months; two days later, the Cuban consulate had granted them permits to land on the island as “tourists”; in late February, they obtained stamps of approval to pass through Morocco; and on Saturday evening, March 7, 1942, a cable from one of the rescue agencies arrived on their doorstep bearing the news that they were cleared for de
parture the following Friday. They were told to report to Marseille a day before sailing to obtain further visas from the Préfecture des Bouches-du-Rhône permitting their boarding the Lipari.

  Although Herbert would eventually sponsor more than one hundred refugees for entry into the United States, he could not persuade the Goldschmidts, Marie, or Bella to let him arrange passage and visas for them. Maurice and Mimi were stubbornly fixed on remaining in Lyon, both insisting the persecution that targeted foreign-born Jews would not really apply to those who were native-born French. Besides, Maurice confessed, he was afraid of the water, had not learned to swim, and therefore could not bring himself to travel by ship. Marie and Bella, of course, would not think of leaving without the rest of Marie’s family. On March 8, Maurice loaned Sigmar $500 for traveling money, a sum that Sigmar duly recorded, along with his own reminder to calculate interest, in the notebook where he scrupulously listed the many debts he had been forced to incur since fleeing Freiburg.

  Janine’s safe-conduct pass, dated January 2, 1942, served in place of a passport, valid only for one trip to Cuba via train and ship.

  Unprepared for instant departure, the family had trouble coming by trunks for packing their things and faced the prospect of hurriedly selling Sigmar’s piano and the furniture they had succeeded in moving from Freiburg to Mulhouse, to Gray and Lyon, only to give it all up in the end. With no possibility of transporting anything more than clothing and some lightweight personal items, regret was numbed by the frenzy of action. The barrenness of the French marketplace enhanced the value of everything they were leaving behind, yet for simplicity’s sake, they struck a deal for the lot, only to have the promised buyer, exploiting their weakness, fail to show up with the payment in time. Thus, in the last moment they were obliged to close the door on all that they had left in the world without the money they anticipated. In their last hasty check around the apartment, they even forgot the crates of valuables they had used to support the mattress on which Norbert slept and so unwittingly abandoned a treasured assortment of family heirlooms. At least documents, letters, and photographs were carefully packed.

  Shrouded in grief as the rest of the family buzzed in fretful preparation around her, Janine barely had time to absorb the enormity of the loss she was facing. Throughout the months of Sigmar’s fruitless travels to arrange their escape, she had persuaded herself it never would happen. She had rejected the prospect, declined to discuss it, blocked the image even from nightmares, and assured herself that should the day come, she would insist the family travel without her. She was eighteen years old and eager to make her life with the man she loved. But even as she told herself this, a practical voice argued against it. In the confrontation between self and soul, she knew she lacked the resolve to break from her parents at this perilous time. Recalling the morning she feared them arrested, she knew that she might have to protect them. Who knew what conditions awaited in Cuba? They needed her and, she had to admit as her thoughts reached this point, she doubted that she could manage without them in the labile and increasingly menacing climate of a Europe cruelly ruled by the Nazis.

  If she stayed in France, where and how would she and Roland be able to live and support themselves? She could not be with him without getting married, but neither could she imagine presenting themselves in a French city hall expecting someone to marry them now—a foreign Jew and a displaced Alsatian ripe to be nabbed for use by the Germans. Would it even be fair to expose Roland to the growing dangers of wedding a Jew? He might well be suspected of being Jewish himself: his boyhood circumcision posed a threat they had already discussed, as stories of fearsome Hosenproben conducted at the point of a gun filtered over the line from the Occupied Zone.

  As the week rushed by, she agonized over the question whose resolution would taunt her forever—to stay or to leave—as if she had free choice in the matter. She counted the days with the same bitter foretaste of inevitable hunger with which she had learned to squirrel her rations, already knowing there would not be enough. She changed her mind over and over again. She packed her things, gave up her job, and acted, if only for the sake of her parents, as if she fully intended to emigrate with them. Meanwhile, every cell in her body protested against it. Roland himself worried aloud about his power to protect her if the Germans decided to retake Lyon, so in the end, fear had the last word.

  Janine went through those final few days with the same strange eyes that drank in the city when she arrived. But this time the distance with which she surveyed the places around her devolved from the effort to fix them in mind. She felt herself an invisible person, her own ghost, seeing it all as if she were gone. Unengaged in the swirl of everyday life that continued unchanged, she imprinted it all in sadness and longing at a frozen and lonely remove from the world. She felt jealous of every girl she passed in the street, seeing the possible face of a rival who would comfort Roland and then steal his love.

