Crossing the Borders of Time (27 page)

To help the Günzburgers escape the Occupied Zone, André Fick falsely attested under the seal of the city that the family’s regular domicile was in Lyon, in the Unoccupied Zone
.

As he had done several times before on official letters aimed at helping Janine’s family—even when, twisting facts, he placed himself in jeopardy—he signed these for the mayor,
A. Fick
, and to each signature boldly added the stamp of the
mairie
.

“Just in case … these may one day prove useful,” he said. He shrugged as if to discount their value, reluctant to put new fears in her mind.

“
Chagrin
.” Sorrow. That was the word he used more than six decades later, when he tried to describe the scene at the station, when “Janine went into exile” and for the first time he had shyly opened his arms to embrace her. Both had wept, full of regret for the sweet and clumsy dance of their friendship, never defined and now ending. Then he stood on the platform and waved until the train and the girl disappeared from his life, chugging down the tracks into the hazy vanishing point of an uncertain future.

The first leg of the trip took the four women southwest to Dole, where they planned to change onto a northwest train bound for Dijon. Leaving from there the following morning, a third train would carry them to the border crossing where they’d arranged to rendezvous with the rest of the family. As an added precaution, Malou’s father, an Alsatian by birth and a German Army veteran of the previous war, had made contact with an old army buddy, now a general in charge of that border location. Monsieur Gieselbrecht explained to his former comrade-in-arms that his daughter was crossing with dear Jewish friends, and the German general replied with assurance that he would personally meet them and warrant they made it safely over the line. But just before the women reached their first destination, German soldiers strode through the train, ordering everyone to get off in Dole. “Last stop!
Alle müssen aussteigen!
” they shouted. All passenger trains in the region were canceled until further notice.

In despair, the women sat in tears on their trunks in front of the station, when a German lieutenant, strolling by, stopped and courteously offered to help them. He and another soldier were heading for Dijon that same afternoon, he said, driving two large
Wehrmacht
trucks with space to spare for two lovely girls. If the girls could wait, he and his friend would shortly return in the trucks to collect them, and, if the girls would promise to dine with them when they reached Dijon, he was sure to find room for their considerable luggage. If Pauline and Bella were willing to ride in the back of a truck, they were welcome to hitch a ride too. That the soldier suggestively winked at this point while describing the bargain was not reassuring, but with no other way to advance toward the border or alert the family of their predicament, the girls saw no option but to accept.

As soon as he left to go for the trucks, however, Malou attacked the valises and furiously started yanking off tags. “How could your father have let us go off with Jewish names plastered all over this stuff!” she demanded. “Günzburger! Cahen! Picard! Doesn’t he realize what’s going on? We must be crazy! Who knows whether that guy already noticed the names on your tags and just left to get help to arrest us? They’ll probably drive us to Dijon, try to have some fun on the way, and then turn us over to the Gestapo.”

Within the hour, two open-backed trucks drew up in front of the station. As the lieutenant had promised, he and his fellow soldier loaded the luggage into one of the trucks and then boosted Bella and her lumbering sister into the back of the other. The only item that Bella took with her was Sigmar’s little brown suitcase packed with his papers and Alice’s silver. The lieutenant invited Malou into the cab of his truck, Janine climbed into the cab of the other, and they set off. As the day quickly darkened and they drove through the woods near Besançon, Janine and her driver chatted pleasantly. She allowed herself to trust that the soldiers, both in their twenties, were simply out for some innocent female companionship and had no intention of causing them harm. Suddenly, the other truck, leading the way, swerved to the shoulder and slammed to a stop. Both doors burst opened, Malou leaped out the passenger side, waving her arms and berating the German, while he jumped from the driver’s side, shouting back at her, red faced and louder.

