Alex's Wake

by Martin Goldsmith

The Jewish Group for Coordination, Aid, and Protection is setting up a center in Martigny-les-Bains for German and central European Jews to provide professional re-education to facilitate their emigration. The Group has arranged access to a large hotel and the center will be operational as of next week. The importance of this undertaking will not be lost on our readers, and we are issuing an urgent appeal for help in providing the refugees at Martigny-les-Bains with games and activities to occupy their leisure time. We would be particularly grateful for the generosity of those who could provide one or more radios, dominos, checkers, chess sets, etc., even if they are used. Simply contact the Group (4 Rue du Cirque, Paris), and they will arrange to pick up the goods and ensure their transport to the Center. We would also be grateful to our readers if they could send directly to the Center for Refugees in Martigny-les-Bains, Vosges, any magazines, periodicals, books, or newspapers, in French or German, that they have finished reading.

  All the objects donated to the center, from books to dominos, arrived at the Hotel International, the once imposing retreat for the beautiful people of Europe who came to take the local restorative waters, a building that would now provide both dorm rooms and classrooms for Jewish refugees. The hotel had fallen on hard times since its heyday and had most recently been called upon to shelter a few refugees from the fighting in Spain. Peter Hart, a volunteer for the center and author of the memoir Journey Into Freedom, wrote of his reaction upon arriving at Martigny as part of an advance party in late February of 1939: “Nobody had prepared us for what we would find inside the Hotel International. Wallpaper was hanging from the walls in strips and everything from the floor upwards was black with dirt; cobwebs hung everywhere. There were no washbasins in any of the bedrooms and no running water on any of the floors. It was icy cold and no stove in sight. There was no time to waste if we wanted to sleep that night and get some rooms ready for the first arrivals in two days’ time. We worked until we collapsed late that evening and for twenty hours the next day. In the large dining room a vast amount of equipment was stored. It had just arrived from Paris and consisted of beds, mattresses, blankets, kitchen and office supplies, machines, workbenches, tools, and various canned goods. Everything was brand new and still wrapped up.”

  On March 23, 1939, at the Joint offices in Paris, Raymond-Raoul Lambert reported on the early stages of the agricultural center at Martigny-les-Bains, where “we have land and farms and, under the supervision of monitors supplied by the French ministry, the work is being carried out. We intend to place on the land a certain number of young people whom we hope will be able to emigrate or find a home in the French countryside eventually. Martigny-les-Bains currently has fifty people working the land and we hope to place a further five hundred refugees there.”

  The Martigny center’s farm consisted of about seventy acres of land not far from the Hotel International and included at first five cows, two horses, a dozen sheep, forty chickens, and several roosters. A blond ex-gym teacher from Vienna, a man named Schindler, was in charge of the farm and taught most of the agricultural courses to an initial group of thirty students, none of whom had ever turned the soil but who, Peter Hart whimsically observed, “took to the work like ducks to water.” In no time, Herr Schindler assumed the sunburned persona of a French farmer.

  With the coming of spring, the student refugees planted a vegetable garden. The garden’s initial harvest, supplemented by the eggs from the chickens, the milk from the cows and sheep, plus the resulting butter and cheese, brought a certain level of self-sufficiency to the center. Within a very short time, the center began to sell some of its products to the villagers of Martigny-les-Bains and the surrounding countryside.

  Within the formerly splendid walls of the Hotel International, the refugees slept and washed upstairs in the guest rooms, while down below in the meeting rooms the center conducted classes in a number of trades, all designed to make emigration more likely for these newly trained workers. Described by Hart as “looking like a University for all ages,” the center offered classes in metalworking, welding, woodworking, shoe repair, automobile repair, electrical work, dressmaking, and the millinery trade, all supervised by professors from the National Professional School in nearby Épinal. Meals were served in the hotel’s still spacious dining rooms, with most of the food provided by the center’s farm. Medical care was easily obtained in the center’s infirmary, also housed within the Hotel International, which employed a nursing staff operating under the direction of the doctor of Martigny. The refugees’ leisure time was also well provided for; in addition to the donated chess sets and other games, the refugees had access to a piano, several radios, a Ping-Pong table, and a soccer field. Plans were announced for a clay tennis court.

