Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Jacob was soft-spoken and studious, and he possessed an innate sense of order and fair play. He came from a family of prosperous merchants, which for several generations had traded in raw skins for the luxury fur market. His father had paid for Jacob to attain two law degrees—first in Paris, then in Russia—with the understanding that he would eventually inherit and manage the family business.

  That day came sooner than Jacob could have imagined. He was in his thirties when his father died, propelling him overnight into the business. Jacob rapidly learned the intricacies of the fur trade: attending wholesale auctions throughout Europe, then grading, shipping, and selling skins to furriers in Italy, France, England, and America, who made coats and stoles for the retail market.

  Jacob and Vera were on their honeymoon in Denmark in 1917 when they learned about the start of the Russian Revolution. They decided against returning to their homeland, where private property ownership was being restricted and factories turned over to workers. After a few months in London, whose cold, foggy weather Vera did not like, they settled in Leipzig, which was a center of the European fur trade. The young couple became stateless, eventually receiving Nansen passports, which were issued by the League of Nations, starting in 1922, to Russian exiles who could not obtain travel documents from their government.

  Some of Victor’s early memories were of trips with his parents to Marienbad, a popular spa in Czechoslovakia. His parents believed strongly in the curative benefits of Marienbad’s spa treatments, including its natural carbon dioxide springs, as did celebrities such as Thomas Edison and Mark Twain and European rulers like Edward VII of the United Kingdom and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, all of whom regularly traveled to Marienbad to be rejuvenated. Vera, who had visited France often and spoke the language fluently, was on the French championship bridge team that competed at the resort.

  During one such trip, in the early 1930s, the Bromberts’ train stopped at the border before leaving Germany. Given their status as stateless refugees, Jacob and Vera were always anxious at border crossings. This time, men with swastika armbands roughly dragged an older couple who had been seated nearby off the train.

  Fellow passengers whispered among themselves. A word—Devisenschieber—was audible. “What is Devisenschieber?” Victor asked.

  His parents hushed him.

  After the train started again, his father told Victor that Devisenschieber had to do with trying to sneak currency out of Germany, which was illegal.

  By this time, Victor was an only child. His younger sister, Nora, an attractive, dark-haired, and loving little girl, had died during surgery in 1930, at age five, as German doctors operated on a brain tumor. For Victor, then seven, it was his first brush with mortality. He had sobbed alongside his mother when she told him the news. As he grew older, Victor came to understand how much his sister’s death had affected his parents, who were torn between self-pity and a feeling of guilt they never completely overcame.

  After experiencing the effects of one revolution, Jacob and Vera watched Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 with great alarm. It was clear to them early on—with the street demonstrations and violence, the mass arrests, the pogroms—that the rise of Nazi nationalism was an ominous development. Unlike some German-born Jews who held on to hope for their homeland and waited too long to leave, or others who wanted out but were trapped by their circumstances, the Russian émigré couple wasted no time in departing. Thanks to the international nature of the fur trade, Jacob had valuable inventory, bank deposits, and accounts receivable outside the country, making their speedy emigration possible.

  Their move meant another memorable train trip for Victor, from Leipzig to neutral Switzerland, where they had arranged to stay on Lake Geneva while awaiting visas for permanent residency in France. His parents had their own sleeping compartment on the overnight train, as did Victor and his faithful German nanny, Marianne. When the train stopped in the dark at the German-Swiss border, Victor awoke to loud voices in the corridor. He heard “Juden” repeated several times, and hard knocks, followed by doors sliding open and shut. Fear gripped him, but he stayed still; he had been warned by his father not to unlock the door to his compartment unless ordered to do so.

  After the train started rolling, his mother rapped softly and Victor let her inside. She wanted to know if he and Marianne were all right. They had crossed safely into Switzerland, she told them.

