SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2011. We awake to a thick fog blanketing the harbor, as nature replicates for us the conditions experienced by Alex and Helmut on their arrival. But the sun soon burns the mist away, presiding over a splendid spring day. Our route takes us up through hills wreathed with deep green forests and garlanded with vines and poppies and down through a valley that witnessed two of humankind’s bloodiest battles. It is a day of feeling the freedom and exaltation of traveling through beautiful, unfamiliar countryside and of unhappy reminders of the reasons behind the journey. When we return home and, fumbling for a word to best describe for friends the overall mood of the trip, I settle on “schizophrenic,” I think of this day as the one when I first truly began to recognize the delicate balance we’re maintaining between limitless joy and inconsolable sorrow.
We drive our hardy little Meriva southeast from Boulogne past the ancient town of St. Quentin, founded by the Romans to replace an even older Celtic settlement that the Italian invaders had burned to the ground, and the holy city of Reims, the site of the coronation of the kings of France from the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries. We leave the expressway at Châlons-en-Champagne and immediately find ourselves driving through vineyards of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier grapes that will in time, through the sweet sorcery of the local vignerons, be transformed into the sparkling wine that has made this region of France renowned throughout the world. Punctuating the rolling acres of grape-bearing vines are breathtaking fields of blood-red poppies that conjure up both Claude Monet’s blooming painted hillside and the melancholy memorial flower of remembrance. Indeed, as if to make sure we do not forget, our route crosses the River Marne. In two battles fought along its banks during World War I, more than 750,000 soldiers from France, England, Germany, Italy, and the United States were either killed or grievously wounded. Today the river flows peacefully through the quiet valley, its gentle current a tranquil blue ribbon that binds together the vines and poppies, row on row.
Through a rear-view mirror darkly . . . a picture of me taking a picture of our two constant companions, Helmut and Alex.
We stop in the town of Bar-le-Duc and purchase two fresh baguettes and a hearty portion of goat cheese at a friendly fromagerie. A few miles down the road, we stop at a dusty little village, its few buildings all made of stone, and enjoy our lunch in a quiet churchyard. As we eat, my thoughts turn once again to Alex and Helmut. Did they, too, partake of crusty bread and flavorful cheese, perhaps washed down with a local vintage, on their June journey from Boulogne? Were they as transfixed by the countryside as we have been on this sunny May afternoon? Were they happy on that day so long ago? Dear God, I whisper, I hope so.
Shortly after 5 p.m., we pull into the town of Contrexéville and check into our hotel, the charming Inn of the Twelve Apostles. We are in the French departement, or state, known as the Vosges, which for many years has been the home of spas and health resorts, due in large measure to the region’s naturally occurring thermal springs. Since 1774, when King Louis XV’s doctor built the first spa here, Contrexéville water has been valued for its restorative powers. First bottled and sold in 1908, it’s been owned and distributed by the international Nestlé company since 1992.
The Twelve Apostles has been here for more than a century, and its rooms reflect the fashions of a bygone era, though it does offer free Wi-Fi as an accommodation to modern desires to stay in touch. It also has a small swimming pool containing the town’s warm healing waters, and Amy decides to shed the stiffness brought on by a day in the car with a vigorous swim. I, however, am anxious to see my grandfather and uncle’s destination and decide to drive the eight or ten miles to Martigny-les-Bains alone.
The road to Martigny is a small country highway that meanders its pleasant, unhurried way through fields of wheat and stands of beech trees, over two bridges that cross a stream and a railway, and past the occasional farm, everything sharply illuminated by the still-brilliant sun slowly sinking toward the horizon. As I near the village, I pass a scene of utter pastoral peace and charm, a field of sheep whose newborn lambs leap and play in blissful abandon. I laugh out loud, which helps somewhat to ease the tension in my tightly held jaw and the hands that clench the steering wheel. I know that my relatives spent time in a formerly posh establishment known as the Hotel International, and as I enter the town limits of Martigny-les-Bains, I am anxious to see it and equally anxious to learn what my reaction will be.
