The French army soon succumbed to the Blitzkrieg. Following, the Armistice of 22 June 1940 established a German military administration in occupied France, including Biarritz and all of the French Basque Country region.
The next morning, at breakfast, Madame Bisset made a suggestion. ‘They say there are trains for refugees, to take them back home. You can return to Belgium, Simone, to look for your family. I packed a suitcase for you.’
Madame Bisset led me to the front room, where she had set up a suitcase on the couch. She pointed out the different things she had packed for me. ‘Here, the dress you wore that first day you were with me; cheese; a small blanket in case you are cold on the train; and this.’ She reached under the blanket and handed me the Fan of a Japanese Empress.
‘But it’s your favourite shell,’ I protested.
‘It’s for you. It will remind you of a time when Biarritz was free, and it will remind you of me. We all liked to be remembered.’
That afternoon, at the front door, Madame Bisset embraced me. ‘Bon voyage, Simone.’
‘Thank you, Madame Bisset. Thank you for saving me.’
‘If we save one, we save all.’
As I walked down the steps and into the street, I saw the red and black Nazi flag with the crooked black cross mocking the colour of the blue sky. I turned to wave goodbye to Madame Bisset, but her door was already closed and she was gone.
As I made my way slowly back to Belgium, on 19 July Adolf Hitler addressed the German nation from the Reichstag in Berlin, boasting of victory.
The German Reich, in particular with regard to Poland, has shown restraint. In the days of 6 May and 7 May, telephone conversations between London and Paris took place, of which we gained intelligence and which reinforced suspicions that an invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium by the so-called Allies had to be expected at any moment. Thus, on the following day, 8 May, I ordered an immediate attack for 10 May, 5:35 in the morning. The international Jewish poison of the peoples began to agitate against and to corrode healthy minds. No other statesman could have afforded to propose a solution to the German nation in the way I did. Paris fell.
All of France had been taken over, conquered, and occupied. It became known that if you were not Jewish, you could return safely to Belgium. I was going home. I had lost my chance to escape the Nazi occupation, but at least I was going home.
I took a train from Biarritz back to Brussels. When I arrived home, I placed my pink shell on my nightstand, and my life in Brussels under Nazi rule began.
So much of those four years is a blur as loneliness, confusion, and fear monopolized my thoughts about my father, my country, and about Hava.
When I first returned home, I found the house unchanged, except for a thick layer of dust that took up residence in my absence. Somehow, my house had survived the chaos, the bombs, and the madness. I wished my father had been there too, but he was still far away. I was frantic to find him, but all the Belgian offices were filled with Nazi bureaucrats who were no help, and simply ordered me to go home.
After one exhausting day of searching, I entered my house and found a note someone had slipped under my door. Your father is safe. He escaped over the Pyrenees and into Spain. I didn’t know where it came from, but I chose to believe it was true. I chose to believe he was safe, and I let myself feel relieved.
During those first few months I made it my mission to find Hava. She was young; she was strong. I knew that she would be okay wherever she was. I just needed to find her. I thought my father’s medal and reputation might give me some clout with whoever was in charge of locating and releasing prisoners. If they knew Hava and her family were good friends of the general, surely they’d let them go.
I spent weeks visiting offices, spent hours scrutinizing lists of names. There were so many people named Daniels, but they were never the right ones. No Hava. No Benjamin. No Yaakov. No Avital. I hoped that one clue, just one clue, might lead me to Hava, but the answers were always the same: the Polish and Jewish people who had been taken away by the Nazis couldn’t be found, couldn’t be brought home.
When I went to Hava’s synagogue, there was only rubble. When I asked in the neighbourhood about Rabbi Menke, or about the Daniels family, all I received was silence. It was as if there had been no Jews in Brussels; as if the Nazi Pied Piper of Hamelin had swooped into Belgium and lured away not rats and children, but all the Jewish people.
So many nights I cried myself to sleep. I prayed for my father, for Hava, and for her family. I prayed for the war to end. And that prayer became my mantra during those lonely days. I would tell myself, ‘When the war is over, I will find Hava. When the war is over, everything will go back to the way things used to be. When the war is over . . . When the war is over.’
But the war dragged on month after month. I felt like a prisoner in my own home as the Nazis marched in our streets, attended our opera, ran our government and used most of our city’s resources for their soldiers.
There was a nightly curfew, food was scarce because of rationing, and the neighbourhood tried to survive in as normal a manner as possible on the little that was available to us. It took so much energy just to endure, just to keep going, that living itself started to feel like a monotonous chore – a dreary cycle of waking and sleeping. I did find moments of solace in books, and I was grateful for my father’s library, but those moments never lasted long as I’d always find my mind wandering back to Hava.