1940
Hedy and Johanna had to take a train to Miami and there a boat to Havana, where they arrived on October 1st, 1940. Unnecessary to say that I was extremely happy to see them again after 2 years. Johanna did not recognize me, of course. She was 2 years old, when I had left Vienna, and now she was 4 years old. She was holding on to her mammy and looked at me. When Hedy told her that I am her Papi, she did not seem to believe it. I lived then still in the same place on the Malecon, and they both moved in into the same room, which I had there. It was not too bad, since we had the whole floor and the big terrace to move about, and also the meals there. And we went out for walks in the streets quite often. Johanna and I became good friends soon, and more, fell in love with each other. In the street, she easily became tired, and I had to carry her on my arm or on my shoulders quite a lot.
I have to insert here a story, not told yet, interesting to my children and grandchildren. [Page 305A inserted here by Adolph.]
[Adolph’s interview with Hedy is also inserted here on pages 305B-L.]
I will now continue with the description of the war situation in France. The German troops did not lose much time. While still engaged in tie part of Northern France, which was cut off from the rest of France, eliminating English troops, which were covering the embarkation of the British and French forces, the main German forces streamed into France in all directions from an arc between Abbeville and Sedan. On June 14th the Germans entered Paris. A few days before, on June 10th, Italy declared war on France and Great Britain and Italian forces invaded Southern France. On June 15th the French fortress of Verdun was captured. On the Baltic, Russian forces moved at that time into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, provinces, which had gained autonomy after the Russian revolution. Now they were swallowed up by Russia again. And another province, Bessarabia, which Russia had lost to Rumania at that time also, was taken over by Russia together with the northern Part of Bukowina, including the capital Czernowitz. The Russians demanded it and the Rumanians had to do what they were told, and on June 28th, Russian troops occupied that territory. My people in Czernowitz had to live now under the Communists. So, after all, it was not as bad as it seemed, when our house was sold and torn down, and three apartments sold. At least a small part was rescued in that transaction. Later, the Communists would have confiscated everything anyway. The Rumanians lost also, under pressure from Berlin and Rome, a large area of Transylvania, which was taken over by Hungary. These reverses caused a political overturn in Rumania. General Antonescu became premier and King Carol fled from Rumania and was replaced by his son as Michael V.
On June 16th, Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain replaced Paul Renaud as head of the French government, and asked the Germans for an armistice. It was signed on June 22nd at Compiegne. It provided that the French forces were to be disarmed and that three-fifths of France be surrendered to German control. On June 20th, an armistice was concluded between France and Italy. On July 5th, the French government at Vichy severed relations with the British government, after the British had sunk French battleships, which refused surrender, among them the Dunkerque (26,000 tons), the Provence (22,000 tons), the Bretagne (22,000 tons), and an aircraft carrier (10,000 tons). After the fall of France, the Germans intensified their bombardment of England, by blasting the airports and vital industries with over 1000 German airplanes. The British responded with heavy raids on Berlin, Duesseldorf, Essen, and other German cities. England had already received before large supplies of war material from the United States. Later 50 American destroyers were transferred to Britain to combat the air and submarine menace. Intensified bombing of London was retaliated by the British by bombing continental ports, including Antwerp, Ostende, Calais, and Dunkerque to frustrate German invasion preparations. Improving British defense measures inflicted heavy losses on German air raiders, 185 invading planes crashing in one day. In a supreme effort at crushing British Industrial resources and demoralizing the population, the Germans blasted the industrial city of Coventry with destructive effect. Thereafter the air attacks became more sporadic.
The British had survived the worst of the aerial Blitzkrieg. German losses in aircraft had been heavy. An official estimate placed them 2,375 German to 800 British planes destroyed in the period August 8 to October 31. 14,000 civilians had been killed in London alone. British losses at sea had also been heavy. German air attacks on Britain resumed after May 1941 with shattering result on London. One home in every five was damaged or destroyed, factories shattered, and transport, gas, and water systems disrupted. The Battle of Britain subsided with the opening of the Russian front in June 1941.
But the German submarine blockade remained a grave menace to British supply services throughout 1941 and 1942.