  The Hotel International also had a small synagogue in one of the meeting rooms. A rabbi was hired to lead prayers and services and to preside over the ritual slaughtering of farm animals so that kosher meals could be served.

  The retraining classes offered a challenge to some of the refugees who had enjoyed professional status in their former lives. The organizers of the center had deliberately decided not to provide courses in academics or the law, lest well-connected members of those professions, fearing competition, raise public objections to the program. A center that turned out agricultural workers and other manual laborers maintained a much lower and safer profile. Thus, many a pair of hands that had never hefted anything heavier than a dictionary sported shiny calluses from wielding an awl or a hammer, or from carrying gas cylinders to the welding shop.

  Some refugee centers in France accepted children, but the agricultural center at Martigny was purposefully organized as a mature undertaking; only single adults and couples without children were assigned there. The refugees elected representatives to meet regularly with the center’s management to resolve disputes and ease occasional tensions. The refugees were officially confined to the hotel, its grounds, and the center’s farm. In order to venture out into the village, a refugee needed an authorized affidavit signed by one of the center’s deputies granting permission. But as time went by and the refugees and villagers mingled more and more on market days and other occasions, barriers both physical and social began to disappear. Spring and summer bring beautiful days to the French countryside and, in contrast to the hate and danger most of the refugees had so recently escaped, the village of Martigny-les-Bains lived up to its reputation as a place of healing for its grateful new residents.

  Into this peaceful, pastoral atmosphere Grandfather Alex and Uncle Helmut arrived on Tuesday, June 27, 1939. Along with their sixteen fellow passengers on the St. Louis, Alex and Helmut were checked into the center, assigned a room in the Hotel International, and informed that they would be expected—in addition to their daily class work—to volunteer for duty in the kitchen, the laundry, or the garden. The center’s representative, who was fluent in both French and German, told them that a well-run kitchen and laundry and a well-kept garden were all vital to a flourishing community and that no one at the center viewed those daily tasks as mere drudgery, but rather as important contributions to the center’s high morale.

  After dinner in the hotel dining room and a good night’s sleep, followed by a hearty breakfast, Alex and Helmut were interviewed by another of the center’s representatives to determine which classes would suit them. Perhaps Alex was influenced by the fact that he came from a long line of rural horse dealers, or maybe he recalled the pleasure his older son took in maintaining the chicken run at the elegant Goldschmidt house in Oldenburg. Whatever his reasons, my grandfather chose to learn the craft of raising chickens on the Martigny farm. Helmut also chose to spend his days on the farm, where he assisted in tending the sheep and in planting and nurturing sturdy crops of potatoes, beans, oats, and wheat.

  For the next two months, father and son rose at dawn five days a week to attend to their duties on the farm. Helmut, summoning his organizational skills, assisted in the neat arrangement of tools, seeds, rope, and other supplies
in the farm’s barn and stable. At noon, the two of them would unwrap sandwiches of cheese and sausage, made for them that morning in the hotel kitchen, and join their fellow farmers for lunch either in the fields or, if the sun was particularly fierce that day, in the shade of a shed of planks that had been fashioned in the woodworkers’ shop. Three evenings a week, they washed dishes after dinner in the hotel kitchen before retiring to the game room, where Alex enjoyed an ongoing skirmish on a chess board with a man from Stuttgart who had spent his day learning how to cobble shoes. Helmut read quietly in a corner. After quaffing a schnapps or a glass of hot tea, they would retire by ten.

