by Nadia Gould
The first Germans we saw in the countryside then must have been the first to enter France. They were tall clean-shaven and handsome. The old people in the street were constantly warning us that the horrible Germans would cut off our fingers and ravage and pilfer houses and stores. They knew because they remembered terrible stories during World War I, but I was not scared. I had been raised to think that all people are good, and that a person is a person whatever his nationality. I thought that the Germans were the same as we were. War was atrocious, and to be a soldier was a pity. Those first Germans impressed me. They sang stirring songs that I enjoyed even though I couldn’t understand the words. Their beat made me feel uplifted.
People were not pleased to see these tall clean uniformed men so proudly singing, with their boots reverberating military rhythms. But these soldiers were polite and tried to go out of their way to be gallant with the population. We were surprised that they were so kind, and we were getting used to them.
Chapter 5
Chatenay-Malabry Occupied 1941
Back in Chatenay when we had returned from the country we noticed that the Germans were no longer so good-looking or young. They were seasoned soldiers, tattered and ragged. People were delighted to guess that the young ones, the ones we had seen first, had been sent to fight the Russians in Siberia from where they would never return, and they said “Remember Napoleon.”
Upon our return my mother took charge of the Cité until Marcel came back from the country. She was worried that the house might be commandeered if it looked empty. And she was right. The Germans came to inquire about its availability: my mother put linens on the window sills and she played the radio as loud as she could to make it seem that many people lived there. Then she ran all over town trying to find people to stay with the two of us. It was important to make the house look fully occupied so it would not be confiscated by the Germans.
I went back to my old school and found Maimaine again and we renewed our friendship. By then, I too, liked boys. But we had to prepare our “Certificat d’Etudes,” the first official diploma one received at that time in France, a serious test for which we had to review the entire year and which took two full days. We were only twelve years old. As it turned out this was going to be my last year in Chatenay although I didn’t realize it. We were occupied by the Germans but in Vichy, in the unoccupied zone, the Maréchal Petain—the old hero of Verdun—was making speeches pleading for the French to stick together as a family. I loved this song that was written for him “Maréchal, here we are facing you the savior of France! The motherland will be reborn Maréchal, Maréchal here we are!!” It was a stirring song, and I volunteered to help in school and distribute leaflets for the old Maréchal.
There was always an undercurrent of fear. My mother began to receive a Jewish newspaper. She was surprised. She couldn’t imagine who would have known she was Jewish. She was not religious, and there was no reason for her to get this paper, which was suspicious anyway. She also received a notice asking her to register as a Jew. Marcel told her not to go, but she didn’t know what to do. She had always obeyed all the rules, and she felt obliged to register rather than take the chance and be in the wrong and found out. Also she didn’t believe that she would be in danger because she was Jewish. Then more mail came with “JEW” printed all over it, as if to proclaim to the postman and all his friends that she was a Jew. Everyone in the Cité was alarmed.
My father, discharged from the French Légion in Africa, was now living in Marseille in the unoccupied zone. Half of France was occupied by the Germans, and the other half was under a government with the Maréchal Petain as the head, cooperating with the Germans.
My father sent my mother letters through a friend who was the cook on the train that traveled Paris to Marseille. The man put the letters in jars, which he hid in a huge simmering soup pot. The ordinary mail was censored. My mother was more and more anxious to join my father. They decided I should go first because the cook had said that unescorted children had no problem passing the “demarcation line.”
I took the train with a small suitcase. The cook walked by and winked at me. I was not supposed to know him, but my mother had told me he would be looking out for me during the trip, and I had nothing to worry about. All I had to say, if anyone asked, was that I was going to visit my father in Marseille.
