Crossing the Borders of Time (15 page)

Monsieur Fimbel, meanwhile, had his own reasons for going to Gray. Not quite forty-two—though already bald and starkly attired in a white shirt and black suit he seemed older—he had been born in Mulhouse under the reign of the Germans. Marked all his life by his Alsatian background and memories of German oppression, when drafted to fight for the kaiser in 1914, he had fled to Belgium and spent four years in hiding rather than having to side against France. In an unsuccessful attempt to pressure his parents to disclose his whereabouts and then oblige him to fight, the Germans had gone so far as to imprison the couple.

After the war, he joined the Catholic order of Marist teaching brothers and, pledging himself to their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, advanced as director of one of their schools. But now, in view of the fact that the French Army requisitioned his school building for use as a military hospital, Monsieur Fimbel aimed to transfer his program to Gray. The pious educator encouraged Sigmar to come along, and his help in moving the family would be the first of many instances in which his aid proved crucial to refugees hiding in France.

Only two hectic days after war was declared, they were ready to leave. This put their departure on September 5, Janine’s sixteenth birthday—a memory that, no matter how fleeting, would shadow every birthday thereafter. She chafed at being swept up in a drama that seemed to have so little to do with things that truly mattered to her, as if she were forced to fight in a battle launched long before she was born. Running again seemed more awful than having been chased from her birthplace the previous year, because while the first move was wrenching, she had been especially happy in Mulhouse and trusted that it would remain a safe haven. Her chief sorrow, losing Roland, was as vast as the all-encompassing joy he had brought. Seeing herself through his eyes had transformed her. Who would she be when she no longer found herself in the love that he mirrored? Time and circumstance, both so limited, had lent them restraint, but unfulfilled passion only heightened her longing. She would have risked any danger to stay in his arms.

Aside from Roland, she had done well in school both socially and academically, earning the top prize in chemistry even while handicapped by tackling new subjects in a largely strange language. The school principal’s evaluation at the end of her first trimester—“She has made progress in French, but not enough yet to follow a class properly”—had swiftly turned into praise for her application in becoming “
une très bonne élève
,” a very good student.

As the family prepared to flee again, she had no grounds to hope they would be firmly established anytime quickly, which made her indifferent to where they were going, except that she wanted an address to give to Roland so he could write her. Assuming, of course, that he wouldn’t forget her. Better
not
to announce where they were going, Alice finally snapped in annoyance when Janine persisted in asking, not daring to tell her mother the reason. As for themselves, they would find out soon enough.

At present, not knowing where they would live or how much space they would have, Sigmar told them to pack very little. With no time to waste, they would have to abandon almost all their belongings and hope for the chance to return for them later. In a halfhearted attempt to appear optimistic, he even suggested they might move back to Mulhouse before long. He was, after all, duly impressed by France’s defensive barrier of concrete fortifications known as the Maginot Line, which ran almost the length of the French–German border, more than four hundred miles from Basel to Belgium, with hundreds of subterranean bunkers, hidden trolleys, and highways. Then, too, having experienced Germany bested before, he consoled himself by counting on Britain and France to crush Hitler soon.

Still it was wiser, he thought, not to dwell on that view. His focus was on packing essentials and rushing away before the Germans stormed over the border. The sole valuable he agreed to take in the car, Alice’s sterling silver flatware, he loaded with his documents and family pictures into his old leather
Köfferle
and entrusted to Bella. When Sigmar discovered that instead of packing her clothes, Janine had filled her suitcase with books, favorites of hers and Roland’s, he dumped them all out on the floor in vexation.

“
Bisch du verrückt?
” Are you crazy? her father demanded, reverting to the
badisch
dialect that would always remain most comfortable for him. But his edict on packing only the basics did not extend to his piano music, its pages all marked with Frau Loewy’s instructions; this he slipped into his bag in spite of the fact he could not take his Bechstein, whose gleaming wood surface he lovingly covered with blankets.