  Those two months must truly have seemed idyllic for my grandfather and uncle, following their harrowing six weeks at sea and six years of ever-increasing terror and humiliation. The work was hard and the hours were long, but their labors were directed toward the success and well-being of this unique community. If they were not wholly free men, if their options did not include taking the train to Paris and from there making a second attempt to reach the New World, they surely must have thought that their rural redoubt was a beautiful, if temporary, shelter from the perils of their homeland. As Alex scattered feed for his chickens and Helmut tended his crops, they must have dreamed of a happy harvest of ripe vegetables and plump poultry in the coming autumn and of their own liberation by the time spring returned to the surrounding hills.

  On July 14, Bastille Day, Alex and Helmut joined their fellow refugees in laying a wreath at the war memorial in Martigny’s public square. Then the townspeople and the refugees took part in a ceremony on the front lawn of the Hotel International, where one of the refugee gardeners had planted flowers of red, white, and blue to spell out Vive la France. That night, the Bastille Day fireworks were set off within the boundaries of the agricultural center, and again refugees and citizens of Martigny mingled happily in the warm, festive summer night.

  In early August, the French periodical L’Univers Israélite published a feature about the center at Martigny, complete with photographs of the hotel and some of the workshops. Titled “A Fine Communal Accomplishment,” the article described the center’s activities and its “extremely cordial” relations with the people of Martigny-les-Bains. Its concluding paragraph reads, “One cannot over-emphasize the importance of this achievement. Condemned to idleness and dependent on public assistance which was always insufficient, these refugees would be doomed to a life of poverty in an urban setting. As active members of a community where they are introduced to new activities, despite the difficulties of re-adapting, they realize that with a bit of energy and thanks to the solidarity of the Jewish community, they can once again aspire to be the architects of their own destiny.”

  Four weeks later, German troops overwhelmed Poland, France declared war on Germany, and my grandfather and uncle’s destinies were once again subject to the architects of uncertainty.

  SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2011. The peaceful sounds of chiming church bells and cooing doves awaken us to a cool, cloudy morning in Contrexéville. Downstairs in the dining room of the Inn of the Twelve Apostles, we linger over croissants, locally harvested honey, tasty locally made strawberry preserves, and pots of aromatic tea. After breakfast, we stroll through the municipal park, admiring the graceful fountains and carefully cultivated flower beds and doing our best to decipher the rules of a game of bocce that seems to be an essential Sunday morning ritual for the elderly men of Contrexéville. As noon approaches, we climb into the Meriva and make the pleasant drive down to Martigny-les-Bains. I eagerly point out to Amy the green field where the lambs had frolicked yesterday afternoon, but today the expanse of grass and clover stands empty. I wonder for a moment if I imagined the sheep, and as we enter the village, I half expect to see a thriving Hotel International, guests on the wide veranda enjoying a formal luncheon amid tuxedoed waiters. But no . . . the ruined facade of the old hotel is as bleak and unrelenting as it was the evening before.

  Today, though, we have an appointment with the living. I have made contact with Madame Gerard Liliane, a woman in her eighties who remembers the glory days when her little village was a destination spot for travelers throughout the continent. I am eager to learn what she recalls of the summer of 1939 when—who knows?—she may have mingled with Alex or Helmut and gasped in delight as the fireworks illuminated the night sky over Martigny on that long-ago Fourteenth of July. As we pull into her driveway off the Rue de Dompierre, the sun emerges from behind its cloud cover and the stone walls of her snug little house seem to gleam. Leaning on a cane, Madame greets us extravagantly and ushers us into her parlor where she offers us slices of a strawberry cake she baked that morning. We are joined by her granddaughter Manon, who will be our translator; Madame’s English is as nonexistent as our French.

  Over the next hour and a half, we learn that we have just missed the annual Escargot Festival, which culminates in the naming of Miss Shell, an honor won last year by Manon’s sister; that the Hotel International was the finest establishment of its kind in all of the Vosges; and that Martigny’s city hall recently sold the hotel to a real estate company that plans to convert the building into a medical center for the treatment of stress, anemia, anorexia, and bulimia. Madame Liliane produces another newly baked wonder, a chocolate cake this time, Manon puts on an Edith Piaf CD, and everyone sings along lustily to the Little Sparrow’s defiant anthem “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” It is a jolly gathering and tres Francais. When we depart several hours later, we exchange warm two-cheek kisses in the debonair French manner.

