THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2011. Too late, I think. I’m too late.
In the glare of a brilliantly sunny late afternoon, I stand on the concrete pier that surrounds the horseshoe-shaped harbor of Boulogne-sur-Mer on the north coast of France, gazing with finely mixed emotions into the murky green water. Fifty yards away, six young men kick around a soccer ball, their collective skill apparently blocking from their minds the fear that an errant pass might send the ball plunging down an irretrievable thirty feet into the drink. On the harbor’s far side, an immense Greek cargo ship is being unloaded with the assistance of two cranes and at least a dozen strapping dockworkers. Far offshore, three industrious cormorants are scanning the waves for an early dinner, floating in seemingly aimless patterns until they drop bodily as if shot, plunging into the sea and then rising again with a gleaming, wriggling fish in their jaws. The bustling life of a seaside town is all around me.
I am more than a little awed to be standing here. And I feel as if I’ve missed the boat, literally. Alex and Helmut have come and gone.
Yesterday morning, Amy and I bade farewell to Hilu and Roland, climbed into our little Meriva, and drove west along the autobahn, leaving Germany and entering Holland. We set aside the Goldschmidt family saga for a while and explored the lives of Amy’s ancestors, whose roots for more than a century were planted in the rich soil of the Dutch province of Friesland. We visited the tiny village of Arum, where her great-great-grandfather Pieter Pieters Menage and great-great-grandmother Tjitse Blanksma were born in 1840, and walked wonderingly along Arum’s main street and through its tidy cemetery, looking for family. Back on the road, driving through the flat Frisian countryside, I often thought I was looking at a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, a Ruisdael or Hobbema, with deep green fields; a few lonely trees; a canal or two; grazing cows, horses, or sheep; and a couple of distant church spires breaking up the horizon.
We spent the night in the historic city of Harlingen, on the North Sea coast, in a cozy old hotel with slightly slanted wooden floors, our window looking out onto a canal that flowed into the sea. This morning, our travels took us south along the coast to the beautiful town of Hindeloopen, where Amy’s great-great-great-grandfather Pieter Thomas Menage was born in 1802. Hindeloopen is a magical little village of flowers and tiny old houses nestled in the protective embrace of an earthen dike. Amy and I were enchanted and vowed to return someday soon.
By then the day had started to slip away from us, so we regretfully left Hindeloopen behind to spend several hours on heavily traveled motorways that took us through and around a maze of smoggy cities from Amsterdam and Utrecht to Breda, and from there across the Belgian border to Antwerp, Ghent, and Brugge. Rain fell intermittently and the traffic was intense, so we were much relieved when the traffic thinned somewhat at the French frontier and the sun emerged from a bank of heavy clouds. There are actual hills in northern France, which were a welcome sight after the unending flatness of Holland and Belgium.
We had printed out Google Maps directions to the hotel we’d booked in Boulogne, and when we got off the motorway at the edge of town, we thought we were only minutes away from stretching out on our bed and resting our eyes. No such luck. At the end of the motorway’s exit ramp, we encountered a detour, which threw us off our directions to such an extent that we wandered through side streets and battled one-ways for a good twenty minutes before we were able to find our lodging. As I was cursing this minor turn of fate, it occurred to me that since Alex and Helmut had to endure so much uncertainty and unpleasantness on their journey to Boulogne, perhaps it was only right that I experience 1/1000th of 1 percent of their tribulations.
Now, as I stand where they stood when their ocean-going odyssey finally ended, I am haunted by an admittedly irrational feeling of failure and the thought that we’ve come racing across the Low Countries to greet my grandfather and uncle as they stepped off the boat . . . only to have missed them. It’s all part of my equally irrational desire to save Alex and Helmut from the fate that befell them a decade before I was born, the fruitless fantasy that brought me here in the first place. But I manage to shake off those sad and useless thoughts by recalling that there is work to be accomplished in the morning: the task of learning more about my relatives’ brief encounter with this city.
