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

by Leslie Maitland

  Marseille’s commercial newspaper, Le Sémaphore, listed seven vessels sailing from port on March 13, 1942, but the destination of one, the Lipari, was not revealed. (photo credit 14.1)

  The steamship Lipari, commissioned in 1922 out of Le Havre (photo credit 14.2)

  On March 27, just two weeks after the Lipari sailed, the first French deportation took 1,112 Jews on a three-day journey to Auschwitz from the camp of Drancy in the suburbs of Paris. The Nazi leadership had adopted a “Final Solution of the Jewish question,” defined as “the complete annihilation of the Jews,” at the Wannsee Conference the previous January. It called for exterminating what they estimated as eleven million Jews in Europe, including those in undefeated or neutral countries. Now, to achieve Hitler’s goal, the Germans demanded French help in arresting, interning, and deporting Jews from all parts of the country.

  In response to Berlin, the French decided first to offer up stateless Jews found south of the line along with foreign or stateless Jews still in the northern Occupied Zone. The quota of Jewish bodies to be supplied to the Germans had to be filled, and under a loi du nombre, a law of numbers, any life spared meant the inexorable sacrifice of somebody else. On June 27, the Germans ordered fifty thousand Jews to be supplied from the Unoccupied Zone. Under terms of the armistice that required France to turn over any former Reich citizen upon demand, the Vichy government—with Prime Minister Pierre Laval now in effective control—absolved itself of any obligation to provide foreign-born Jews with asylum. But three days later, Adolf Eichmann, head of the central German security office branch for Jewish affairs, more fully revealed the scope of the Nazis’ Final Solution when he personally carried new orders to Paris: all Jews in France, foreign and native, would henceforth be targeted for deportation. Citizenship no longer offered protection to Jews.

  The impact on French emigration proved drastic. Already in February, a month before the Lipari sailed, the Germans widely reissued their previous ruling that forbade the emigration of Jews from the Occupied Zone without prior approval from Himmler. (As chief of the dreaded SS, Himmler was responsible for implementation of the Final Solution.) In the Unoccupied Zone, Vichy’s aim of deporting foreign Jews first, before French citizens—“pour commencer,” to begin, as Laval would express it—swiftly led to a similar crackdown. On July 20, Vichy’s Interior Ministry suspended exit visas previously issued to all foreign Jews except those from Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Quickly thereafter, on August 5, Vichy’s aim of deporting foreign Jews first produced a stringent order to regional prefects. With few exceptions, the order directed that all foreign Jews who had arrived in France after January 1, 1936, be promptly sent to the Occupied Zone and that any exit visas they held be summarily canceled. The following month, Laval explained the directive by saying, “It would be a violation of the armistice to allow Jews to go abroad for fear that they should take up arms against the Germans.”

  As a result, more than two-thirds of the 75,721 Jews deported from France would ultimately prove to be foreign born, despite the fact that they accounted for only half the Jews then in the country. Few of those seized would survive the ordeal to the end of the war. Three-quarters of the deported were arrested not by the Germans but by French policemen, while besides the deported, another four thousand died or were killed while still in French camps. More than half the dead—almost forty-two thousand, mostly foreign—were deported from France in that same year, 1942, that Janine and her family escaped from Marseille at the very last conceivable moment.

  That July, a notorious operation involving nine thousand French police produced the arrests of nearly thirteen thousand Jews around Paris. The so-called Vel d’Hiver roundup was named for the sports stadium where those arrested, including more than four thousand children, were held for five punishing days with meager amounts of water and food before being deported to face execution. The following month, the pace of arrests sharply picked up in the southern department of the Bouches-du-Rhône, where many deported already held emigration visas in hand. On August 11, a convoy from the camp of Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence took adult German and Austrian Jews with last names that began with the letters A through H. Thousands from other French camps were forced onto trains in the following days, while French-run dragnets on August 26 and 27 snatched 6,584 more Jews from throughout the Unoccupied Zone for convoys headed to death in Poland.

  Even evading capture in France, the Günzburger family’s flight to freedom would have been blocked in Morocco had they left any later. That summer, shortly after they sailed from Marseille to Morocco and from there on to Cuba, Joseph J. Schwartz, the Joint’s charismatic European director, cabled the rescue agency’s New York office from Marseille to report: NEW DIFFICULTIES HAVE ARISEN WITH REGARD MOROCCAN EXIT VISAS EVEN FOR THOSE WHO ALREADY HAVE FRENCH EXIT VISAS THUS MAKING IT DOUBTFUL WHETHER ANYBODY WILL BE ABLE DEPART CASABLANCA.

  As obstacles mounted, Schwartz rushed for help to the American chargé d’affaires in Vichy, S. Pinkney Tuck, who said he had already objected to Laval and other French leaders, and there was nothing more he could do. Schwartz reported Tuck’s resigned observations back to the Joint in New York: “Washington is fully informed of every detail and the French Government knows our reaction to the inhuman steps which they are taking,” Tuck had told him. “I do not believe that anything can be done by anybody for the time being. The only language these people understand is force.”