I was excited to be traveling on my own with a suitcase. This was my first voyage, I was alone in the train compartment for the entire trip. In those days there were not many travelers. I enjoyed the scenery and was not worried. It was peaceful until there was a sudden stop and I heard a man shout something in German. My door opened brusquely and two uniformed men towered over me “Where are you going?” “How old are you?” “Open your suitcase!” The soldiers searched my things and found a chocolate bar, which they confiscated on the spot. They laughed and ate it in front of me. Chocolate was rare and expensive. And only available on the black market, but I couldn’t protest. I was paralyzed with fear. The soldiers tapped me on the head and walked out chuckling and looking pleased with themselves. As soon as the train started again the cook came to see me, and this time he sighed, relieved: “You’ve made it.” I was puzzled because I had not realized I had been in any danger and that I had crossed the border without papers. The cook had told my mother I could cross, but it was not a sure thing. “In these days of war nothing is ever sure,” he said to me.
Chapter 6
Marseille 1941-42
My father lived in the center of Marseille, in a quiet small back street. His furnished apartment with white lace curtains on the windows also had a white Victorian handmade crocheted bedspread on the bed. The kitchen was almost entirely filled by a round table covered with a red-and-white checkered oil cloth.
I had not seen my father for a year, and I was happy to be living with him, by himself, in Marseille, a hustling port city whose warm weather and blue sky enchanted me. We waited for my mother to organize her escape from occupied France and join us. It was getting harder and harder to leave the occupied zone, and we worried about how she was going to manage.
The best memories I have of my father were the months we spent alone in his small apartment. When we lived in the Cité in Chatenay he was hardly ever at home. He traveled constantly selling anything he could from knives to tombstones. When he came home from these business trips we had short-lived festive reunions. He once brought me ham or saucisson sec: subversive treats forbidden by Dr. Carton, but my father thought it couldn’t be all that bad just one time. For a few days he would be in a good mood, and we had fun. Then he became sullen and quickly exasperated. He kept his own counsel and never talked about what bothered him; and he often made my mother and me tremble at his threatening silence. It was a relief to see him go off on the road again.
In Marseille, I was surprised to find him far less disgruntled. It took me a while to get used to living in a small household away from the people of the Cité. But I loved my father’s cooking. He made bouillabaisse and french fried potatoes and the kind of food that could be cooked only in small quantities. We ate many dishes we never had in Chatenay. He was obsessively clean and neat, and he took great care of his kitchen utensils. He made it look easy as he flung his arms in the air and poured broth from pot to pot or threw in the air thin crepes. I admired his technique and the obvious pleasure he took in his own cooking.
Across the street lived a retired sea captain with a talking parrot who jabbered all day long. It said, “Bonjour petite fille” and also screamed obscenities. This parrot made me love Marseille all the more. I also loved the special accent of Marseille which made everything seem comical. In Marseille everything was sunshine. When people shouted insults to one another, I thought it sounded like endearments. I wanted to belong to the city, and I immediately started to speak with the southern accent. Soon people believed I was born there.
One day as I was standing in the back of the bus someone pinched my buttocks. I shouted “EH! Monsieur, yo
u are pinching MY buttocks!” Everybody laughed. The man had to get off the bus in a hurry, and the other passengers praised me for being outspoken and brave. I knew this was my city.
My mother arrived with her old rusty bicycle after she crossed the demarcation line. It had not been easy. Bicycles were rare and precious items and my mother used hers thoroughly. I remember her on her bicycle or just holding on to it ready to go anywhere wherever she heard food, any food, was being sold on the black market. She had a special sense for discovering places where she could buy foods we had not seen for years. She told us hair-raising stories about her escape from the occupied zone. As she was going down a steep hill, she pressed on her brakes and suddenly she realized she had no brakes and she had to scream, “No brakes! No brakes!” And, fortunately it made the people on the road give way for her and her bike. She left Paris with a friend who had relatives along the way. They decided to go biking slowly and always appear as if they were ordinary local folks. Her friend was French so he would answer the questions of the French gendarmes. They made sure to go to some stores in the villages or cities and make some conversation with the storekeepers collecting names and tidbits of local gossip. It was a harrowing time. They were stopped at every intersection and grilled by the police: “Where do you live?” They would have to know all the villages nearby and sound convincing. “Where are you going?” and also “What‘s in your basket?” She was amazed at her quick wit during these inquiries. They always said the right thing. When the German police questioned her she could say she was French because they couldn’t tell she had a foreign accent. With the French police she would let her friend answer or she had to have a new story, other lies they made up: “I am the new nurse of Madame Cartier”—a name they had picked up from the locals. She said she was made more afraid by the French police than the Germans in these encounters.