  When they finally arrived in France, they spent their first days in Paris at the apartment of Jacob’s sister, Anya Adler, a longtime widow. She took young Victor to his first street market, where he was bedazzled by the displays of flowers, fruits, vegetables, meats, and especially the fish stands offering plump pink shrimp and live crabs. That day, Aunt Anya also introduced Victor to a strange new vegetable, the artichoke, which he was initially wary of but liked once she showed him how to pull off its thorny leaves and which parts of it to eat. Aunt Anya had lost her fireman husband years earlier in Russia, and in Paris she had settled into an independent life that she praised as une vie facile (an easy life), which she lived thanks to her brother Jacob’s generosity.

  After staying at Anya’s for a few days, the family rented an apartment decorated with delicate eighteenth-century furniture in the affluent Sixteenth Arrondissement, which was home to a colony of fellow anti-Bolshevik émigrés, most of them well-heeled. Years earlier, Jacob and Vera had managed to bring their own surviving parents out of Russia to Germany. In addition to Russian, Victor’s maternal grandmother, Anna, spoke French to him, as his mother often did, and by the time they moved to Paris he was already fluent. At home, his parents also spoke Russian, and for his first nine years in Leipzig, Victor spoke German in and out of school, a language he continued to use in Paris with his nanny, who remained with the family for two years before returning to Germany. So Victor was stumped whenever he was asked his native tongue. He dreamed in German, French, and Russian, and when counting repetitions in calisthenics, he switched from one to another without thought.

  In time, France, where Victor would spend more than eight of his most formative years, came to feel like his true home, and French became his preferred language, culture, and identity. Were it not for the Russian Revolution, he would have been Russian; were it not for Hitler, he would have grown up German; because of them both, he became a proud Frenchman.

  Victor attended Lycée Janson de Sailly, one of the most prestigious schools in Paris. He was a poor student in mathematics but received top grades in French literature and history. His first contact with English came from a teacher who believed the key to fluency was to translate and recite from memory English poets such as William Wordsworth. For his part, Victor learned more English from movies starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Tyrone Power, and Bing Crosby.

  Having attended synagogue only for High Holidays, Victor grew up with little religious instruction. In fact, his father pointedly taught him the meaning of the word “agnostic,” and both parents warned him against the dangers of doctrines and dogmas espoused by church or state. Nevertheless, Victor was bar mitzvahed when he turned thirteen, in 1936. To prepare, he was taught the rudiments of Hebrew while he and his mother summered at Marienbad, studying in a hotel room with a local rabbi who had been hired as his tutor.

  The ceremony was held in a small, modern synagogue on the rue de Montevideo, a quiet street near the Bromberts’ apartment. Victor was nervous but not particularly moved by the event; his favorite part was giving the chanted prayer an operatic intonation, as he harbored the fantasy of one day becoming a famous opera singer. For his parents, the ceremony seemed a formality, albeit a joyful rite of passage for their son. It also meant they could throw a lavish party, which turned out not so different from their other parties, with vodka and caviar served to guests, most of whom were also Russian émigrés.

  Victor, who intended to become a naturalized French citizen when he came of age, was certain he would one day do his compulsory service in the French army. He l
ooked forward to that day in spite of his pacifist parents’ concerns; they insisted he read antiwar novels like All Quiet on the Western Front, but this did not always have the expected results. Victor spent hours fantasizing about a life of adventure and days filled with heroic acts of courage.

  The summer of 1939, spent with his parents at Deauville, a beach resort in Normandy, was much more than a family holiday for Victor. He had to study for an exam in the fall that would determine—due to his poor grades in mathematics—whether he would repeat the previous year of school. His mother reminded him daily of this looming event and set Victor up with a tutor. There were also afternoons spent with friends, playing volleyball and tennis, and when it was cold outside, a new board game called Monopoly. Still, there was time for the sixteen-year-old to fall in love for the first time.