I drive slowly down the main street, peering expectantly all around me. Then I see the outlines of the grand hotel to my left . . . and in sheer shock slam on the brakes. Luckily, no one is behind me, or I would doubtless have been rear-ended. The engine has stalled, but I manage to coax it to life again and steer the Meriva into a parking space at the edge of what was once an expanse of green lawn leading up to the splendors of the Hotel International. My heart thumping in my chest, I manage to climb out of the car, where I stand staring up at what is now a glorious ruin.
What remains today of the luxurious Hotel International in Martigny-les-Bains. “O let not Time deceive you, you cannot conquer Time.”
My legs have been rendered weak and my mouth hangs open stupidly as I begin a slow stumble forward, my eyes staring fixedly at broken towers, crumbling walls, and shattered windows. As I draw closer to the rictus of a doorway, the nearby village church bells begin to peal the arrival of seven o’clock. The unrelenting toll of hours sounds across the clear evening air and I think of W. H. Auden: “All the clocks in the city began to whirr and chime: ‘O let not time deceive you, you cannot conquer Time.’” From a grove of trees to my left comes a loud cawing from a murder of crows, their calls a mocking accompaniment to the pitiless verdict of time and history.
For the next thirty minutes, I walk slowly and sadly through what remains of the Hotel International. Everywhere is peeling wallpaper, buckling floors, and the iron skeletons of wooden banisters. Doors have fallen into what were exquisite suites, threadbare carpets flap from once-regal stairways, the dust of decades lies thickly throughout. Retreating once more to the comfort of literature, I remember Charles Ryder and his shock upon returning to Brideshead and seeing the stately mansion fallen into decay.
I gather up a torn corner of brown wallpaper and a shard of broken glass as souvenirs and make my way slowly back to the car. I remain in a state of emotional paralysis, not quite able to comprehend the reality of what stands, all too real, right there before me. Perhaps the abandoned building echoes my own long-held fears of abandonment. But as I turn again to face the ruins of the Hotel International, I realize that this sight is a harsh reminder of what was to come for Alex and Helmut. The contrast between the smiling countryside and the unhappy story I am following keeps surprising me. Yet their time in Martigny-les-Bains could very well have been the high point of their ordeal.
“MARTIGNY, THE PRETTIEST of the Spas of the Vosges, is 218 miles from Paris and five hours via the Eastern Railway, situated on a plateau of 1,257 feet; it is the highest of the watering places in the basin of the Vosges. Known as the Thermal Versailles, Martigny has no equal in the Vosges and is supplied with every modern comfort. Everywhere there is an abundance of air, light, and space, essential factors in hygiene that make Martigny-les-Bains an especially salubrious resort. At no place better than Martigny can children benefit from such a healthful cure, and take their amusements or exercise in such safety, without need of the least supervision. Moreover, the healthiness of the country children excites the admiration of our visitors; the inhabitants are robust, and the longevity of the population is well known all around.”
Those proudly forthright words appeared toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century in a flier heralding the virtues of Martigny-les-Bains. And they weren’t translated from the original French. Martigny was such a popular destination for citizens of London, Manchester, and Liverpool that a vigorous marketing campaign was conducted in English. Within this particular flier was a full-page advertisement for the Hotel International; among its offerings, proclaimed the ad, was a formal Five O’Clock Tea served on “the fine terrace with its magnificent view” and “Electricity in all the Rooms!”
A promotional flier promoting the Hotel International in 1909. “Electricity in all the Rooms!”
The Hotel International was only one of many attractions of which the town could boast. There was also a casino, a fine park, an orchestra that performed nightly at the park’s bandstand, a golf links that had been recently designed by a Mr. Cowington of Nice, and several healing springs, including the “Source des Dames,” or Ladies’ Spring, which “is somewhat lighter in composition and includes a small quantity of iron to aid in the cure of Dyspepsia and Anemia.”
Martigny-les-Bains had been a thriving spa town since the 1860s, and by 1912 it had reached its zenith as a healing destination. In that year, the Hotel International’s register included visitors from Paris and London as well as from such faraway cities as Budapest, Monaco, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Nairobi, and Istanbul.