“
Vous êtes des salauds!
” You bastards! Malou was screaming. Her hot words smoked in the cold night air. “I hate you! You think Jews and Communists are problems for France? You Boches are the ones destroying our country! I only wish you’d all drop dead and leave us in peace! I want nothing to do with any of you! Go to hell!” The soldier was glaring at her, and Janine rushed to his side in an effort to calm him.

“Please, please, you must understand,” she begged, grabbing the lieutenant by both arms and babbling excuses. “Her only brother—she loved him so much—he was killed last June in the fighting,” she found herself lying. “She’s still mourning for him. But her father is Alsatian, and just like you, he was an officer in the German Army in the last war. Malou doesn’t mean what she’s saying. I swear, that’s just grief you hear talking! This has nothing to do with you. You have to believe me!”

The officer’s arms were folded in front of his chest, and he sullenly stared into the woods. A drizzle had started, the raindrops audibly tapping the dry, brittle leaves that lay on the ground, and Janine was shivering. She remembered Bella and Pauline huddled together in the back of the open truck and couldn’t imagine what they would do if the Germans abandoned them with all their bags at the side of this black, forsaken road, with the rest of her family waiting for them.

“Please understand,” she repeated, ashamed of the desperation she heard in her voice. The soldier turned on his heel.

“
Ja, ich verstehe
,” he finally said, his voice clipped. “These are not simple times.” He beckoned to Malou. “Come on now,” he said, his voice softening, “get back in the truck. We have to move on.”

Outside Dijon, the lieutenant pulled off the road again, waved the second truck over, and came to its window to consult with his comrade, prompting Malou to rush over behind him. The lieutenant pressed for arranging hotel rooms before going to dinner, but Malou, reminding him of Bella and Pauline—cold, wet, hungry, and tired—sketched out another plan of her own.

“Why don’t you drop us at the station, so we can leave our maids with the luggage to wait for us there?” she brightly suggested. “While you gentlemen find us rooms, we’ll change into something pretty. Then we’ll gladly join you for dinner and anything else you have in mind. Bella and Pauline won’t mind spending the night on a bench at the station.”

When they reached the city, and the soldiers drove off, promising to return for them within the hour, Malou proposed that she and Janine hide for the night in the stalls of the ladies’ restroom. Pauline and Bella would remain in the waiting room, prepared to provide a convincing account when the Germans showed up: the girls, they were instructed to claim, had already left for the evening to meet up with them. They had said not to worry, they would probably not be back until morning, since they were planning to spend the night with the soldiers in a hotel. Sorry, no, they left no other message.

After rehearsing the story, the girls went into the restroom, locked themselves into two stalls, and tried to rest. The air in the station was clammy and cold, but they drifted into a light, fitful sleep until a few hours later, when an attendant barged into the bathroom, banging on doors and calling their names. “Janine! Malou! Janine! Malou!” she sang out their names in a volume that easily carried out to the hallway where the soldiers were waiting and hollowly echoed through the cavernous station.

“There are two German soldiers outside looking for a Malou and Janine.
C’est vous deux?
” the wide-eyed attendant clutching a broom asked in a hush when the girls slid open the bolts and peeked out of the stalls. They would later debate whether the woman had believed their denials. “
D’accord
,” okay, she said, nodding, and she left to report to the soldiers that the girls were not there. Come morning, Janine and Malou emerged and rejoined Bella and Pauline, and with great relief they managed to catch a train to the border.

Janine never recalled the name of the town. What she distinctly remembered was feeling deserted and panicked when she went with Malou to find Monsieur Gieselbrecht’s friend, the German general who had promised to help them. Pauline and Bella remained at the station with the baggage, while the two girls set off on foot for the German’s home, having been told to meet him there and not at the local
Kommandantur
, where their visit might prompt unwanted attention.