The small caravan left Mulhouse that Tuesday with Norbert at the wheel of the Rosengart and Trudi beside him, and with Janine morosely crammed into the narrow backseat beside Sigmar’s
Köfferle
and the mountainous Bella. The housekeeper in her light cotton dress was rolled into a big, fluffy ball with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms folded on top of the ample shelf of her breasts. Sigmar, Alice, and Marie rode with Monsieur Fimbel, who led the way out of the fear-gripped city, past the school and the synagogue, the candy-colored town hall and the languid river. Janine’s eyes searched the streets, hungry for an unlikely last glimpse of Roland. Not permitted to leave the apartment once war was declared and never allowed to use the telephone, she was distraught at being unable to say good-bye and find out whether the Arcieris planned to stay in Mulhouse or also retreat from the border. As an Alsatian-born veteran of the kaiser’s army, she knew, Roland’s father was unlikely to be more eager than Sigmar to greet the Germans and risk their finding a new use for him on behalf of the Reich.

In tandem, the two cars headed southwest, on roads punctuated by khaki-clad soldiers and jammed with vehicles laden with luggage and piled high with mattresses and pyramids of household possessions. On this second day of the war, however, travel seemed easier than expected, with little happening to make them believe the conflict had started. For months to come, moreover, as a quiet fall tumbled into a bitterly cold but equally quiescent winter, Janine would often reflect with remorse that she might have spent that time with Roland, had her family not fled from Mulhouse so precipitously.

Until late spring, France and Germany would sit passively, if nervously, frozen on opposite sides of the Rhine without either launching a full-scale assault. Indeed, while military training and the building of warplanes rushed forward on both sides of the Channel, Hitler publicly disavowed any interest in land to the west, and no armed German soldier crossed over the border to France. As the waiting game lingered, some came to believe that actual fighting might never erupt. It was a period the French came to call the
drôle de guerre
, the phony war, in which except for some action at sea, both sides largely hung back in defensive positions behind the security of their Maginot and Siegfried lines, at the same time urgently plotting and arming for battle. In England, Prime Minister Chamberlain called it the Twilight War; other British officials declared it the Bore War; and in Germany too, they came up with a darkly humorous name for this strange interlude of passive aggression. There it was dubbed the
Sitzkrieg
or the sitting war.

On the day they left Mulhouse, though, the Günzburgers could not have foreseen more than eight months of stillness lying ahead, or Janine would have been even more disconsolate than she was, as the tiny four-cylinder Rosengart puttered along on bumpy back roads and past well-tended vineyards and wide rolling fields edged by Queen Anne’s lace and mustard. They pulled into Gray in the late afternoon. With an abrupt shifting of gears and screeching of brakes that startled the passengers napping around him, Norbert stopped short as the car carrying their parents pulled to the curb and suddenly parked in front of a building whose Renaissance façade of richly carved stone, like many in Gray, was marred by old peeling shutters and unpainted grillwork.

Why was Alice getting out of the car? She darted into a small notions shop and, emerging with a package, headed to the Rosengart and tapped on the little half window in back where Janine was sitting, miserably staring off into space. Moist curls framed Janine’s forehead and her cheeks were flushed red, by both the hot sun of early September and the pressure of Bella, slumped against her like a thick sack of flour, sleeping again, and now lightly snoring.

“
Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, Hannele
,” her mother said. Heartfelt good wishes on your birthday. “I’m sorry it’s not a good birthday for you. Hopefully next year things will be better.” Alice smiled as she passed the packet through the window. Inside was a blue plastic rain hat printed with tiny white flowers and with strings for tying under the chin. It was almost identical to one that Janine had noticed and admired aloud, walking with Alice in Mulhouse the previous week, before everything had horribly changed. Janine was touched and broke into tears that had waited all day for an excuse to erupt, like an afternoon storm after hours of heat lightning. “A birthday gift for a rainy day,” Alice said, patting her shoulder through the car window.

As darkness fell over the Saône River, they drove soberly up the Grande Rue, the town’s main thoroughfare, past an eighteenth-century apothecary shop where the sculpted heads of four women above the arch of each shuttered window unblinkingly met their arrival with stony suspicion. The street mounted a hill from the banks of the river toward the top of the town, where the church and an unexpectedly beautiful town hall presided—its Flemish tile roof fantastically patterned in large diamond shapes of olive green, black, orange, and yellow.