But the hotel’s—and the town’s—fortunes changed two years later, in 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War. The hotel shut down for the duration, and for more than four years, the cavalcade of the well-heeled unwell stopped coming to take the healing waters. Business resumed during the early twenties, but the Crash of 1929 was a severe blow to the area’s fortunes. By 1933, the grand Hotel International had closed its doors for the last time as a place of revelry and the pursuit of good health.
That same year, Adolf Hitler assumed power in neighboring Germany. Within months of the establishment of National Socialist rule on January 30, thousands of German Jewish refugees streamed across the border to find a haven in France. Unlike the United States, with its quota-driven Immigration Act of 1924, France had never passed legislation that limited immigration. In fact, due largely to the devastation of its labor force in the Great War, France was actively encouraging foreigners to cross its borders to take up the plow or the wrench or to assume a place in an assembly line to help revive its moribund economy. And with both political and personal conditions in Germany deteriorating steadily for the Jews, more and more of them chose to settle their affairs in the land of their birth and begin life anew in the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Upon their arrival, these new immigrants found themselves taking part in the latest act of the long-running and sometimes uneasy saga that has been the history of the Jews in France.
The year 1492 is famous in American history for the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and infamous in the history of the Jews as the year they were expelled from Spain. But a century earlier, in 1394, the Jews were forced to leave the kingdom of France. Over the next four hundred years, about forty thousand Jews managed to make their way back into France, with most of them toiling in rural regions and only about five hundred allowed to make a life in the thriving capital of Paris. But then came the French Revolution, and to the astonishment, perhaps, of the Jews themselves, they learned that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen extended to them as well. France became, along with the United States, the first country on earth to bestow upon the Jews full political, legal, economic, and social equality.
A few niggling exceptions remained on the books, such as the More Judaico, a special oath that Jews had been required to utter in court since the Middle Ages (“If I am not telling the truth, may I be stricken with plagues such as those visited upon Egypt when we escaped”), which was not abolished until 1846. Until 1831, synagogues received no public funding, unlike Christian churches. In that year, however, a special vote in the Chamber of Deputies established that the two religions would receive equal grants from the Ministry of Cults.
During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Jewish participation in French social, financial, political, and cultural life indicated the degree to which their emancipation had taken hold. Established in Paris in 1812, the Rothschild bank soon took its place among the most important financial institutions in Europe. Achille Fould was appointed finance minister in 1848 and then four years later served as Napoleon III’s minister of state. And the dazzling opera and theater stages of Paris were nightly illuminated by the contributions of composers Jacques Offenbach and Giacomo Meyerbeer, playwright Ludovic Halevy, and actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Then came humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, an economic recession, and the rise of a persistent and, at times, virulent anti-Semitism. French pride was deeply wounded by their military defeat as well as the political aftermath, the ceding of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the victorious Germans. In the inevitable search for scapegoats, the fact that many Jews spoke French with German accents placed them under suspicion in the eyes of the easily manipulated. Some blamed the recession of the early 1880s on the pernicious influence of the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers. Then in 1886, a man named Edouard Drumont published a twelve-hundred-page, two-volume book called La France juive in which he named the Jews as the source of all the ills, social and economic, that plagued modern France. By the end of the year, Drumont’s book had sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Six years later, encouraged by the continuing hearty sales of the book, Drumont founded a daily newspaper, La Libre parole, to extend the reach of his anti-Semitic views. Two years after that, the Dreyfus Affair ignited France, calling into question the acceptance by their country’s majority that so many French Jews had assumed was theirs.
On November 1, 1894, a front-page article in La Libre parole announced the arrest of “the Jewish officer A. Dreyfus” on charges of treason. The paper declared that there was “absolute proof that he had sold our secrets to Germany.” Based on entirely trumped-up evidence, a thirty-five-year-old officer named Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and accused of being a spy for Germany. Dreyfus was from a wealthy family in the Alsace region, which had been annexed by Germany in the aftermath of the war in 1871, and was thus suspected of harboring German sympathies. More suspicious yet, Dreyfus was a Jew whose primary allegiance—the newspaper charged—was to his “race” rather than to his country.