The description of the course of the war was necessary for the understanding of the situation, in which Lisa and Francis were at that time in France and Hedy’s parents in Austria. Further developments in the war will from now on only be mentioned occasionally, since they are well known or can easily be found in history books and, anyway, do not belong and should not be included in this family biography.
As to Lisa’s and Francis’ whereabouts, all we knew for a long time was that they were in Le Touquet and well. What we did not know and found out later was that they had to move from there, as they were in danger of being registered as foreigners and perhaps sent away by the Germans. They had the good luck to know a rich man, Mr. Roi, who had two Polish girls as servants, who were also in danger, and the next day they all moved in two cars to the Bernerie, a little village on the Atlantic coast, where this man had a few houses and where they could live more or less in peace for a few months. Then, one day, there was a similar situation as before, when they were in danger and Lisa and Francis took off by train for Paris. There Lisa was successful in getting the permission to move to the unoccupied zone of France, vividly described by her in the interview, and they settled in Vichy, where they endured a very cold winter and lived in precarious conditions. Francis got there very sick with measles.
At about that time, something very interesting happened in Havana. A friend of mine, Dr. Besner, met me in the street and told me that he had received a letter from a friend, Paul Rosegg, from France, in which he asked him, whether he knows me, who was the brother-in-law of Miss Lisa Ziegler, who is somewhere in France, and whose whereabouts he would like to find out. Paul Rosegg was my schoolmate in Czernowitz, about 26 years before, but I had only a faint remembrance of him. Anyway, I wrote to my in-laws in Vienna about it, gave them the address of Paul Rosegg, and since they had Lisa’s address in France, they wrote her about it and gave her Paul’s address. This seemed to have been the way Lisa could get in contact with Paul, who was at that time in Nice. It did not take long that Lisa and Francis also moved to Nice and that they found Paul there. From then on, we got also in contact with them in Nice.
My dad remembers the Besner story differently (in “Flashbacks”). In his version, during that chance encounter in Havana, Besner mentioned that he knew a Paul Rosegg who was living in Nice with a boy named Mechner, whereupon Adolph got excited and said “That could be my son!”
In other words, my dad thinks that thanks to Besner (and Paul), Adolph learned that Paul and Lisa were in Nice, and got their address. Adolph’s account is the reverse: it was thanks to Besner (and Adolph) that Lisa got Paul’s address in Nice, and was able to reconnect with him.
I don’t know which one is right.
What’s also foggy to me is at what point Adolph heard from other family members (the grandparents in Vienna, or cousins in Paris?) that Lisa and Franzi had survived the German invasion and gone back to Le Touquet, and how much he knew (and when) about their subsequent odyssey from Le Touquet to La Bernerie to Paris and Vichy.
Adolph writes in the previous chapter: “For months after [the German invasion] we were cut off from them and did not know whether they were still alive. Later we had found out through Hedy’s parents in Vienna that they had received mail from them and that they were O.K.”
I’d love to see some of those letters he mentioned, if they can be found. Any letters to or from Papi, Lisa, and other members of the Ziegler family while he was in Cuba could clarify a lot of details. The only thing that seems for sure is that at some point after Lisa and my dad joined Paul in Nice, Adolph got their address and started writing to them.
Update on this little mystery: I just reread Lisa’s section (interviewed by Adolph). She says this about their time in Vichy:
So, [Francis] got well again, and at that time I started to correspond with Paul again, who was in Nice. Before, when I was still in Le Touquet, I could write to Paul. There were printed postcards and you could write only by finishing a printed sentence, for instance: “I am here, how are you?” I sent him these printed postcards, and he sent me printed postcards. This was the correspondence that was allowed between people in the occupied zone and those who were in the un-occupied zone. This was done through Suzanne. Then, when I was in Vichy, I could already write regularly to Paul. But I could not go to Nice, because the Department, where Nice was, was closed, and we were not allowed to go there. Every department in France had its own regulations.
But then it was opened and the moment they opened it, I took a train and I went to join Paul in Nice, passing through Lyon, where I met a brother-in-law of Lucy, a Mr. Werdenschlag, whom I knew very well. He came to the station and I went out of the train, he kissed me, and we talked for a while. In Nice, we first went to a hotel, but then I moved into Paul’s apartment in the Rue Gloria No. 5.