That first evening in Gray they checked into the Hôtel de l’Europe, where Marie and Bella would spend the next months, even after the rest of the family moved into a few shabby, unfurnished rooms in what they were told was the town’s oldest building—a ramshackle fifteenth-century structure on a small winding street, the rue de la Malcouverte or “the street of the badly covered.” Lacking the most rudimentary comforts, these accommodations offered no running water, no plumbing, no electricity, and no heat. The family slept on wooden crates; a pail on the terrace served as their “outhouse,” while in order to bathe, they gratefully filed once a week into the common bathroom of Aunt Marie’s hotel. Fleas infested their rooms, and they were soon pocked with nasty bites. For drinking water, there was a pump out back, a source they shared with the prostitutes who lived in the building directly behind them and who, short of business with so many men drafted in expectation of war, lounged in the courtyard.

Alice dealt with life in Gray without complaint, impressed by the general spirit of brave acceptance she witnessed as Frenchwomen sent their children alone into safety or fled their homes carrying virtually nothing, their valuables sewn into the clothing they wore. For the good of the nation, the government urged “calm and sangfroid,” advising residents to observe the strictest discretion in speech because “the ears of the enemy” were everywhere, listening.

In the face of these things, Alice felt fortunate to have her family together, and she consoled her two daughters with uplifting tales of the wealth and comfort that would await them after the war, when Sigmar could finally claim the inheritance left by his two older brothers who had died in New York. They had left many millions, with Sigmar, Heinrich, and Marie all named in their wills. “After the war, we’ll be very rich,” Alice promised, “and we’ll live in a beautiful house again and eat lots of good food and wear fine clothes.” For now, however, they would have to rely on what funds Maurice, Aunt Marie’s son-in-law, could send from Lyon as a loan against those expected bequests. “In case I die before then, just don’t bury me in this horrible dump of a town,” Janine griped to her mother.

Once viewed as a snob by her children, Alice faced every fresh hardship with stoicism and even good cheer. “We must count our blessings!” was the lifelong philosophical lesson that she would take from a second ordeal of living through war. Stories kept filtering over the border about hundreds of German Jews killing themselves to avoid deportation to what were being described as “modern ghettos” in Poland, and the Nazis predicted that within a few months,
all
of Germany’s Jews would be gone. It was reported that German officials had discussed this bold project with their allies in Moscow and that Kremlin leaders had raised no objection. Jewish men were sent first, put to work in occupied Poland to build living quarters, Alice read in the paper, and their wives and children would be sent on to join them. There was talk of Jews everywhere soon being deported and resettled in camps to the east, but how they would live there was never made clear.

The same week the Günzburgers arrived in Gray, the French Ministry of Education announced that school would begin as expected on October 2 and that students should attend classes in the towns where they were, rather than return home to their regular schools. With Monsieur Fimbel’s assistance, Janine and Trudi were enrolled in a mostly-boys school, and while more refugees turned up within its gates every day, the new German girls attracted attention.

“You
can’t
be Jewish,” a native of Gray named Claudia insisted to Janine once they had gotten to know one another. As a student in Freiburg, Janine had experienced little outright anti-Semitism from her classmates, and she steeled herself as she waited to learn where this conversation was heading. “Why’s that? What do you mean?” Janine asked, uneasily eyeing the students gathered around them under the trees in front of the school. “Everyone knows that Jews all have horns,” Claudia told her, bringing her hands to both sides of her head.

Some fifty years later, however, it was Janine who could not recognize her former classmate when they encountered each other by chance on the street. We were together on her first trip back to Gray since the war, a bright autumn morning in 1989, when a tall, gray-haired woman, bent over a cane and wearing a long black dress and sensible shoes, stopped us at the top of the town to speak with my mother. She was slightly winded from having climbed up the steep flight of stone steps that led from the Malcouvert to where we were standing outside the town’s Renaissance church.