After a four-day trial, Captain Dreyfus was unanimously convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a military garrison off the northern coast of South America. Two years later, evidence emerged that another French army officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was the real culprit, but high-ranking figures in the army, determined to protect the institution’s reputation, initiated a cover-up. Major Esterhazy was indeed brought to trial, but further forgeries were presented in court as evidence against Captain Dreyfus, and Esterhazy was acquitted.
But slowly, the arc of the affair began to bend toward justice. On January 13, 1898, on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore, the celebrated writer Emile Zola published his electrifying open letter to the president of France titled “J’Accuse . . .” Zola pointed to numerous judicial errors in the handling of the trial and the lack of credible evidence, and he concluded his impassioned letter by accusing the government of engaging in anti-Semitism, which he ringingly called “the scourge of our time.” Largely as the result of “J’Accuse . . . ,” Captain Dreyfus was brought back to France from Devil’s Island in 1899 for a retrial. He was convicted yet again, but, said the court, owing to “extenuating circumstances” his sentence was reduced from life imprisonment to ten years.
The Dreyfus Affair both caused and exposed major rifts in French society. Families and friendships were torn asunder by conflicting views of the captain’s guilt or innocence. There were the Dreyfusards, who supported the view that he was innocent and had been the victim of, in Zola’s phrase, “a miscarriage of justice,” and there were the anti-Dreyfusards, who believed that death, not Devil’s Island, would have been the proper sentence. Egged on by editorials in La Libre parole and other organs of the popular press, thousands of anti-Dreyfusards marched through the streets of scores of French cities, calling for the arrest of Jewish citizens, smashing the windows of Jewish-owned stores, and occasionally breaking into and looting synagogues. The plague of anti-Semitism even infected such great artists as the painters Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who began to speak dismissively of “Jewish art.”
The Hungarian writer Theodore Herzl, assigned by a Viennese newspaper to cover the initial Dreyfus trial, came away from his weeks in Paris convinced that, even in France, the cradle of revolutionary equality, Jews could never hope for full acceptance and fair treatment. Thus, he reasoned, Jews required their own homeland. In 1896, Herzl published a book called Der Judenstaat and founded the World Zionist Organization, which called for the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Dreyfus Affair also gave rise to an international sporting event. The most widely read sports daily in France, Le Velo, was proudly Dreyfusard in its views. Anti-Drefusards, anxious to have their own sporting news to consume every day, founded a rival rag called L’Auto in 1900. But by 1903, L’Auto’s circulation had declined to the point that its wealthy backers feared that it might go out of business. So to boost interest in the paper, L’Auto announced the launch of a new long-distance bicycle race with an itinerary and cash prizes that would vastly exceed those of any race currently in existence. Thus was born the Tour de France.
Finally, in 1906, twelve years after his arrest and conviction, Dreyfus was acquitted of all charges by the High Court of Appeal. He was reinstated into the ranks of the French army with the rank of major and was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1914, he volunteered for service in the Great War, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Alfred Dreyfus died two days before Bastille Day in 1935, aged seventy-five.
In 2006, French President Jacques Chirac presided over a ceremony marking the one hundredth anniversary of Dreyfus’s acquittal. In the presence of the living heirs of both Dreyfus and Zola, Chirac declared that “the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won.”
The dark forces of anti-Semitism retreated in France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, but it was a tactical retreat only, not a surrender; conditions more favorable to their advancement would return soon enough. In the meantime, the atmosphere brightened.
Although the affair had exposed anti-Semitic elements in the French army, it didn’t dampen Jewish enthusiasm to take part in the military affairs of their homeland. The Jewish population of France in 1914 was roughly 120,000. An impressive 38 percent of that number, or 46,000 Jews, fought for France during the War to End All Wars, with about 6,500 dying in combat. When peace returned to the land, Jewish artists, from Amadeo Modigliani and Marc Chagall to Darius Milhaud and Tristan Tzara, were major reasons that Paris took its place as the most celebrated cultural city in the world during the 1920s.
