Crossing the Borders of Time (49 page)

As luck would have it, Mimi’s husband and mother were saved from arrest that night because both were in the hospital: Maurice for hernia surgery, Marie with heart palpitations. Curiously, the
Milice
left the building without taking Bella. But the following morning, the doting woman could not stand to think how her precious Mimi and the children she loved as if they were hers had been yanked from their beds into the chilly night air without being allowed to take along so much as their coats. Heedless of personal danger, Bella hastened to pack up the family’s warm winter clothes and delivered them to Fort Montluc. It was then that officials took a good look at the sixty-four-year-old Jewish housekeeper, checked her name in their records, and seized her as well.

Further details came from Marc-Henri’s mother, Monique, and Pierre Balland, a retired shirtmaker who had known my cousins and still lived in the building, indeed in the same top-floor apartment where the young Jeanine Goldschmidt had regularly come to spend afternoons with Pierre’s childless wife.

“The Goldschmidts were denounced,” said Monsieur Balland, hale and trim at almost ninety. “Was it jealousy? Who knows? Madame was always
le feu dans le bâtiment
,” the fire in the building. It was clear that someone gave the
Milice
or the Gestapo their names, he said, and that others in a position to save them had failed to act. A second Jewish family in the building, refugees from Poland, had been warned about the impending raid in time to get out and quietly left a few days beforehand, thus surviving to return to Lyon after the war. Monsieur Balland stared at the floor in discomfort as he explained that, based on some latent enmity between the two families, the Polish couple had not shared with the Goldschmidts the alert to leave. It was rumored that Mimi had sent them away empty-handed when they sought a contribution from her for a fund to help impoverished Jews escape from the Nazis. Whoever turned over the Goldschmidts’ names presumably had not mentioned Bella Picard, Monsieur Balland suggested, theorizing as to why the agents initially failed to arrest the housekeeper, although she was Jewish.

Emilie “Mimi” Goldschmidt in 1940

Monique Arfeux fought back tears as she recalled how the Goldschmidts had waved off entreaties to escape from Lyon, Maurice refusing to give up his business, and Mimi spurning the wisdom of hiding her children in the country. The morning after the raid, she said, her uncle André rushed to the hospital to warn Maurice and Marie not to come back because the Gestapo was taking over their home. Hesitantly, afraid of giving offense by speaking ill of the dead, Madame Arfeux and Monsieur Balland intimated that Mimi had imprudently turned herself, and therefore her family, into a target. At a time when the
Milice
and the Germans were hungry to round up Jews who caught their interest, the Goldschmidts not only dismissed the need to hide or even to lie low, but also had failed to ward off resentment that led to condemnation and finger pointing.

In days that followed the Goldschmidts’ arrests, the Gestapo and the
Milice
destroyed all that they found in the Jewish apartments. Photographs and personal papers lay in the street, and for fear of the Germans no one dared touch them. Maurice, broken in spirit, survived until Lyon’s liberation on September 2, 1944, alone and in hiding, and then wandered home to his vacant apartment. According to Monsieur Balland and Madame Arfeux, once he returned, Maurice spent all of his days hounding relief agencies to search for his family, while becoming the victim of ruthless hucksters who promised to find them. Strangers arrived and moved in with him. Opportunists devoid of conscience or pity claimed to have seen his wife or his children. One swore to have spotted Elie-Jean at Auschwitz III, digging in coal mines, while another remembered Jacques in its quarries; still another said he had seen Mimi herself, a feeble skeleton in line at a roll call. Someone had glimpsed her in the Buna synthetic rubber factory that I. G. Farben built at the camp in order to profit from ever-replenished ranks of slave labor.

These tipsters fed on Maurice, clawing for shelter and money. Day after day for almost a year, they goaded him to wait for his family at the gare de Perrache with photos in hand. Each day with fresh optimism, accompanied by one of a changing cast of nefarious guides, Maurice rushed toward the travelers who climbed off the trains, certain the moment would finally come when the people he loved most in the world would wave to him from the crowds on the platform and fling themselves into his too-empty arms. In a fever of madness, he met the trains and showed his pictures to anyone willing to stop and rifle through memory’s permanent nightmares. Thus the man who escaped the fate of his family became a ghost, haunted by ghosts, lost to the world in his search for the others.

That fall, his mother-in-law Marie sent word to Sigmar in New York that her daughter, three grandchildren, and Bella had been deported the year before, and that she and Maurice were still struggling to maintain faith that they would return. Marie herself had succeeded in reaching Valence to hide with Lisette and Edy, who had both been working within the Resistance. Once the Germans were driven out of the region, the Cahens were able to retrieve their two sons and two daughters from the tiny mountain village in the Vercors where a rescue agency had sheltered them for more than a year. Because the name Cahen was recognizably Jewish, Lisette had equipped the children with a new French last name: with customary, if ill-advised, wit under the circumstances, she had dubbed them Cacheux, from the word
caché
, hidden.