There has been a settlement on this site for at least two thousand years. In 43 AD, the Roman emperor Claudius launched his invasion of the British Isles from here, when the town was known as Bononia and served as an important fortress city in the northernmost regions of the empire. The walls of the fort were renovated in the early fourth century and survive to this day, though parts of the battlements that remain—looking out over the English Channel from the hills that rise above the port—date from yet another repair job undertaken during the thirteenth century. Boulogne fell to the English in 1544, but was then brought back into French possession when King Henri II purchased it six years later. In 1805, the French emperor Napoleon, perhaps inspired by the example of Emperor Claudius, amassed a grand army in Boulogne and planned an invasion of England, but events on other fronts forced him to abandon the project.
Within the walled sections of this ancient city stands the magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame, renovated in the nineteenth century to replace the original medieval cathedral, which was torched by revolutionaries in the early 1790s. The old earl’s castle is also sheltered by the Roman wall, as is the city hall and the Bibliothèque Municipale. On Friday morning, under a deep blue sky, we walk up the hill from our hotel and pass through one of the four gates in the wall. For the first time since my long-ago eighth-grade French class, I actually find a use for the phrase “Où est la bibliothèque?” and we locate the library. With the assistance of two friendly librarians, one of whom speaks enough recognizable English to make up for our primitive French, we find several tall leather-bound editions of Boulogne newspapers from the spring of 1939.
“ALL OF THE FRENCH AND FOREIGN PRESS have been talking for some time now about the lamentable odyssey of Jews who fled Germany and who, on board steamships, have traveled from port to port, never finding the haven that they sought. But now France, perhaps the most hospitable nation in the world, is going to offer them the welcome that so many others have refused. More than two hundred Jewish refugees from the SS St. Louis will arrive early tomorrow morning in Boulogne-sur-Mer.”
So read an article in the June 19, 1939, edition of La Voix du Nord—the Voice of the North—a regional newspaper serving several cities in northern France. Over the next few days, dispatches from the Voice reporter kept readers abreast of what was happening to these weary visitors to their hospitable shores.
At a few minutes past 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, June 20, in calm seas, the Rhakotis pulled into Boulogne’s outer harbor at the end of its relatively brief journey from Antwerp. It was a very warm morning and, due in part to the heat, a thick fog arose and blanketed the coast for miles in both directions. Foghorns sounded their booming calls, waking the passengers on board the Rhakotis, who were undoubtedly eager to finally set foot on dry land.
Toward 9 a.m., the fog began to lift, the skies cleared, the sun broke through the remaining wisps of mist, and the foghorns ceased their moaning. On board the Rhakotis, which was carrying both the French and English contingents of St. Louis refugees, small buckets of water were set out to facilitate a morning washing-up for the 224 arriving passengers. At about 10:00, a small shuttle boat, the France, left the inner harbor and steamed out to the Rhakotis. It was time for those disembarking in France to say farewell to the refugees bound for Southampton. Tears were shed by passengers who had become fast friends while in exile for more than a month and who now questioned whether they would ever see one another again.
Though outfitted for no more than fifty passengers, the France managed to accommodate all 224 refugees. They were greeted by Raymond-Raoul Lambert, the secretary general of the Comité d’Assistance aux Réfugiés, who had attended the planning meeting with Morris Troper in Paris five days earlier. Lambert declared grandly, “I welcome you on Free French soil.” The France then made its way carefully past the breakwater and into the safety of the Boulogne harbor.
At 10:55 a.m., the France tied up at the dock. It was low tide and the boat rode the waves well below the level of the pier, where upward of two hundred people awaited the arrival of their visitors, a crowd made up of journalists, members of the Boulogne Jewish community, curious townspeople, and a few indigents drawn into the unexpected hubbub. As a gangway was attached to the side of the little boat, leading up to the pier, the exiles on board began to cheer and wave hats and handkerchiefs, many of them shouting, “Vive la France!” with tears visibly streaking their cheeks.