When she arrived in Marseille, she couldn’t believe she was safe and reunited with her family. It took her some time to regain her strength. She had no luggage and had to get all new clothes: A red silk blouse with long sleeves, a navy pleated skirt and a white tailored cotton jacket. It was the fashion then to wear blue, white and red, the colors of the French flag. Women were also wearing elevated wooden shoes because leather was rare. My mother looked tall and glamorous with her curly hair that she dyed blond. I loved seeing her so chic.
My father’s apartment was too small for the three of us, so we moved to the house of the friends of my parents. It was a large villa on a street called “La rue des Flots Bleus” (The Street of the Blue Waves) near the Corniche, the famous road that followed the Mediterranean Sea. I loved the villa with an enclosed garden where we dozed, caressed by the breeze that carried the fragrances of the sea as the waves broke on shore. The two families who had lived in the house had left for Casablanca. As many Jews as could were leaving Marseille. All my parents’ friends were going, and soon it seemed as if we were the only ones left.
I registered at the Lycee Longchamps, a serious school that I felt proud to attend. My first friend was Jacqueline, short like me, who wore her hair braided and crisscrossed on top of her head Russian-style. She was frail, and her eyes went in different directions—one was immobile and could at times create a disturbing asymmetry. Because of her sharp wit, she was the favorite of the young teachers while her classmates thought she was a snob.
I was not all that smart, and I wanted to be popular. I worked on it conscientiously. I had read a story about the lion that was lucky to have a mouse as a friend in his hour of need, and I wanted to be on the side of the underdog. I kept thinking of the Revolution. I had no doubt that the French Revolution was the greatest achievement in the history of mankind. If there was abuse by those in power, I was on the side of the victims. Jacqueline’s alliance with the teachers made me uncomfortable, even though I also liked them. I couldn’t forget my peers, but I worked it out through my friendship with Jacqueline: I remained one of the girls, but I was close enough to the teachers. Even though I was new, I quickly made myself the class student representative. Jacqueline was the top student in all subjects, but one summer, my only summer in Marseille, I studied and researched the Greek myths, and I became the expert. I could differentiate between the Roman and Greek stories and I knew all the obscure demigods and mortal heroes and their relationships to the Gods. I even considered making them my religion.
I liked to make people laugh, and when I had to be Vercingetorix in a play at my new lycee, I was such a buffoon and people laughed so hard that after that just the sight of me would make them laugh and I loved it. Vercingetorix was the first King of Gaul and he was thought to be good-natured but primitive, crude and slightly stupid. So I could enjoy showing off all his frailties and yet I managed to make him also lovable. I was a ham and the French love hams on the stage.
I made friends with another girl also called Jacqueline. She was reserved and Protestant. That she should feel so strongly about her religion came to me as a surprise. We had just studied about France’s losses as it expelled its Protestants, and Jacqueline told me she was glad that it taught the French a lesson! I was exhilarated by her fervor. It made me feel that the history we learned from books was still alive. Her feelings of belonging to an outside group fascinated me. I didn’t have that feeling, yet, except in terms of my parents being foreigners.
I joined the Cercle des Nageurs, a swimming club on the Corniche where professional swimmers exercised. There I made another friend Maribelle, a beautiful brown-skinned girl from Martinique. She was homesick and loved to tell me stories about the island where everything was easy and much better than in dirty Marseille. The pool at the club was ugly, and the water was too cold, she said. As far as I was concerned, the club was beautiful and the water warm. But to make her happy I agreed with her.