Visiting the little Cacheux children the previous summer, Lisette had found them badly malnourished and had rushed to Lyon to ask her sister-in-law to take the children into her home. Mimi agreed to accept the oldest child only, not the three others, and Lisette, incensed, rejected the offer. “I’d prefer her to starve to death with her sister and brothers than to have her here living with you!” Lisette hotly retorted. “I shudder to think what she’d learn.” But in the end, her disdain for Mimi, who would welcome one child and reject her siblings, unexpectedly worked to save Lisette’s daughter, when two months later, the
Milice
raided the Goldschmidt apartment and deported the family.

After Lyon’s liberation, Maurice came south to visit his in-laws, and seeing him shattered, Marie took it as her duty to go back to the city and care for him. But soon she, too, was seduced by whispering devils that clamored around them, selling unfounded hope. Marie shared her sorrow across the Atlantic, sending her brother Sigmar an anguished series of densely written postcards and letters. Despair filled her pages and spiraled the edges in a barely legible scrawl. She begged him to help obtain information, possibly through the American Red Cross, and poured out her message of pain many times over:

You have surely learned of our great and terrible tragedy. My dear Mimi, the three children, and my poor Bella were arrested on 29 October 43. We have had no news of them since Drancy. They are surely in Poland or in Upper Silesia. What I suffer, you can believe, is more than terrible because we don’t know where our poor children are.… One despairs above all at a time when it is so cold. Do you think perhaps Herbert can do something? I have already written to him.… If only one knew where they were. Nothing now for more than a year! It’s totally hopeless. There is such misery in the world.

It will truly be the most sacred of moments when the good Lord will liberate them. Maurice suffers horribly. I cannot speak. God give us strength! How often I think of my dear Sigmar who wanted to take us away with him! How right you were to leave! If only God will protect our dear deported ones and preserve them in health. My time is filled with prayers that I hope God will hear. Write to me. Think of me. I kiss you with my whole heart. Your sad sister, Marie.

Again and again, she wrote to Sigmar seeking advice and describing Maurice’s frantic attempts to search for their loved ones, as he continued to do until after the war, when all five names turned up in the lists of the dead. Only then did he learn that his wife, three children, and Bella were deported on Convoy Number 62 that pulled away from Bobigny station near Drancy just before noon on November 20, 1943. The transport approved in Berlin by Adolf Eichmann had included one thousand two hundred Jews crammed into freight cars. Among the other prisoners was Roland’s friend Roger Dreyfus; also among them was Jacques Helbronner, widely known as “the Marshal’s Jew” for his friendship with Pétain, along with his wife, Jeanne; another was Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy, the granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus. Of no known relation to Roger, Madeleine had been arrested in Toulouse in early November on charges of working for the Resistance.

The train crossed the border north of Alsace on a journey that ended at Auschwitz in Poland, missing 19 prisoners who had managed a daring escape on the first night of travel. In an icy rain, on a platform patrolled by SS guards with dogs, the remaining 1,181 prisoners were separated from their belongings. Quickly selected for immediate death were 895 deportees, with the remaining 241 men and 45 women assigned to hard labor. Of those, all but 29 men and 2 women from Convoy Number 62 would perish before the end of the war.

In the fall of 1944, Norbert left Cuba to come to the United States to be with the family at Sigmar’s sixty-fourth birthday at the end of December. But only weeks after his arrival, as he’d predicted, he was drafted into the American Army. Dispatched to Camp Blanding in Florida for basic training with an infantry unit, he was then assigned to an intelligence branch that valued his fluency in French and German. On the day in late April 1945 when Norbert shipped out, Janine and Trudi saw him off at the pier on Staten Island. True to form, he railed against leaving his latest girlfriend, this one an American, but any fears of going back to war were quickly assuaged by his enormous good fortune of debarking in Europe on May 8, the very day the Germans surrendered.

Norbert in his American army uniform, stationed in Germany after the war

It had only been a matter of days since the arrest of Pétain, the execution of Italy’s Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and the suicide, in his Berlin bunker on the last day of April, of a crazed Adolf Hitler. He had skirted defeat and certain capture by choosing to shoot himself in the mouth. With his last written words, the leader who plotted a Thousand Year Reich had blamed the Jews for provoking the war, causing millions of deaths and appalling destruction. Aides found the Führer’s mangled corpse beside the slumped form of his poisoned bride, Eva Braun, whom Hitler had finally married in the dark morning hours of the previous day. Then, in a macabre, self-prescribed Viking funeral—a wordless ceremony amid the roaring bombardment of Red Army shells—they were both laid to rest in a bed of flames.

Never one to miss a party, Norbert arrived right in time for the great jubilation, free French kisses, and small opportunities for silent revenge. And the following fall, when a few days’ leave gave him the chance to strut through Freiburg, resplendent in his American uniform, and then to visit Lyon, a friend told him that Roland was still there, living alone now in a one-room apartment. When they met, Roland recounted the trials of the past three years: how he had narrowly escaped arrest by the
Milice
, dodged bullets and bombings in the liberation, and served with the Allies in a revived French Army during the months between the rescue of Lyon and final triumph over the Germans. Filling a low-level clerical job with a tank regiment at a barracks in Lyon, he had been tasked with tracking food and supplies for the troops in his unit. At that point, he still knew nothing about Roger’s murder.