Three elderly women in their seventies were the first to disembark. They were quickly followed by a stream of young people and their parents, some pushing prams, and a crowd of older men, who formed the majority. Most of the adult passengers wore light-colored raincoats, and all carried a boxed breakfast that the CAR representatives had prepared for them. Each of the sixty children was presented with a bag full of fruits and sweets. “Some of the faces were sad,” reported the press, “but nonetheless the refugees appeared to be in good health and seemed to be in good spirits.”
On the pier, the journalists took photos and exchanged a few words with the newcomers, who were then ushered onto a fleet of waiting buses and driven about a mile to an establishment called the Hotel des Emigrants, at 41 Rue de Liane, where they would rest for several days before moving on to a less temporary address in France. Their luggage would follow, taken off the boat by the longshoremen of Boulogne, who refused payment for their labors. By 11:30, after having been the scene of so much unusual animation, the docks had resumed their normal pace.
A headline from the June 21, 1939, edition of the Voice of the North: “224 Jewish Refugees From the ‘St. Louis’ Disembarked Yesterday Morning in Boulogne.” The subheadline reads, “The oldest of the group was 80 years old and the youngest only two months.”
At the Hotel des Emigrants, the refugees were greeted by M. Sagnier, a member of the Boulogne Chamber of Commerce, and served a meal of hot coffee, croissants, local cheese, and soup. Everyone began to relax a little, and the reporters from La Voix were able to spend some time talking with the weary but happy travelers:
We were introduced to the most senior member of the contingent, an 80-year-old lady who has a son in Cuba. She got a glimpse of him from the deck of the St. Louis but was not permitted to go embrace him on land. The youngest refugee was a darling child, barely two months old.
One woman, whose husband already lives in Cuba, wanted to give us her impressions. “Our suffering during this voyage was more emotional than physical. Think of the pain that I suffered when I learned that I was not permitted to join my husband. The saddest moment of our long crossing was when they refused to let us disembark in Cuba. An epidemic of despair spread rapidly among us and we had to organize a suicide watch and formed an orchestra to cheer up those who were most desperate. I must say that we were well taken care of on board, but you can imagine our joy when we heard that we would be authorized to land at last.” When our conversation ended, we were introduced by the CAR’s Gaston Kahn to a charming three-year-old toddler who was in his grandmother’s arms and who was unaware that his father, a physician in Berlin, had just died in a German concentration camp.
A reporter from La Voix interviewed a young woman from the St. Louis, who provided her impressions of the increasingly dangerous quality of daily life within Nazi Germany:
You are unaware of what is going on in my country. Espionage is everywhere. One day I telephoned one of my friends and someone was listening in on our conversation. “Wait,” they said to me, “What is that last sentence you just uttered supposed to mean? This is the Gestapo . . . stay right where you are. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” In much less than fifteen minutes the agents were in my home. One of them said to me, “You called a certain person. In the future you are forbidden to call her.” The Gestapo is everywhere; you run into their agents in all the streets, you see them in all the buildings. One of my friends’ little boy was stopped in the street by a man who asked him, “What did your father say at lunchtime about Mr. Adolf Hitler? What did he say about the regime?” You in free France are unaware of what could happen in your country.
By mid-afternoon, the meal ended, the reporters packed up their notebooks and cameras, and the refugees settled into their rooms at the Hotel des Emigrants. They were permitted to stroll through the hotel’s courtyard to get some fresh air and to use all the establishment’s somewhat threadbare facilities, but for forty-eight hours they were not allowed to leave. On Thursday afternoon, however, the doors of the hotel were thrown open and the refugees were given the freedom to stroll wherever they wished through the streets of Boulogne. How wide those boulevards must have seemed to them after their long weeks at sea.