  Quickly the situation grew worse. PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE EVEN JEWS FRENCH NATIONALITY OBTAIN EXIT VISA, Schwartz wired New York on September 11, and the trend he noted was soon formalized. On November 8, the Vichy government called a total halt to granting exit visas, as the Allies launched Operation Torch, attacking the Moroccan and Algerian coasts. The landings—which Churchill optimistically hailed as “the beginning of the end” of the war—met French resistance in Casablanca, and Pétain broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. American fighters and warships engaged with French fighters protecting French warships, submarines, and transports, and as fire swept through the harbor of Casablanca, the Lipari, on which the Günzburgers had escaped just the previous March, was destroyed.

  Three days later, on November 11, under Hitler’s orders, the Wehrmacht stormed over the Demarcation Line and swept south to the sea. Operation Anton, the Nazi code name for the seizing of France, met no armed French opposition, despite its clear violation of the 1940 armistice between the two nations. Unchecked by Vichy, the Germans easily grabbed the rest of the country and conclusively sealed the routes of escape for all Jews still caught inside France—the foreign, the stateless, and the French citizens—leaving them equally subject to being deported. Within a month of taking Marseille, Hitler ordered the immediate deportation of every Jew still to be found south of the line.

  By January 1943, the Germans unleashed Operation Tiger, a massive roundup throughout Marseille that included—besides Jews—Communists, petty criminals, and others condemned as undesirables. It was the first step in a Nazi plan to demolish the historic port district in order to root out resisters already traced to anti-German guerrilla actions and to control the area in advance of a possible Allied attack from the sea. When they finally came, on May 27, 1944, American bombing raids on Marseille killed more than two thousand, mostly civilians, and also leveled much of the city where Janine and Roland had shared their last night.

  This, then, was the menacing world that Janine escaped when she was forced to board the Lipari for Casablanca, leaving Roland behind. That she loved him so much, while understanding so little of the dangers involved in remaining in France, would color her future and cloud her memories of that fateful day. Instead of embracing the last-minute chance to survive, at the age of eighteen, surrounded by madness and evil for almost a decade, she viewed leaving as exile, because the only place she felt safe in the world was within Roland’s arms.

  Janine stood fixed at the Lipari’s railing as the last sea-tossed golden mimosa drifted away,
the last curious gull wheeled back to shore, and Roland—capable of rowing no farther—finally turned his boat toward the pier. Twisting his treasured ring on her finger, she tried to find solace in its solid reality there on her hand, as if it might guarantee they would be reunited. With everything that mattered to her rapidly shrinking into the distance, she felt enraged. Yet she was not the passenger who cursed aloud. Rather, the male voice that startled her out of her own dark reflections expressed a view she could not bear to hear.

  “Merde à la France!” She spun in surprise to see several bearded Orthodox Jews, diamond dealers from Antwerp, standing beside her. The speaker’s native Polish accent saturated his acquired Belgian French, as once again he swore, “Merde à la France!” Shit on France! He was wearing a long black coat and broad black hat that he clutched to his head to keep it from blowing away, as he reached over the side and spat in the sea. “The cowardly French are no better than Germans, only less honest,” he contemptuously remarked to his fellows, who took his words as a cue to follow suit and spit in the waves.

  Janine studied the man—his grim, black attire, his bony frame and narrow hunched shoulders, his skeletal fingers hooked over the railing—and meanly observed that he looked like a crow. His attack on France, with Roland by now just a dot on the water, clawed at her heart. In him she saw the embodiment of all her problems: he was one of those Jews who attracted suspicion wherever they went and incited hatred from the rest of mankind. Why should her existence be shaped and confined by people like this, who scoffed at the need for winning acceptance, when all joy in her life had solely depended upon remaining in France, yes belonging in France like anyone else?

  Four years. Almost four tumultuous years had passed since their leaving Freiburg, and now they would have to begin all over again. But she didn’t know Spanish, and she certainly didn’t know what to expect from this destination called Cuba that sounded barely civilized to her. And what if Roland forgot her this time? Senselessly, she turned her despair on the stranger beside her. “Vraiment, you spit on the French?” she confronted the man. “I, for one, would much rather be staying in France than be sent into exile here beside you!” He stared, speechless, as if he couldn’t believe such hostile words had come from her mouth.

  With that, realizing she had best be alone before she lashed out at somebody else, she moved off and tried to focus her sights on the shore. High above the clay red rooftops of the ancient, sprawling maritime city, she could make out the gilded Virgin and Child atop Notre-Dame de la Garde. Roland had said he would climb the hill to the basilica’s terrace after the Lipari sailed in order to keep her in sight as long as he could.

  “Keep your eyes on the top of the hill,” he had told her, “and know I’ll be there.” Janine fixed her gaze on the church and tried to pretend they could see one another. “Wait for me,” she whispered under her breath. “Please, mon chéri, please wait for me, or come for me soon.”