  That Tuesday, after her last day at work, Roland showed up outside her office on the place Jules Ferry and announced they were going together to buy her a ring, an enduring symbol of their commitment to marry after the war. For one delirious hour, choosing a ring that pledged his future to hers, she freed herself from the specter of leaving that had blackened the days since the cable arrived. Together, they selected a square-cut stone that aspired to resemble an aquamarine and mirrored the crystalline blue of her eyes. The stone was set in a modern wide band of silver—nothing showy or complicated—as simple and clear as their love for each other. While the jeweler inscribed Roland’s name and the date inside the band, another ornament caught his eye: a brooch composed of three little poppies, enameled in blue, white, and red to symbolize the French tricolor. It was the flag of the country where he would be waiting for her, and before she could stop him, Roland emptied his pockets for patriotism’s token, as well.

  “J’attendrai.” He whispered the words of their song in her hair as he attached the floral pin to her jacket and then slipped the glittering ring on her fourth finger. “Moumoutte,” he murmured, his term of endearment. “Chérie.” He opened his arms and clasped her against him, pretending that nothing could force them apart. “Jour et nuit, j’attendrai ton retour.”

  That night, not having the means to reciprocate by buying a present, but wanting to leave something for him to remember her by, Janine searched through her things for the only two items of value she had: a pink-gold heart-shaped charm with her German initials, HG, that she had received from an aunt when she was a child, and a garnet ring that Alice had had made, and the same for Trudi, out of a pair of their grandmother’s earrings. Janine knew they were things Roland couldn’t use, but she gave them to him along with her prized autograph book as a deposit—proof that after the war she would return to redeem them with the gift of herself for the rest of her life.

  On Thursday, March 12, the family went in a horse-drawn cab to the gare des Brotteaux for the train to Marseille. Edy’s wife, Lisette, planned to board the train farther south in Valence, where she was living in hiding, in order to see the family before they sailed and to spend a parting night with Janine. No one expected Roland to be there, but he and Roger, along with one of Norbert’s girlfriends, were at the station when the family arrived. Janine’s eyes were swollen with weeping, but instead of the wrenching departure she dreaded, Roland strolled casually by while the parents were busy exchanging farewells with Marie, Mimi, Maurice, and Bella. Curiously, he did not stop to greet her, but flashed her a wink, squeezed her arm, and whispered, “Pas encore.” You won’t leave me yet. Then he walked down the track and mounted the train a few cars behind the one the family boarded.

  An hour after the train pulled out of the station, with Sigmar and Alice lulled to sleep in the rocking compartment, Norbert beckoned his sisters to follow him through the cars to look for their friends. They couldn’t stay long for fear the parents would wake up and worry, but they scribbled the name of their hotel in Marseille and arranged to meet in the city that even
ing after Alice and Sigmar had gone to bed. Then they returned to their own seats to watch the soft fields of France roll behind them and fall into memory, and the chestnut and plane trees begin to give way to spears of dark Mediterranean cypress.

  “Never in my life do I remember to have passed a day as sad as this Thursday at Marseille, and I still hate that town for that awful day I spent there,” Janine would later write in a journal. “It was only on our arrival there that we fully realized that the next day—only twenty-four hours later—we had to leave France for good.”

  Scanning the crowd to catch sight of Roland after debarking the train, she came out of the Saint Charles Station with her family and found herself standing at the top of a terraced mountain of steps that cascaded sharply down to the street, flanked by verdigris art nouveau lampposts and white statuary. From the crest of that hill overlooking Marseille, she stared in awe for the first time at the sweep of the sea endlessly stretching into the distance and understood with fresh despair the vast chasm that would divide her from Roland.

  The sprawling city was laid out beneath her, and on an opposite hilltop over the harbor, the gilded Notre-Dame de la Garde, crowned and cradling her infant son, kept watch on the Mediterranean waters. Pink limestone formations patched charcoal hills surrounding the city, and down past the end of the principal artery of the grand Canebière, antique flesh-colored forts, built from the stone chiseled out of those hills, stood in defense of the narrow Vieux Port. There, at the foot of the city, bustling streets embraced the notorious harbor on three of its sides, and the fourth one opened into the sea. The family wandered the streets toward their hotel, twisting through a warren of tiny alleys north of the port, so steep that many were laddered with steps. Come darkness, Janine worried, what if Roland could not find the place where the Jewish rescue agency had booked them rooms for the night? It was in the vice-ridden, decrepit tenement section, the Quartier du Panier behind the seventeenth-century city hall that crouched in faded glory like a worn-out whore at the side of the harbor.