  Her name was Danielle Wolf, and Victor became so infatuated that he thought of little else. Dany was two years older, short and well proportioned, with curly brown hair brushed back, dancing eyes, and full lips. Victor spent all the time he could with her, even if it meant failing to show up for his tutorials. Once, he incurred the anger of his usually composed mother by spending his tutor’s fee on treats for Dany as they strolled on the beach boardwalk. At night, they lay on the sand, fingers entwined, gazing skyward and counting shooting stars. Hours after parting, he remained consumed by her; he could still taste her lips and smell the intoxicating scent of her hair.

  Victor’s near-magical summer came to an abrupt end on September 1, 1939. As he and his parents were preparing to return to Paris, they heard the BBC radio bulletins about Germany’s invasion of Poland. Two days later, when France and England, Poland’s allies, declared war on Germany, rumors circulated that the powerful armies of the Third Reich would now turn against France. Jacob, who for years had not shared the level of complacency or safety felt by so many Frenchmen, decided that the family should not return to their Paris home after all. Suspecting the capital would be a major target, he found a villa in Deauville to rent.

  With the war as yet distant and unreal, Victor was at first delighted by the change of plans. He would miss the big exam, and there would surely be no school in the foreseeable future. On that last point, he was mistaken. Many other vacationing families extended their stay in Normandy—to Victor’s utter disappointment, Dany’s was not among them—and a school was organized in a local hotel. Either Victor got lucky or the standards were lower than those in Paris; he was admitted into the top class of the secondary education cycle leading to the baccalauréat.

  And yet, he had begun to wonder: With France at war, what was the point of preparing for university? What did a degree or career matter? When he turned eighteen, he decided, he would go in the army to fight for France. Period.

  Victor Brombert with Dany Wolf on the boardwalk of Trouville, Normandy, summer 1939. (Family photograph)

  Despite the lack of major fighting during the so-called Phoney War, there were very real casualties. That winter of 1939, the war drew uncomfortably close for Victor and the other students, who gathered together to help evacuate a trainload of wounded French soldiers to a local hospital. The students waited at the Deauville station for hours; when the troop train arrived late at night, they carried stretchers bearing the injured to waiting ambulances.

  That winter, Victor accompanied his father on a brief business trip to Paris. After Dany had left at the end of the summer, she and Victor wrote to one another. His letters were hopelessly romantic, with passages drawn from the great poets. Dany’s replies from Paris were tender if noncommittal; her French Jewish parents favored an older, more appropriate suitor for their eighteen-year-old daughter. But Dany and Victor arranged a rendezvous on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. When they met, so far removed from the sands of Normandy, they were nearly strangers. Victor had hoped for much more, even a rekindling of what they had once felt, but it was not to be. It was his first hard lesson in the ways of love, although it would not keep him from trying again.

  A few months after that trip to Paris, in May 1940, German troops pushed through the Ardennes into France within days of their invasion of Holland and Belgium. Across the bay from Deauville, Luftwaffe bombers hit the oil refineries at Le Havre. Victor and his parents, with gas masks close at hand in case of a poison gas attack, watched from the other side of the bay as fiery-red explosions ripped across the night sky and the earth trembled. They packed quickly and left the rented villa the next morning, determined to make their way to a safer region in southern France.

  By the time they reached Paris, the collective exodus to the south was well under way. With roads out of Paris jammed by all forms of foot and vehicular traffic, they decided to take a train to Bordeaux, four hundred miles to the south, despite warnings that not all trains were reaching their destination due to aerial attacks.

  They made it safely, arriving in Bordeaux on a mild spring day, and settled in a small hotel. Jacob decided to go to the Portuguese consulate, in the hope of obtaining visas for the family to enter that neutral country, and he invited Victor along. As they rode in a horse-drawn carriage along the city’s broad avenues, his father explained how important it was in such times to make contact with proper officials and slip into their palms or place on their desks an envelope with a few banknotes at the right moment. Jacob wanted Victor to understand that he considered such inducements not only illegal but also morally reprehensible; in normal times, they would not be necessary. The world being what it was, however, bribes were sometimes necessary. Money could save lives. Victor waited outside the consulate, but when his father rejoined him, he still had the envelope of money—and no visas.