Their liberty lasted through the weekend. On Sunday morning, about thirty children, including the three youngest offspring of Joseph Karliner, left on a bus bound for the Villa Helvitia, a home managed by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Agency for the Rescue of Children), known as the OSE. Then on Monday morning, June 26, the dispersal of the rest of the French contingent of St. Louis passengers took place. The journey began at 7 a.m., when forty-nine people, including Mr. and Mrs. Karliner and their older daughter, Ilse, left for Portiers. Then sixty-five departed for Le Mans, thirty-three for Laval, thirty for Paris, and eighteen, all of them men without spouses, including Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt, for the Professional Re-Education Center in the little village of Martigny-les-Bains in the French district known as the Vosges.
Before they rode away, the refugees expressed their thanks for the hospitality of the authorities, charitable organizations, and the citizens of Boulogne. They also sent telegrams of thanks to French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier and Minister of the Interior Albert Sarraut. Then the motors of the transport buses and autos roared to life and the two hundred souls who had been granted asylum in France, they who had so recently been among the more than nine hundred and had now been further divided, drove up the hill from the harbor and went their separate ways. They had been on French soil for seven days and now they were Wandering Jews once more.
FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2011. In the midst of uncovering these latest events in my grandfather and uncle’s odyssey, we are inexplicably interrupted. At noon, we are politely informed that the Bibliothèque Municipale closes for lunch . . . until two o’clock. Eager to continue our research, I mutter curses under my breath at this Gallic self-indulgence. A two-hour lunch break? On a weekday? As it happens, however, we spend those hours enjoying a delicious petit déjeuner of crepes and mineral water at a cozy café across the Place de la Résistance from the library, rambling the ramparts of the old city under a clear blue sky, and finally enjoying a doze, lying in each other’s arms in a sunny, sheltered corner of the ancient walls. Not for the last time, I reflect that this continental manner of taking time away from work—by enjoying a long lunch or spending the entire month of August on vacation—is ultimately so much healthier and more civilized than our breathless American pursuit of getting and spending.
We are back in the library promptly at 2:00 and spend the next two hours gathering information from the Voice of the North. I emerge with eyes swimming from the effort of focusing on small newsprint and with a heart made heavy by my unresolved sense of failure, my irrational yet very real wish that I’d been here seventy-two springs ago to meet my relatives at the pier and usher them to safety. My mood grows no lighter as we walk back across the square and enter the magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame just in time to witness the closing moments of a funeral. Six solemn pallbearers hoist the casket to their shoulders and, as they slowly carry the departed to his final resting place, the cathedral is filled with the sound of an organist playing a particularly ornate version of “Auld Lang Syne.” My eyes fill to overflowing.
For the next couple of hours, Amy and I part company. Heading out for a run in Oldenburg a few days ago, she had sustained a foot injury. Armed with a phrase book, she walks off gingerly to buy a new pair of running shoes. I go to search for a trace of the Hotel des Emigrants.
Nine days after D-Day, on June 15, 1944, nearly three hundred planes of the Royal Air Force bombed the inner harbor of Boulogne-sur-Mer to prevent the German navy from using it as a base. The harbor and the segment of the Liane River that flows into the English Channel were completely destroyed. The boulevard running parallel to the river, the Rue de Liane, and the Hotel des Emigrants, at 41 Rue de Liane, were obliterated. Nevertheless, I am determined to stand where Alex and Helmut did when their long oceanic ordeal had ended and they enjoyed that first meal of hot soup. So, map in hand, I walk south of the harbor along a rebuilt Rue de Liane, looking for number 41.
The Voice of the North had mentioned that the hotel was “on the banks of the Liane,” but today there are no buildings on the river side of the rue. On the opposite side of the street, I find a rather soulless apartment building with the number 42. This will have to do, I tell myself, and I take a couple of pictures with my little digital camera to commemorate my visit. But it’s a deeply unsatisfying moment. No traces of the hotel remain, nothing for me to touch, to grasp, to embrace. I feel cheated.