  But the long afternoon has ended on a note of frustration. Though she was nine or ten years old in that summer of 1939, Madame Liliane claims no memories of encountering refugees at the agricultural center headquartered at her beloved Hotel International. I pull out a copy of the article in the L’Univers Israélite that I’ve brought with me—the article that emphasizes the friendly relations between refugees and townspeople—and Madame scans it eagerly but says that she had no idea that the people staying at the hotel that summer were refugees, most of them from Nazi Germany. I suppose that it’s certainly possible that a little girl would have been protected from the details of where the hotel’s residents had come from and why they had left their homes, but today Madame Liliane thinks of herself as a historian of the hotel. It is from her that I received the flier touting the many healthy virtues of Martigny-les-Bains in general and of the Hotel International in particular, details that I quoted earlier in this chapter. How could she have remained ignorant of this crucial period in the chronicles of her village, a place she has called home for more than eighty years?

  Neither of us knows for sure, of course, but as I show Amy around the hotel’s sad remains, we discuss Madame Liliane’s memory. We recall the not-quite-believable claims of people who lived in close proximity to Dachau or Treblinka and never noticed anything amiss, even as sinister smoke curled up from the chimneys of the crematoria. Was this self-styled historian sweeping a somewhat damning segment of history under the rug? Or—a more benign explanation—was she simply more engaged by stories of well-to-do guests sipping champagne and sharing a tureen of lobster bisque on a golden afternoon in 1912 than she was in a tale of refugees raising sheep as the shadows of war lengthened in the late summer of 1939?

  As we gaze a final time at the place that was Alex and Helmut’s shelter for those halcyon months, we acknowledge that in one crucial respect, it doesn’t matter whether or not Madame Liliane was aware of the truth. We had traveled to Martigny to learn a few precious details about how my grandfather and uncle had passed their time here and had discovered this particular oracle to be mute. In the absence of hard facts, we are left with the metaphor of the crumbling grand hotel and its image of ruthless time, a memento mori of steel and stone and warped wood that reminds me yet again of the futility of my desire to save my doomed relatives. There is nothing to do but drive pensively back to our comfortable Inn of the Twelve Apostles.

  Yet, thwarted as I feel by Madame Li
liane’s failure of memory, saddened as I am by the hotel’s stark reminder that all things must pass, I continue to experience a certain exhilaration brought about by the realization that I am seeing the same countryside and breathing the same air as Alex and Helmut did while living in Martigny seventy-two years ago. I am witnessing the very place where they greeted each new morning and where they rested each night after their toil in the fields. I am bearing witness.

  As we once more pass the green field on the edge of town, I see that the sheep have returned and the lambs are as frisky and joyous as on the previous afternoon. Tossed between emotions, the sorrow of my loss and the satisfaction of my quest, I find myself wondering if any of these lambs could possibly be the descendants of the sheep that Helmut tended during those tranquil summer days so long ago. The fanciful idea enchants me. I stop the car, and Amy and I spend a good ten minutes watching the woolly revelry.

  And because my mind works in the way it does, I recall lines from Wordsworth’s immortal Ode: “Let the young Lambs bound as to the tabor’s sound! We in thought will join your throng, ye that feel the gladness of the May! We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind; in the soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering; thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

  APRIL 2012. Despite my best detective efforts and those of the dedicated researchers I’ve met through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, there has always remained a small but vexing break in the thread of Alex and Helmut’s journey through France. I know that they spent those summer months of 1939 at the agricultural center in Martigny-les-Bains and that they arrived in Montauban in October 1940. But where were they during those roughly thirteen months from September 1939 to October 1940? In the first quarter of 2012, even as I have begun setting down their story, some answers to that question emerge from an unexpected but most welcome source.