But it was not only artists who were made to feel welcome in France in the years following the Great War. France had suffered a greater percentage of national loss during the war than that of any of the other major combatants. Nearly 1.7 million French soldiers and civilians perished in the war, or nearly 4.3 percent of the entire population. (By way of comparison, Germany lost 3.8 percent, the United Kingdom lost 2.2 percent, and the United States lost 0.13 percent of its population.) During the decade that followed the war, many voices in France expressed the fear that the country’s stagnant population—in 1925, for instance, France grew by only sixty thousand citizens, while Germany’s population increased by half a million—would inevitably lead to another war with its Prussian neighbor and a likely defeat. To rebuild its population, including its vastly reduced labor force, France embarked on an ambitious and aggressive campaign to attract foreigners to cross its borders and establish a new homeland for themselves.
Encouraged by the national government, factories recruited workers from across Europe in an attempt to get their production lines humming again. In August 1927, the National Assembly passed a new and significantly liberalized naturalization law. Whereas before a person had to be at least twenty-one years old and had to have been a resident of France for ten years to be considered for citizenship, the new law required only three years’ residency and a minimum age of eighteen. By the end of 1927, with the new law in effect for only four months, the number of newly naturalized French citizens was triple that of the previous year. With the United States having enacted its much more restrictive immigration law three years earlier, in 1924, France was now seen as a new haven for refugees, and the numbers kept growing over the next several years. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand German citizens crossed the border seeking refuge in France, about 85 percent of them Jews.
If both native-born and newly arrived Jewish citizens questioned the degree to which their new homeland welcomed their presence, a wildly affirmative answer seemed to arrive in 1936, when France became the first country to elect a Jewish prime minister. True, four months before the election he had been dragged from his car and beaten by an anti-Semitic mob, but on June 4, Leon Blum assumed the prime minister’s office as leader of the government known as the Popular Front. Although Blum was denounced as a “cunning talmudist” by a right-wing member of the National Assembly, the country certainly had come a long way from the railroading of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
But the worldwide economic depression of the early thirties, which by no means spared France, caused something of a backlash against more liberal immigration statutes, as economic security grew more precarious and foreign-born workers were viewed with greater suspicion and hostility. By the mid-thirties some of the welcoming provisions of the previous decade had been rolled back and thousands of refugees—their citizenship no longer so easily obtained—had been thrown into prison. As the decade approached its end, hundreds of thousands of Republican sympathizers poured over the border from Spain, refugees from the bloody Spanish Civil War. The immigration issue became a topic for heated debate in the National Assembly and elsewhere in France as the country weighed its egalitarian ideals against the social and economic realities of the uncertain present. This was the atmosphere that gave rise to a new conception of how to honor the creed of fairness for all, an idea rooted in the French soil.
Beginning in 1933, a proposal was made to settle refugees in rural areas of France to assist the country’s farmers with their dawn-to-dusk endeavors. No less than their urban brethren who oversaw factories, French agricultural workers were still feeling the effects of the devastation wrought on the national population by the Great War. So it seemed a natural fit to pair newly arrived men and women who were eager to work with farmers who needed capable laborers to tend the vineyards in the sparsely settled hinterlands of France.
Two of the voices who spoke out in favor of this idea belonged to leaders we’ve already met. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, who as secretary general of the Comité d’Assistance aux Réfugiés (CAR) greeted the St. Louis passengers when they landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer, wrote approvingly of the proposal in a widely read Jewish journal in the summer of 1933. And Louise Weiss of the Central Refugee Committee of Paris, who helped broker the French agreement to accept the St. Louis passengers, lobbied for the idea later in the decade. The popularity of the proposal ebbed and flowed through the thirties, closely tracking the country’s economy, but after the widely reported atrocities of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, which resulted in a new flood of Jewish refugees from Germany, French authorities were spurred to act.