Walking with eyes cast down as I cross the Rue de Liane, I incur the wrath of a motorist who has to slam on his brakes to avoid me. I sprawl onto the grass at the river’s edge and gaze disconsolately at the current. I am chasing phantoms, I think, and nothing solid remains. Hell, I rage to myself, I don’t even have any memories of these people I’m following. I recall our days in Friesland earlier in the week and envy Amy’s memories of her grandfather Pete, who told her stories about his childhood journey to Friesland with his father Ysbrand, saying with a straight face that the captain had let him “drive the boat home.” She spent summers with Pete in Iowa, where he raised pigs and chickens on his farm and refurbished feedbags in a workshop overrun with wild rabbits. He fed hobos during the Depression, earning the honor of their mark on his gate identifying him as a generous man. She remembers her grandfather’s Zen-like last words to her in his eighty-ninth year: “You like rabbits. You run fast. You’ll do OK.”
I have none of that, I mourn. I never saw Alex or Helmut, never heard them speak or sing or laugh, never witnessed them perform any act, profound or quotidian. I wasn’t there to help them hang a picture, mow the lawn, buy the weekly groceries, or hold their hands when, at the end of a long life well lived, death came to claim them, gently and peacefully, without violence or hate.
Fighting an inexorable wave of self-pity, I lie back on the grass and gaze upward into the unsullied blue bowl of the universe. I close my eyes and within minutes I am asleep, letting my subconscious do battle with my sense of loss. I awake in better spirits and walk briskly back to our hotel. Amy has conquered the language barrier and bought new sneakers, and I admire them happily. Life has gone on, as it does.
Later that evening, our last in Boulogne, we walk to the end of the pier and the entrance to the harbor. Because of the air raid of 1944, much has changed since Alex and Helmut’s ship pulled in on June 20, 1939. This evening, accentuating the contrast, four paragliders have raced off the green cliffs extending away from the harbor to the east, and their colorful sails are soaring gracefully in the shifting air currents high above the sand.
But the entrance to the inner harbor is largely unchanged, with a narrow passageway of pilings leading from the open channel to the safety of the docks. The cliffs are still here, the long sandy beach is still here, the gulls with their melancholy calls are still here, and the sunshine and the endless waves are still here—just as they were on that solstice eve seventy-two years ago when my grandfather and uncle made their slow approach past the winking harbor lights to what must have seemed a genuinely safe mooring. I gaze out across the broad English Channel toward the beach in Dover where Matthew Arnold heard “the eternal note of sadness” in the unceasing tides and saw his “ignorant armies clash by night,” and then look back to the harbor, trying my utmost to imagine what Alex and Helmut felt as they glided to their landing here in France. As I think of them passing slowly by on that June morning long ago, I am moved to lift my right hand in greeting; anyone watching would see me waving extravagantly at nothing at all.
They had experienced such terror in Germany and then the uncertainty of their long ocean voyage and now—voila!—it seemed that someone had use for them after all. Germany had kicked them out; Cuba, the United States, and Canada had turned their backs; and now here was France, against whom Alex had fought twenty-five years earlier, welcoming them into this sheltered harbor with its green cliffs, peaceful sands, and the noble dome of Our Lady looming protectively over them from the ancient walled city on the hill.
Toward dusk on a quiet evening in the year 636, according to local legend, worshippers emerging from a thatched chapel on these cliffs noticed a wooden ship without sails, oars, or a rudder enter the harbor and slowly approach land. When the people hurried down to the water’s edge to investigate, they discovered that the ship was empty save for a three-foot-high carved statue of the Virgin Mary holding the child Jesus in her left arm. Over the gentle lapping of the surf, they heard a voice proclaim, “I choose your city as a sanctuary and a dwelling of grace.” Awed, the people of Boulogne-sur-Mer built a shrine to Mary that, over the coming centuries, attracted pilgrims from all over Europe, among them Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. It became one of the most important destinations in all Christendom, the site of many miracles.
On this golden evening by the sea, I wish I could have journeyed here in time to witness another one.