  When the evening sky turned gray and cold, she grudgingly withdrew from the deck and found the stairs that wound down through the ship. Off-limits to her were the impressive common rooms—the bar, the library, the spacious salon—with patterned carpets, inlaid tables and Louis chairs, heavy draperies, potted palms, bronze sconces, and richly paneled wood ceilings and walls. Not for refugees either, the first-, second-, and third-class passenger cabins. Instead, their place on the voyage was the dark, cramped, and windowless hold. A space designed for packing freight, it now held more than two hundred double-decker beds set up in rows. Curtained partitions divided the sexes and a tin basin hung from each bed to accommodate the needs of the seasick. In addition to Jewish refugees, the hold carried red-capped French colonial soldiers returning home to Africa, their wartime service no longer required. Those assigned to the hold were permitted one exterior deck to congregate, while the ship’s fine common rooms were mainly reserved for the use of higher-ranking military personnel traveling in the passenger cabins.

  Roland watched Janine’s ship sail out of sight from the plaza of Marseille’s nineteenth-century basilica, situated at the city’s highest point. (photo credit 14.3)

  Reaching the hold, Janine found Alice and Trudi nowhere in sight near the beds they had claimed by planting their things—upper bunks for the girls and a lower for Alice. She assumed they were trying to give her some time to herself. Her parents had shown no sign they noticed her anguish in leaving and had not even questioned the ring on her finger. To confront her about it would open the issue of why she’d pursued a romance with Roland in overt defiance of Sigmar’s objections. Relying instead on distance to end it, the parents kept silent, and Janine herself would never dare broach the topic with them, either then or, for that matter, anytime later. Relieved for the moment not to be bothered, she climbed into the top bunk of the bed next to Trudi’s—a plank covered with a rough straw mat and bedding limited to one black, foul-smelling blanket—and then, hiding her head in her arms to muffle the sound, she wept until she felt empty. At last, following Roland’s directive, she decided to open the long envelope he had slipped in her pocket just as they parted.

  With it she found a small, useful gift of a new handkerchief that coaxed her to smile as she noticed the bright embroidered scene in one corner. It was a childlike view of a jaunty French cock singing the start of a better tomorrow as it summoned that day from over an ocean. A half circle of sun arose from the water wearing a radiant crown of yellow stitches. Beneath the rooster, embroidered letters spelled the name of France’s Resistance leader, DE GAULLE, still in refuge across the Channel in England—a political message expressly designed to wipe away tears. Janine pulled the coarse blanket over her legs and tore open the seal of Roland’s envelope to find twelve neat, handwritten pages. In the dim light of an ugly bare bulb that hung from the ceiling, she started to read, carefully savoring each precious French word.

  The brightly embroidered handkerchief that Roland gave to Janine

  “Lyon,” it said at the top of the page, dated three days before. “This Tuesday evening, the 10th of March, 1942. To my darling Janine, so that she will always believe in me and to help her wait for better days.” Roland’s letter continued in part:

  When I first knew you three years ago, you were still young, and I myself did not know more about love than the word. The affection that I had for you would soon fade with the war but I treasured a memory of you.

  Roland’s letter to Janine

  Later, when we met again in Lyon, I did not retrieve this memory, and the idiotic principles that I had adopted during a year of war turned our meeting into a banal adventure, one more sorrow for you, one more remorse for me, because all the same I was aware of my cowardice. You must know, however, that I never completely forgot you. In Villefranche, I thought of you from time to time, but never without a pang of anguish and disgust for myself. It was necessary to have last summer together for me to discover the young woman you are. Everything I lacked the courage to say, I now will say here. I ask your pardon, Janine, because you loved me and as a result, there was a great deal I caused you to suffer.

  Happily for me, I fell sick and if my operation brought mainly ennui, it also succeeded in bringing me close to you, and since then, I could love only you. But one is forced to believe that actions and their consequences do avenge themselves. Scarcely have I found you back once again than you must flee, but now you are not alone in suffering, and destiny sends me a just punishment for all of my weakness.

  Still, we share a love that is strong enough to triumph over all obstacles and to arrive at its most perfect expression in marriage and a life together. I consider you from this present day as my fiancée and future partner. You ask only to belong to me. We must wait for that reality. Our sole enemy is time! Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on us alone. I give you my vow that whatever the time we must wait, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt.

  Believe in the fulfillment of our happiness, believe
in it with all your strength, all your will, all your love, and our test will end as we desire. Time will change nothing. I am sure of you, be equally sure of me, and we will have overcome half our pain.

  You will tell me that it is a long time, two years without seeing each other. But there is no reason to think that our separation will actually last that long. The war may end in Europe in a few months, and nothing will stand in the way of regular correspondence and telegrams. In any case, the hostilities will end by winter. And as soon as normal communications are reestablished, our separation will be less difficult.

  Please believe, ma chérie, it is absolutely untrue that you might not be able to return to Europe. One way or another, as soon as the war is over in Europe, even if it is lost, you will come back to France. If you can’t get permission to stay, you can get tourist papers, and that will be enough for us to regularize our situation and for you to become my wife. Under the worst hypothesis, if the war is lost and you are forbidden entry to Europe, I can obtain a permit to reside in or visit the USA, which will enable us to pursue our most cherished plans. There is no reason to worry about this. I give you my word that I will come to find you, and no law could forbid a foreigner from coming to a country if his intention is only to marry the woman he loves!