In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, the government agreed to a recommendation from an international Jewish relief organization to accept 250 children under the age of fifteen and added that it would accept a thousand more children if homes could be found for them in the provinces. Over the next few months, CAR and other refugee organizations, sensing a shift in public opinion, increased their efforts. In early 1939, CAR purchased property in the Burgundy region on which to build an agricultural center for refugees. The master plan was for a series of such “agricultural retraining centers,” where refugees would learn farming techniques and receive instruction in such professions as the wood and iron trades. Whereas Jewish relief groups saw the plan as an opportunity for refugees to escape the dangers of Nazi Germany and learn a new skill in the bargain, the French government was more interested in the plan as a means of providing the immigrants with tools that would more quickly enable them to find a new home away from France. But the two sides reconciled their differences for the most part and worked together for the venture’s success. A CAR representative wrote in a Paris newspaper that the new Jewish agricultural settlements would “put an end to the anguish of these unfortunates who have been searching the world over for a hospitable land” and would also “give new life to deserted villages, to houses in ruin, to uncultivated land.”
In the late winter and early spring of 1939, five of these agricultural centers were organized, with funds provided by three groups: CAR; the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; and the Jewish Group for Coordination, Aid, and Protection, an organization sponsored chiefly by Robert de Rothschild of the famous French banking family. One of the centers took shape in Argenteuil, the charming village on the River Seine that was once the summer home of the great painters Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Georges Braque. Agricultural centers also sprang up near Nice at Sainte Radegonde and the Villa Pessicarl, and in the south central French departement of Corrèze, the birthplace of film director Eric Rohmer.
The agricultural settlement that would see the largest influx of refugees was organized in Martigny-les-Bains, a destination spot that had boasted an internationally regarded luxury hotel thirty years earlier and was now fully living up to CAR’s description of it as a “deserted village” with “houses in ruin.” On March 31, 1939, the Jewish newspaper La Tribune Juive reported:
Our German Jewish refugees who were not legally in France were until now not able to get a residence permit and were subject to imprisonment for breaking the residence laws. To ameliorate this lamentable state of affairs, a number of refugee assistance groups have come up with the idea of creating “welcome centers” to house persons whose legal status is irregular, centers where they would be authorized to stay by the Ministry of the Interior. The aid groups have just created such a center in Martigny-les-Bains, an abandoned summer resort a few kilometers from Vittel. The refugees take professional re-education classes, taught by French professors, with the goal of preparing them for other occupations while they await emigration to their final destination.
About a week later, an article appeared in L’Univers Israélite, a Jewish weekly published in Paris:
The Jewish Group for Coordination, Aid, and Protection is setting up a center in Martigny-les-Bains for German and central European Jews to provide professional re-education to facilitate their emigration. The Group has arranged access to a large hotel and the center will be operational as of next week. The importance of this undertaking will not be lost on our readers, and we are issuing an urgent appeal for help in providing the refugees at Martigny-les-Bains with games and activities to occupy their leisure time. We would be particularly grateful for the generosity of those who could provide one or more radios, dominos, checkers, chess sets, etc., even if they are used. Simply contact the Group (4 Rue du Cirque, Paris), and they will arrange to pick up the goods and ensure their transport to the Center. We would also be grateful to our readers if they could send directly to the Center for Refugees in Martigny-les-Bains, Vosges, any magazines, periodicals, books, or newspapers, in French or German, that they have finished reading.
All the objects donated to the center, from books to dominos, arrived at the Hotel International, the once imposing retreat for the beautiful people of Europe who came to take the local restorative waters, a building that would now provide both dorm rooms and classrooms for Jewish refugees. The hotel had fallen on hard times since its heyday and had most recently been called upon to shelter a few refugees from the fighting in Spain. Peter Hart, a volunteer for the center and author of the memoir Journey Into Freedom, wrote of his reaction upon arriving at Martigny as part of an advance party in late February of 1939: “Nobody had prepared us for what we would find inside the Hotel International. Wallpaper was hanging from the walls in strips and everything from the floor upwards was black with dirt; cobwebs hung everywhere. There were no washbasins in any of the bedrooms and no running water on any of the floors. It was icy cold and no stove in sight. There was no time to waste if we wanted to sleep that night and get some rooms ready for the first arrivals in two days’ time. We worked until we collapsed late that evening and for twenty hours the next day. In the large dining room a vast amount of equipment was stored. It had just arrived from Paris and consisted of beds, mattresses, blankets, kitchen and office supplies, machines, workbenches, tools, and various canned goods. Everything was brand new and still wrapped up.”
