Alex's Wake (26 page)

For the next two months, father and son rose at dawn five days a week to attend to their duties on the farm. Helmut, summoning his organizational skills, assisted in the neat arrangement of tools, seeds, rope, and other supplies in the farm's barn and stable. At noon, the two of them would unwrap sandwiches of cheese and sausage, made for them that morning in the hotel kitchen, and join their fellow farmers for lunch either in the fields or, if the sun was particularly fierce that day, in the shade of a shed of planks that had been fashioned in the woodworkers' shop. Three evenings a week, they washed dishes after dinner in the hotel kitchen before retiring to the game room, where Alex enjoyed an ongoing skirmish on a chess board with a man from Stuttgart who had spent his day learning how to cobble shoes. Helmut read quietly in a corner. After quaffing a schnapps or a glass of hot tea, they would retire by ten.

Those two months must truly have seemed idyllic for my grandfather and uncle, following their harrowing six weeks at sea and six years of ever-increasing terror and humiliation. The work was hard and the hours were long, but their labors were directed toward the success and well-being of this unique community. If they were not wholly free men, if their options did not include taking the train to Paris and from there making a second attempt to reach the New World, they surely must have thought that their rural redoubt was a beautiful, if temporary, shelter from the perils of their homeland. As Alex scattered feed for his chickens and Helmut tended his crops, they must have dreamed of a happy harvest of ripe vegetables and plump poultry in the coming autumn and of their own liberation by the time spring returned to the surrounding hills.

On July 14, Bastille Day, Alex and Helmut joined their fellow refugees in laying a wreath at the war memorial in Martigny's public square. Then the townspeople and the refugees took part in a ceremony on the front lawn of the Hotel International, where one of the refugee gardeners had planted flowers of red, white, and blue to spell out
Vive la France
. That night, the Bastille Day fireworks were set off within the boundaries of the agricultural center, and again refugees and citizens of Martigny mingled happily in the warm, festive summer night.

In early August, the French periodical
L'Univers Israélite
published a feature about the center at Martigny, complete with photographs of the hotel and some of the workshops. Titled “A Fine Communal Accomplishment,” the article described the center's activities and its “extremely cordial” relations with the people of Martigny-les-Bains. Its concluding paragraph reads, “One cannot over-emphasize the importance of this achievement. Condemned to idleness and dependent on public assistance which was always insufficient, these refugees would be doomed to a life of poverty in an urban setting. As active members of a community where they are introduced to new activities, despite the difficulties of re-adapting, they realize that with a bit of energy and thanks to the solidarity of the Jewish community, they can once again aspire to be the architects of their own destiny.”

Four weeks later, German troops overwhelmed Poland, France declared war on Germany, and my grandfather and uncle's destinies were once again subject to the architects of uncertainty.

S
UNDAY
, M
AY
22, 2011. The peaceful sounds of chiming church bells and cooing doves awaken us to a cool, cloudy morning in Contrexéville. Downstairs in the dining room of the Inn of the Twelve Apostles, we linger over croissants, locally harvested honey, tasty locally made strawberry preserves, and pots of aromatic tea. After breakfast, we stroll through the municipal park, admiring the graceful fountains and carefully cultivated flower beds and doing our best to decipher the rules of a game of bocce that seems to be an essential Sunday morning ritual for the elderly men of Contrexéville. As noon approaches, we climb into the Meriva and make the pleasant drive down to Martigny-les-Bains. I eagerly point out to Amy the green field where the lambs had frolicked yesterday afternoon, but today the expanse of grass and clover stands empty. I wonder for a moment if I imagined the sheep, and as we enter the village, I half expect to see a thriving Hotel International, guests on the wide veranda enjoying a formal luncheon amid tuxedoed waiters. But no . . . the ruined facade of the old hotel is as bleak and unrelenting as it was the evening before.

