Crossing the Borders of Time (23 page)

As for the mayor, there could never be recompense for the loss of a son. Yet there was something a lifelong politician might well have enjoyed: a permanent place in the minds of some of Gray’s people—the last who remember or the few who may ask—through a street named in his honor after the war.

In the first months of occupation, the Günzburgers fared better than had Mayor Lévy, because even with one thousand Germans ensconced now in Gray, no one attempted to oust them from their apartment. What made this doubly surprising was that their interim home at 12 rue Victor Hugo was just a few steps away from the headquarters the Nazis established at number 8, where a swastika menaced the street on a
Wehrmacht
flag above the front door. And more astonishing still was that they not only managed to live undisturbed by their
Wehrmacht
neighbors, but that a German lieutenant was actually billeted in their apartment! Far from becoming a threatening presence, however, the officer who moved in with them, taking the smallest bedroom close to the kitchen, behaved in a manner polite and considerate. On that point, they all granted him sincere credit. He arrived late in the evening, left in the morning, asked no questions, created no trouble and, to the contrary, often brought them small gifts of food from the Germans’ canteen, richly stocked with all the provisions the victors withheld from the average French table: a little meat, sugar, or butter and the treat of fresh bread untainted by petrol. He even told Janine, when he caught her admiring his bicycle at the foot of the stairs, that he would keep his eye out to find her one too.

At such close quarters, the family could readily see there was no way of hiding the facts they were Germans
and
Jewish. Yet the dilemma of how to deal with a German officer under their roof was awkward at best and inherently frightening. Was their courteous boarder a fellow German who might at one time have been a friendly acquaintance, a schoolmate, a neighbor, or a customer’s son? Or a Nazi who held their lives in his hands, because with only a word he could have them deported?

For Bella there was nothing confusing about how to regard the
Wehrmacht
troops who marched past their windows each morning that summer en route to swim in the chilly Saône River. Bare chested, wearing only trunks and shoes, the soldiers paraded their hard-muscled bodies before the townspeople. They invaded the streets in confident ranks, singing “Erika” or “Heidi-Heido” robustly in German—warriors embodying Hitler’s Aryan ideal. In response, Aunt Marie’s housekeeper daily rushed to the windows and yanked closed the tall shutters facing the street, deploring the sight of these vainglorious men as an inappropriate spectacle from which Janine and Trudi and all decent women ought to be shielded.

At the river themselves, the girls tried to ignore the young German soldiers who showed up in their off-duty hours to relax in the sun. Afraid to seem rude, they found it hard not to reply when directly addressed, yet they refrained from any friendly response that could suggest they were willing to carry things further. Fraternizing with the enemy would not be viewed kindly and represented even more risk for girls who were Jewish.

One afternoon, as Janine and her friend Malou sat on a bench in the grass, reading and talking, Malou jumped to her feet to confront a German soldier who was taking their picture. Not for her to wind up on exhibit in some German scrapbook, the butt of jokes in the barracks or the barbs of the Fräuleins he might later attempt to make jealous back home, or to let it appear she had willingly posed, a too-friendly local, scantily clad, welcoming the soldier’s advances! She demanded his film, and he acceded. Then, not yet invited to sit, but granted an audience by virtue of his gracious surrender, he stood chatting with them, and it was shortly disclosed that this soldier working so hard to pursue conversation was, by coincidence, a native of Freiburg. Heinz Rosenstihl, just twenty-two, gaped in mirrored surprise at the news that Janine had come from the very same town, each of them hence a Freiburger
Bobbele
. Delight filled his face, and he suggested that Janine might know of his family through their stable and riding school in the bucolic eastern part of the city called Littenweiler. And before very long, as invariably occurs when travelers run into someone who hails from their town, Janine began to probe for details, the temptation to hear about friends left behind and inquire about home chipping away at her wall of reserve.

Marie-Louise “Malou” Gieselbrecht, Janine’s closest friend, in a boat on the Saône River

Adrift in the war, this boy and this girl, soldier and refugee, German and Jew, spent a few happy minutes exploring their common Black Forest childhoods. Memories hung in the warm summer air: the fair at the Meßplatz, the view from the Schauinsland, the bubbling
Bächle
, steamed noodle cakes drenched in caramel sauce,
Spätzle
and pretzels. By the next time they met by chance at the river, Heinz Rosenstihl had decided to save her. He felt especially drawn to this pretty young woman, whom he could almost believe he had known as a child. Somebody’s classmate, the friend of a friend, a blue-eyed young girl he had passed in a park or a bakery or maybe on skis in the mountains long before she had captured his fancy on the banks of the Saône.