On March 23, 1939, at the Joint offices in Paris, Raymond-Raoul Lambert reported on the early stages of the agricultural center at Martigny-les-Bains, where “we have land and farms and, under the supervision of monitors supplied by the French ministry, the work is being carried out. We intend to place on the land a certain number of young people whom we hope will be able to emigrate or find a home in the French countryside eventually. Martigny-les-Bains currently has fifty people working the land and we hope to place a further five hundred refugees there.”
The Martigny center’s farm consisted of about seventy acres of land not far from the Hotel International and included at first five cows, two horses, a dozen sheep, forty chickens, and several roosters. A blond ex-gym teacher from Vienna, a man named Schindler, was in charge of the farm and taught most of the agricultural courses to an initial group of thirty students, none of whom had ever turned the soil but who, Peter Hart whimsically observed, “took to the work like ducks to water.” In no time, Herr Schindler assumed the sunburned persona of a French farmer.
With the coming of spring, the student refugees planted a vegetable garden. The garden’s initial harvest, supplemented by the eggs from the chickens, the milk from the cows and sheep, plus the resulting butter and cheese, brought a certain level of self-sufficiency to the center. Within a very short time, the center began to sell some of its products to the villagers of Martigny-les-Bains and the surrounding countryside.
Within the formerly splendid walls of the Hotel International, the refugees slept and washed upstairs in the guest rooms, while down below in the meeting rooms the center conducted classes in a number of trades, all designed to make emigration more likely for these newly trained workers. Described by Hart as “looking like a University for all ages,” the center offered classes in metalworking, welding, woodworking, shoe repair, automobile repair, electrical work, dressmaking, and the millinery trade, all supervised by professors from the National Professional School in nearby Épinal. Meals were served in the hotel’s still spacious dining rooms, with most of the food provided by the center’s farm. Medical care was easily obtained in the center’s infirmary, also housed within the Hotel International, which employed a nursing staff operating under the direction of the doctor of Martigny. The refugees’ leisure time was also well provided for; in addition to the donated chess sets and other games, the refugees had access to a piano, several radios, a Ping-Pong table, and a soccer field. Plans were announced for a clay tennis court.
The Hotel International also had a small synagogue in one of the meeting rooms. A rabbi was hired to lead prayers and services and to preside over the ritual slaughtering of farm animals so that kosher meals could be served.
The retraining classes offered a challenge to some of the refugees who had enjoyed professional status in their former lives. The organizers of the center had deliberately decided not to provide courses in academics or the law, lest well-connected members of those professions, fearing competition, raise public objections to the program. A center that turned out agricultural workers and other manual laborers maintained a much lower and safer profile. Thus, many a pair of hands that had never hefted anything heavier than a dictionary sported shiny calluses from wielding an awl or a hammer, or from carrying gas cylinders to the welding shop.
Some refugee centers in France accepted children, but the agricultural center at Martigny was purposefully organized as a mature undertaking; only single adults and couples without children were assigned there. The refugees elected representatives to meet regularly with the center’s management to resolve disputes and ease occasional tensions. The refugees were officially confined to the hotel, its grounds, and the center’s farm. In order to venture out into the village, a refugee needed an authorized affidavit signed by one of the center’s deputies granting permission. But as time went by and the refugees and villagers mingled more and more on market days and other occasions, barriers both physical and social began to disappear. Spring and summer bring beautiful days to the French countryside and, in contrast to the hate and danger most of the refugees had so recently escaped, the village of Martigny-les-Bains lived up to its reputation as a place of healing for its grateful new residents.