I was a bad swimmer. I was always the last to arrive in the competitions. I lost the races with a smile that only I knew was false. Everyone agreed there had to be one loser. The coach said I lost because I plunged too far underwater and I took too much time surfacing, but he liked me because I was a good sport.
It was at the swimming club that I began to read novels—long novels by Balzac and Stendhal. These readings triggered new emotions in me. I was moved to tears sometimes, and I was beginning to understand that nothing was the way it appeared. There were mysteries in people that I began to prize. The first book that made me feel the people in the story were more important than those in my life was the “Lys dans la Vallee” by Balzac. I found it amazing to escape the person I was and turn into others—men or women—to feel as they felt. I was astounded to see inner thoughts described in words and characters in the novels becoming as real as the people around me. I hated to finish reading a book, because it meant I had to let go of the characters.
During my last summer in France, we visited Cassis. It was a short but memorable visit. We bicycled from Marseille, following the coastline. The blue sky and the breeze produced a perfect climate, which years later I recognized when we made a stop in Hawaii. We stayed in Cassis in a hotel tucked between two large rocks. As soon as we arrived I went to sleep on the white sand of the bay in front of the hotel. I had my head buried in a towel and was wearing for the first time the bikini my mother’s seamstress had made with leftover material. I couldn’t think of anything better happening to me. Then I heard a whisper in my ear, “Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?” I was paralyzed for a moment. “No,” I answered, feeling stupid. I couldn’t even see the face of the man who was talking to me, but I didn’t care I wanted to hear more even though I knew this couldn’t be true. I was not really beautiful. Or was I? I wondered, is this love? It made me warm and tingling all over my body. When I saw the young man’s face, the dream vanished.
Cassis at that time was special, because we ate for three days, three times a day, fresh grilled sardines and grapes just picked off the vines. It was all so delicate and sublime. Also we didn’t have to give our ration tickets. Our food was ratio
ned during the war. We went to a black market restaurant one night in the village and had their famous rabbit stew. As we were leaving we heard people say we had really eaten cat stew. They had seen the cat skulls in the kitchen. But it tasted like rabbit to me, and who knows what cat meat tastes like?
In Marseille I began to be seriously interested in clothes. I loved wearing the plain cloche hat I had seen on Deana Durbin in the movies, and I wanted a bag and shoes of the same color. My mother had a coat made for me from a man’s used coat in thick wool that someone had given her. The inside of this coat had a bold plaid design that looked new, and my mother decided to use it as the outside of my coat. I got to love that flashy plaid coat, and I was pleased that my mother had dared to use that old cloth. My mother was also becoming stylish, putting on lipstick and painting her fingernails. She went looking for food on her new bicycle but she wore high heels and short pleated skirts. Because of the scarcity of textiles the women wore their hemlines very short. I noticed for the first time that my mother had dancer’s legs.
While I was preoccupied with my friends, school and the swimming club, my father, I learned later, was making false visas and other documents for the underground. People kept coming and going, and everyone asked us when we would be leaving. My father was waiting to hear from the people who had gone ahead. Everyone worried—there were rumors that the Germans were contemplating marching into the free zone at any moment. At this time a woman who lived next door, in a house where German Jews were under house arrest, came to see my mother. She had to make a choice, either stay in Marseille with her daughter or follow her sick husband who was being sent to a “work camp” somewhere in Germany. In fact, he was being sent to the gas chambers, but at that time we didn’t know. Her husband was sick and needed her. Distressed, she felt she should stay by his side. Her daughter had a visa to go to Spokane, Washington, and she was expected to stay there with her uncle. It had all been arranged. She had to wait for the boat that was due to arrive in Marseille at any moment. Instantly my mother agreed to take the girl in with us. I was not consulted.