Today, though, we have an appointment with the living. I have made contact with Madame Gerard Liliane, a woman in her eighties who remembers the glory days when her little village was a destination spot for travelers throughout the continent. I am eager to learn what she recalls of the summer of 1939 when—who knows?—she may have mingled with Alex or Helmut and gasped in delight as the fireworks illuminated the night sky over Martigny on that long-ago Fourteenth of July. As we pull into her driveway off the Rue de Dompierre, the sun emerges from behind its cloud cover and the stone walls of her snug little house seem to gleam. Leaning on a cane, Madame greets us extravagantly and ushers us into her parlor where she offers us slices of a strawberry cake she baked that morning. We are joined by her granddaughter Manon, who will be our translator; Madame's English is as nonexistent as our French.

Over the next hour and a half, we learn that we have just missed the annual Escargot Festival, which culminates in the naming of Miss Shell, an honor won last year by Manon's sister; that the Hotel International was the finest establishment of its kind in all of the Vosges; and that Martigny's city hall recently sold the hotel to a real estate company that plans to convert the building into a medical center for the treatment of stress, anemia, anorexia, and bulimia. Madame Liliane produces another newly baked wonder, a chocolate cake this time, Manon puts on an Edith Piaf CD, and everyone sings along lustily to the Little Sparrow's defiant anthem “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” It is a jolly gathering and
tres Francais
. When we depart several hours later, we exchange warm two-cheek kisses in the debonair French manner.

But the long afternoon has ended on a note of frustration. Though she was nine or ten years old in that summer of 1939, Madame Liliane claims no memories of encountering refugees at the agricultural center headquartered at her beloved Hotel International. I pull out a copy of the article in the
L'Univers Israélite
that I've brought with me—the article that emphasizes the friendly relations between refugees and townspeople—and Madame scans it eagerly but says that she had no idea that the people staying at the hotel that summer were refugees,
most of them from Nazi Germany. I suppose that it's certainly possible that a little girl would have been protected from the details of where the hotel's residents had come from and why they had left their homes, but today Madame Liliane thinks of herself as a historian of the hotel. It is from her that I received the flier touting the many healthy virtues of Martigny-les-Bains in general and of the Hotel International in particular, details that I quoted earlier in this chapter. How could she have remained ignorant of this crucial period in the chronicles of her village, a place she has called home for more than eighty years?

Neither of us knows for sure, of course, but as I show Amy around the hotel's sad remains, we discuss Madame Liliane's memory. We recall the not-quite-believable claims of people who lived in close proximity to Dachau or Treblinka and never noticed anything amiss, even as sinister smoke curled up from the chimneys of the crematoria. Was this self-styled historian sweeping a somewhat damning segment of history under the rug? Or—a more benign explanation—was she simply more engaged by stories of well-to-do guests sipping champagne and sharing a tureen of lobster bisque on a golden afternoon in 1912 than she was in a tale of refugees raising sheep as the shadows of war lengthened in the late summer of 1939?

As we gaze a final time at the place that was Alex and Helmut's shelter for those halcyon months, we acknowledge that in one crucial respect, it doesn't matter whether or not Madame Liliane was aware of the truth. We had traveled to Martigny to learn a few precious details about how my grandfather and uncle had passed their time here and had discovered this particular oracle to be mute. In the absence of hard facts, we are left with the metaphor of the crumbling grand hotel and its image of ruthless time, a
memento mori
of steel and stone and warped wood that reminds me yet again of the futility of my desire to save my doomed relatives. There is nothing to do but drive pensively back to our comfortable Inn of the Twelve Apostles.

Yet, thwarted as I feel by Madame Liliane's failure of memory, saddened as I am by the hotel's stark reminder that all things must pass,
I continue to experience a certain exhilaration brought about by the realization that I am seeing the same countryside and breathing the same air as Alex and Helmut did while living in Martigny seventy-two years ago. I am witnessing the very place where they greeted each new morning and where they rested each night after their toil in the fields. I am bearing witness.