Into this peaceful, pastoral atmosphere Grandfather Alex and Uncle Helmut arrived on Tuesday, June 27, 1939. Along with their sixteen fellow passengers on the St. Louis, Alex and Helmut were checked into the center, assigned a room in the Hotel International, and informed that they would be expected—in addition to their daily class work—to volunteer for duty in the kitchen, the laundry, or the garden. The center’s representative, who was fluent in both French and German, told them that a well-run kitchen and laundry and a well-kept garden were all vital to a flourishing community and that no one at the center viewed those daily tasks as mere drudgery, but rather as important contributions to the center’s high morale.
After dinner in the hotel dining room and a good night’s sleep, followed by a hearty breakfast, Alex and Helmut were interviewed by another of the center’s representatives to determine which classes would suit them. Perhaps Alex was influenced by the fact that he came from a long line of rural horse dealers, or maybe he recalled the pleasure his older son took in maintaining the chicken run at the elegant Goldschmidt house in Oldenburg. Whatever his reasons, my grandfather chose to learn the craft of raising chickens on the Martigny farm. Helmut also chose to spend his days on the farm, where he assisted in tending the sheep and in planting and nurturing sturdy crops of potatoes, beans, oats, and wheat.
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.
SUNDAY, MAY 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.”
APRIL 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.
On September 1, 1939, as Helmut’s spring lambs were being readied for market, the German army smashed into Poland. Two days later, France and England declared war on Germany and the Second World War began. Preparations for fighting had been going on for some time, as had plans for the large numbers of foreigners, particularly Germans, who were living in France. On September 14, a national radio announcement ordered all male German citizens in France who were between the ages of fifty and sixty-five to prepare for internment. There followed a flurry of weddings, as an addendum to the decree promised freedom for all foreigners who had married a French woman.
In the Vosges region, soldiers from France’s 208th Regiment were dispatched to see that the national internment plans were carried out. The citizenry was simultaneously being primed to accept both the importance and the legitimacy of the action. An editorial in a local newspaper posited that people who held German passports were now threats to French national security and concluded by stating flatly, “The German citizens should not be allowed to remain at liberty.” A week later, all Germans found themselves under house arrest and their papers given over to the police.
The agricultural center at Martigny-les-Bains, conceived so carefully as a place of hope and renewal for hundreds of refugees, most of them victims of the very German regime now at war with France, was summarily shut down following the proclamation of September 14. Alex and Helmut were loaded onto a bus and taken up the road to Neufchâteau, where an internment camp had been hastily set up within the walls of a factory. Two satellite camps, Camp du Martinet, in the village of Sionne, and Camp du Châtelet, in Harchéchamp, were established when it became clear that the Neufchâteau factory was far too small. During the autumn of 1939, the three camps of greater Neufchâteau held about twenty-two hundred German citizens, all guarded by the Second Battalion of the 208th Regiment. Alex and Helmut were transferred from the main camp at Neufchâteau to Camp du Martinet in Sionne, which was under the command of Lieutenant Francois Laurens. There they stayed for months, having suddenly metamorphosed in the eyes of their captors from displaced persons in need of a new and useful occupation to enemy aliens.
The history of these camps in and around Neufchâteau has not been told, not even by the rigorous and dogged archivists of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The reason is fairly simple: the records have been destroyed. In June 1940, as the recognized government of France relocated from Paris to the city of Vichy, about 220 miles to the south, the camp commandants were given secret orders to burn their files. In the words of M. Duvaux, “It was then impossible to find the archives of the camps of Neufchâteau.”
As I ponder what became of what was once referred to as the “Welcome Center” at Martigny-les-Bains, as I think of the ruined hopes of those who planned what L’Univers Israélite called “this fine communal accomplishment,” those who organized the classes and straightened the furrows in the farm’s vegetable garden, and as I contemplate the fate of those refugees who spent that one fruitful summer there, I more completely understand my initial visceral reaction to my first sight of the now decayed Hotel International. In his ninety-fourth sonnet, Shakespeare writes:
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.