  By June, the French army had been crushed by the Germans at a cost of nearly one hundred thousand dead, and a million and a half French soldiers interned in prisoner-of-war camps. German forces arrived in an undefended Paris on June 14. Within days, Germany dictated the terms of the armistice, dividing France into occupied and unoccupied zones and setting up the new pro-Nazi government in Vichy, which agreed to deport any political refugees who had sought asylum in France.

  When Jacob heard that Jews who had settled in France faced arrest and extradition, he chose Spain as the family’s next sanctuary. He thought it unlikely Hitler would invade that country, as it was ruled by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Jacob hired a car and driver and bought gasoline at black-market prices. With their suitcases strapped onto the roof, the family fled to Biarritz, a town on France’s Basque coast, twenty miles from the border with Spain. After two days, they had made no progress in acquiring visas, and news reports indicated that France’s entire west coast would soon be occupied by German forces. Desperate to keep his family from being caught by the Nazis, Jacob hired an old ambulance to take them inland to Pau, where they found themselves facing the great wall of the Pyrenees, a centuries-old natural barrier between the two countries. His vague plan—to find a place somewhere along the frontier to sneak across, on foot, if necessary—now seemed both unrealistic and unsafe.

  Instead, they made their way more than three hundred miles up the coast to Nice, situated in Vichy-controlled southeastern France. Seemingly safe for the time being, they rented an apartment, and Jacob set his sights on getting the family to America. He made regular trips to Marseille, also in the Vichy zone, where there was an American consulate, carrying with him the family’s passports as well as letters and affidavits provided by Vera’s brother, a successful businessman who had settled in New York years earlier. Jacob worked tirelessly through the official channels, and by summer of 1941 had pulled together the litany of required documentation: U.S. immigration visas, French exit visas, Spanish transit visas, and expensive boat tickets.

  They were to meet their ship in southern Spain, at Seville, the country’s only commercial river port, which was some fifty miles from the entrance to the Atlantic. Getting there required several days of train travel. At the Spanish border, men in unfamiliar uniforms questioned Jacob at length as they examin
ed the family’s travel documents. Victor sat sweating in the train’s stifling compartment, scared that some unforeseen technicality would stop them, that a new regulation would invalidate their permits and all his father’s efforts to acquire them would be for naught. But his fears were unfounded. Their papers were at last approved and stamped, allowing them to transit through Spain.

  The vessel that awaited in Seville was owned by a Spanish shipping company, and had recently been chartered by Portuguese entrepreneurs looking to cash in on the willingness of desperate people to pay large sums of money to put an ocean between them and the Nazis. The SS Navemar, listing slightly, was four hundred feet long, with a high hull, bulky, massive, not a passenger ship but a freighter. It had cabin accommodations for only twenty-eight passengers, and other than those spaces it had no facilities, not even toilets. Tickets for the few cabins went at exorbitant prices. The captain even gave up his own cabin and charged two thousand dollars each to as many people as could fit themselves into the small space. Jacob told his son he had paid one thousand dollars apiece for the least expensive tickets. Though it was a price they could afford, he was critical of the charter company for engaging in scandalous exploitation of people in danger, many of whom could not afford such an expense. The cargo hold was filled not with bananas or coal but with 1,120 refugees, most of them Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

  The ocean crossing, made on a zigzag course to avoid German U-boats, took six weeks, and included ports of call in Lisbon, Havana, and Bermuda, although the refugees were not allowed off the ship at any stop. Food was in short supply aboard ship, with the main staple being potatoes.

  Victor and his parents spent most days topside on a meager deck that they shared with a few live oxen, which, one by one, were slaughtered for meat along the way. They slept on deck or in one of the lifeboats, rather than below, where tiers of primitive bunks had been fitted into dark, airless holds. The space was soon thick with the stench of vomit and excrement. Many people fell sick with typhus and dysentery; six died during the crossing and were buried at sea.