As we once more pass the green field on the edge of town, I see that the sheep have returned and the lambs are as frisky and joyous as on the previous afternoon. Tossed between emotions, the sorrow of my loss and the satisfaction of my quest, I find myself wondering if any of these lambs could possibly be the descendants of the sheep that Helmut tended during those tranquil summer days so long ago. The fanciful idea enchants me. I stop the car, and Amy and I spend a good ten minutes watching the woolly revelry.

And because my mind works in the way it does, I recall lines from Wordsworth's immortal Ode: “Let the young Lambs bound as to the tabor's sound! We in thought will join your throng, ye that feel the gladness of the May! We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind; in the soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering; thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

A
PRIL
2012. Despite my best detective efforts and those of the dedicated researchers I've met through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, there has always remained a small but vexing break in the thread of Alex and Helmut's journey through France. I know that they spent those summer months of 1939 at the agricultural center in Martigny-les-Bains and that they arrived in Montauban in October 1940. But where were they during those roughly thirteen months from September 1939 to October 1940? In the first quarter of 2012, even as I have begun setting down their story, some answers to that question emerge from an unexpected but most welcome source.

In early February, quite out of the blue, I receive a letter from Cheshire, England, written by a Steven Behrens, who had come across my earlier book,
The Inextinguishable Symphony
, and determined that
we are related. We share a common great-great-grandfather, Elkan Simon Behrens, the father of the Bremen coffee importer Ludwig Behrens, who was the father of Toni Behrens, who married my grandfather Alex Goldschmidt. Steven's great-grandfather was Ludwig's cousin. My family is so small that any news of a direct relative is good news indeed. Steven and I begin an enthusiastic e-mail and telephone exchange and plan to meet, either in Cheshire or in our ancestral homeland of Germany, as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Steven's tireless genealogical research turns up a clue to Alex and Helmut's whereabouts during those missing thirteen months. Max Markreich, who married Toni's sister Johanna and managed to emigrate safely to the Western Hemisphere in 1939, left behind a fascinating trove of letters at the time of his death in 1962. One of them was a letter my grandfather sent to Mr. and Mrs. Markreich in their internment camp in Trinidad. The letter is dated January 27, 1940 . . . precisely in the midst of those mysterious months. The return address is listed as Camp du Martinet, Sionne, Vosges.

In his letter, Alex declares,

When we began our departure almost ¾ of a year ago on the
St. Louis
we could not imagine how things would turn out for us. Now our journey has taken us even further and our family is totally torn apart. I hear from Toni, Eva, Günther, and Rosemarie, though I have been without news from them for a while. I have also not had any news from Helmut for two weeks. We are temporarily separated as I came to this hospital in Contrexéville about three weeks ago because of constant eczema on my head and neck, but it is healing now. Our address is still the same as the one at the beginning of this letter. Helmut is big and strong, but it is very regrettable that he cannot get a professional education. I am very much looking forward to seeing him again, although I am
very well off
here.

In September, when we came to this camp, I never thought that the war would last so long, but expected a rapid fall of Hitler's regime. I am still today of the opinion that everything
will end suddenly, that Hitler's chances are getting worse from week to week, and that he is in a blind alley from which he cannot turn back. So we are not giving up hope, my dears, that we will be reunited again in the not too distant future. No one knows where or when.

So that's where they were, for at least part of that time. I seize a map of France and find that Sionne is a village about thirty-five miles north of Martigny-les-Bains and only about five miles away from the larger town of Neufchâteau, which I remember from a road sign as we drove away from Contrexéville. I check the Internet for the tourist office of Neufchâteau and e-mail them requesting information about the establishment of refugee or internment camps in that region of France immediately following the outbreak of war in September 1939. After a few exchanges, I receive a very kind, informative dispatch from Monsieur Julien Duvaux of Neufchâteau. He essentially clears up the mystery of most of those thirteen months and confirms the accuracy of the return address on Alex's letter of January 1940.