At a fine country house surrounded by a low stone wall, Malou told Janine to wait outside while she went in to meet the general and explain their needs, which included retrieving the baggage and Bella and Pauline from the train station and taking them all to the border crossing. But long minutes passed, and then so did hours. Malou did not reappear, and Janine grew increasingly frantic, pacing the street and watching the door. She was afraid for her friend, but just as afraid of ringing the bell and blundering into Malou’s maneuvers. At long last, when the door opened, Malou bounced down the steps, tossing her head of shiny curls and smiling back at the general over her shoulder. Janine sprang to her feet and searched her friend’s face, alarmed to think what might have kept her so long.

“Oh, what a time we have had!” Malou gaily announced. “The general gave me a splendid lunch and he’s been telling me about all the daring exploits he shared with my father during the war.”

By the time the general sent a truck to the station and personally drove Malou and Janine to the crossing point, the family was already there, apprehensively waiting. Introductions were made, Mayor Fimbel shook hands with the German, and Sigmar doffed his hat, inclined his head in a respectful bow, and offered the general effusive thanks. With perfunctory scrutiny, the general glanced at their papers, then he ordered a soldier to lift the barriers and, snapping his fingers, he summoned others to carry the luggage across. The women sailed through the border onto the terra firma of the Unoccupied Zone with the grace and refinement of dancing a waltz.

In three separate runs, Mayor Fimbel and Sigmar then shuttled the women and baggage to the nearest train station where they would leave for Lyon. It was the last the two men would see of each other. As the gangly Alsatian and his short German friend clasped one another in a farewell embrace, they called on the God they shared to protect them both through the perils lying ahead.

And yet, who could have predicted the future course of events? Before the end, the Jew would escape the fate the Nazis intended. But the mayor of Gray, a man suspected by his townspeople of being a little too cozy with the occupiers, and even disdained by some as a collaborator, would be arrested by the Gestapo and then deported to Buchenwald.

On the holiday morning of May 1, 1944, when the
mairie
was closed and the streets were festive, agents of the Nazi secret police sent from Dijon, acting on orders from the Gestapo in Paris, burst into the school Saint-Pierre-Fourier in Gray, where Monsieur Fimbel had continued to live and to work while serving as mayor. Armed with pistols and submachine guns, a commando raid of about sixty men—German SS and military as well as members of the traitorous French
Milice
all dressed in black—followed them in and tore though the school hunting for Alsatian deserters and members of the Resistance they had come to suspect the mayor of hiding. The Nazis left with five people, including the mayor, and threw them in prison in Dijon for interrogation and torture.

Having believed for years that their hand-picked mayor was doing their bidding, the Germans now understood the mask he was wearing. Fimbel was actually running his own covert intelligence network, eventually even printing counterfeit cards of laissez-passer in the newspaper office, so that people marked for arrest, resisters and Jews, seemed to disappear into the air only hours before they were to be seized.

“We could fool the Germans for quite a long time because they were rather naïve,” André Fick told me, “but there arrived a moment when it didn’t work anymore.”

Three months later, Fimbel scrawled a message on a piece of wrapping paper that found its way out to his friends in Gray through a sympathetic German monk (Alfred Stanke, later renowned as the Franciscan of Bourges) who worked in the prison: “I am on a list of those leaving,” Fimbel wrote. “Do not worry about me. I will return soon. God will guard me.… My heart is with you.”

According to André Brissinger, a fellow Marist who wrote a detailed account of Fimbel’s year-long ordeal in the grip of the Nazis, Gray’s mayor was sent by train with eighty others to the woods of Compiègne, not far from the spot where the Germans accepted defeat in 1918 and where Hitler laid down the terms of French surrender in 1940. There, on August 17, 1944, the SS forced Fimbel and hundreds of French deportees into sweltering cattle cars without food or water for a journey that lasted four days and ended in death for many of them. Among the dead were those shot in reprisal for thirty prisoners who managed to gouge a hole in their car and jump from the train into uncharted darkness that looked better to them than what they could see, or what they foresaw of their destination. Using dogs and searchlights, the guards gunned down or captured and viciously beat about twenty of them, and the following morning they exacted random revenge as a warning.