“Hitler will take over the whole world, including Palestine, but I can save you,” he solemnly told her. He sounded pleased by his noble intention and looked to Malou, like him a Catholic, to help Janine accept the inevitable. “That’s the only way you’ll survive. All the Jews are going to be killed, but I’ll marry you and take you home to my family in Freiburg. We’ll tell everybody that you lost all your papers, and then we’ll make up whatever we have to. Your family will be happy to know that at least one of you will be left alive. And, who knows, there’s a chance that from Germany you might be able to help them somehow.”

Janine sat stunned into silence, but Malou chewed on a long stalk of grass as she sized up the soldier’s husband potential. “Don’t be too quick to say no,” Malou whispered to Janine. “He’s not bad, you know, and he may have a point. Let’s give it some thought.” But Janine was already standing, collecting her things.

“Thank you,” she told him. “Really,
wirklich
, it’s kind and brave of you to make such an offer, but we should not even be seen here with you, talking together in public this long.” Flustered, she pulled on her skirt and blouse, slipped on her shoes, stuffed her towel and book in a bag, and granted him a smile of good-bye in place of openly shaking his hand.

“
Ist er verrückt?
” Sigmar exploded when Janine got home and told him what happened. He instructed her never to speak with the soldier again (the young man’s sanity being called into question), even though he conceded knowing Freiburg’s Rosenstihl family and remembered them as respectable people. For Janine, of course, it mattered little what her father thought of the soldier’s background, as her own marital interests stopped short in Mulhouse. The German’s proposal had drawn her thoughts to Roland, and she realized that if
he
had suggested leaving her family and escaping the Nazis through Christian marriage, the ring might have already been on her finger, with safety just a side benefit of everything else she desperately wanted. She prayed for God’s help in finding the man she adored, while never exactly confessing his name for fear that Abraham’s God of judgment and vengeance might fatally frown on her choosing a Catholic. Why trouble the Lord with details, she figured, at a time when He was already so busy with world-shaking matters? After the war, she would hopefully find a way to persuade Him—or at least her own parents—that Roland’s different faith should not be cause to keep them apart.

For now divine intervention seemed necessary. With Alsace and Lorraine swallowed into the Reich, even contact with Mulhouse was out of the question. On July 16, a German order expelled all Jews from Alsace, with thousands given just one hour’s warning before being forced to assemble in the Mulhouse synagogue courtyard to be loaded on trucks and carted out of the Occupied Zone. The reports that traveled to Gray began to fill in the shadows that shaped Private Rosenstihl’s warning. But a week or so after his sudden and daring marriage proposal, Janine found herself summoned to her school principal’s office. An unsmiling, ferretlike man with dark thinning hair and a little mustache, the principal had worked himself into a rage.

“What do you think you’re you doing, fraternizing with a German soldier?” he demanded, indignant. “Certainly, as a Jew, mademoiselle, you should understand the perils of this! Have you really no shame in front of your people?”

“Monsieur, I don’t know what you mean,” Janine replied in confusion, but with a brusque wave of his arm, he cut her off.

“Then I’m sure you can tell me why Private Rosenstihl came here to see me! He claimed he wanted to marry you in order to rescue you. He suggested that
I
talk to your father to win his consent. But I refuse to get involved in this matter! And I’d advise you in the strongest possible terms not to get involved with him, either, although it appears I’m already too late.”

The next time the soldier from Freiburg approached her as she and Malou lay in the grass at the river, Janine did not shrink from voicing annoyance. Now his desire to protect her without her permission struck her as crazy and oddly pretentious.

“
Maintenant, ça suffit!
” That’s enough! she snapped in French at the crestfallen soldier, calling the thing to a halt and punishing him by refusing to speak the
badisch
dialect that had been like a verbal vacation for them. “I’d rather die with my parents than escape with you. How could you think I’d go off and leave them? I can’t marry you, and now I can’t even speak to you either.”

In my younger years, I wanted to trust that the French had all been resisters, if not actively flouting personal danger, then at least in the way that they viewed their invaders and the suffering the Nazis inflicted on Jews throughout Europe. This was before the French publicly searched their own historical record through films and books and trials that explored their actions during the war, and it clearly reflected my mother’s perception and all she had told me. Her love for Roland, her friendships with Malou and others, her embrace of their country instead of her own disgraced homeland, and
oui
, her careful decision to paint herself as having been French from the day she was born—all of these went into the mix that turned me into a Francophile.

My identification with the mother I worshipped translated cleanly into a love of the country where she happily lived during four otherwise terrible years of Europe’s worst turmoil. With the razorlike moral distinctions acceptable only in childhood, I therefore grew up dividing the villains and heroes in all of her stories with a line far more fixed than their changeable borders. As the Nazis were evil, I blocked out the language my grandparents spoke, which I heard every day all around me, while my studies of French leaped ably ahead, thanks to a private instructor—the French widow of an American soldier—retained by my mother for weekly lessons.