Chapter 45. On the Road to Montreuil

I felt weak and numb as we walked slowly along the dusty deserted highway with our luggage strapped to our backs. We walked in the direction of Montreuil, which was the nearest town, only a few kilometers away [#2 ON THE MAP]. There was dust in the air from the bombed out wrecks of houses that stood along the highway. We were appalled at the sight of so much destruc¬tion. Once-beauti¬ful old farmhouses that had with¬stood the ravages of centuries had been reduced to piles of rubble. What had happened to the people in those houses? Did they flee or were they still in them, dead or alive? How might it have felt to be in one of those houses at the moment of their destruction? I was finally seeing what really happens when bombs hit houses in which people live, something I had spent a lot of time trying to imagine during the air raids in Le Touquet.
Weak from hunger, we walked slowly. We had not walked more than ten minutes when we encountered a tired-looking and disheveled British soldier. He was unarmed; all he carried was a satchel slung over his shoulder. Lisa went up to him.
“Do you have any food by any chance?” she asked him. “We haven’t eaten in a long time.”
“All I have is this piece of bread,” he replied, taking a heel chunk of dried out dark bread from his satchel. “Take it.”
“Just give us a small piece of it,” said Lisa. “You may need the rest.” I wished that Lisa would just grab the whole thing and give it to me.
“Never mind, take the whole thing,” he said, to my great relief. “I’ll soon be taken prisoner by the Germans and they will feed me adequately, I’m sure.”
I felt sorry for him and grateful for his generosity, especial¬ly when I sank my teeth into that delicious piece of dry bread.
We continued our walk toward Montreuil with renewed energy. Half an hour later we reached the town. Montreuil had been devastated, most of it leveled.

Chapter 46. The Germans From Up Close

And then we saw them for the first time. In a small market square, about a dozen German soldiers relaxed under the shade trees, holding rifles, their motorcycles and Wehr¬macht trucks parked nearby.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lisa said, though she seemed a bit afraid herself. “They won’t pay any attention to us. Let’s just keep on walking.”
I was fascinated to see the long feared enemy in their beautiful green gray lichen-colored uniforms at such close range, and the big black plus signs on the Wehrmacht trucks that I had previously only seen from a great distance. I found this raw display of power frightening, but I also saw in it something awesome and fascinating. The German vehicles and weapons seemed invincible, so huge, powerful, and perfectly constructed—almost beautiful in a scary way.
But I was afraid to stare at the soldiers too intently lest I attract their attention. When some of them actually looked at us I quickly turned my eyes away, and I breathed easier when we had walked past them without any incident.
As we continued to walk through the town, we often saw German soldiers riding around in motorcycles with little sidecars.

Chapter 47. Food at Last

Around the large square near the center of town stood several undamaged buildings. In front of the buildings some children were riding bicycles and playing. We walked into one of the buildings that looked like a hotel. I became excited when I smelled food.
“Could we get something to eat?” Lisa asked the corpulent proprietress who greeted us.
“We don’t have much,” she said. “But you can have some soup and rabbit stew.”
It felt wonderful to sit down in the hotel’s small dining room. I gulped down as much of ultra delicious rabbit stew as I could, and was surprised at how little of it my shrunken stomach could hold.
Soon four German soldiers came in and sat down at the table directly across the aisle from us. From their accent we knew immediately that they were Viennese, as they spoke in the dialect with which Lisa and I had grown up.
“Don’t speak a word of German, only French,” Lisa admonished me in a stern whisper. There was no need for her to tell me. I was as scared as she was.
The soldiers were evidently in a happy and ebullient mood. They ordered wine, and laughed and kidded around with each other.
“How far do you think we are from the Stefans¬platz?” one of them asked, whereupon his compan¬ions broke into uproarious guffaws.
One of them kept staring at Lisa.
“Frolein, wos shawn ze den so trorig drein?” (Miss, why the sad face?) he asked her flirtatiously in the Viennese dialect, clearly for the amusement of his compan¬ions, as he had no reason to believe that Lisa would understand his words. Lisa avoided making eye contact with him and seemed quite tense. But I felt confused. These supposed murderers were the same jovial, fun-loving guys among whom I had spent my first seven years.

Chapter 48. We Try To Walk Back to Le Touquet

Having finished our lunch, we felt strong again and eager to return to Le Touquet. Lisa, in chatting with the proprietress, learned that the Belgian farmer’s decision to get off the highway and turn into the woods, three days ago, might have saved our lives, as many refugees then perished on that highway as a result of strafings by German planes that were clearing the highway for the tanks and trucks.
While Lisa talked to the proprietress, I was outside with the kids. They were riding their bicycles around the town square and showed me how to get on one. After a few minutes, I was able to stay on for a few wobbly meters. It felt wonderful, as if reborn, to be playing and having fun after three days of terror and hunger.
I was a bit disappointed when Lisa came out and told me to get ready for the long hike back to Le Touquet. We were told that it was eighteen kilometers to Le Touquet, and that there were two highways, one still closed by fighting, but the other one probably okay.
We strapped our baggage on our backs again and started to walk. We crossed a bridge in the center of town and soon found the highway. We had barely walked an hour when we began to hear distant explosions. Two men, walking in the opposite direction, advised us not to continue.
“Vous allez vers la zone de feu” (You are going toward the fire zone), said one of them.
Lisa thought we should keep going. “Maybe the fighting will be over by the time we get there,” she said. We were eager to get back home and thought we had already gone too far to turn back.

Chapter 49. A Traumatic Experience

But then something more persuasive happened. A German plane came flying low over the highway toward us with its machine guns blazing. Before I could fully grasp the meaning of the machine guns’ ratatat, Lisa pushed me into the ditch alongside the road and threw her suitcase and herself on top of me. In a matter of seconds, the plane was gone, and we got up.
“We’d better turn back,” said Lisa.
“Yes!!” I said, enthusiastically. I was certainly frightened. But then I realized that I would soon be back with the kids and their bicycles. Earlier, before leaving town, knowing that our lives and welfare were at stake, I had resisted the temptation to say to Lisa, “Let’s stay a bit longer because I’m having such a good time.” But now I was happy that my desire for fun coincided with our welfare.
As we started back, I felt somewhat proud at how easily I had gotten past this latest brush with death, like a veteran who had learned to look death in the eye. But a minute later the significance of what had just happened began to sink in: That pilot had actually tried to kill us. The previous planes had been shooting only at each other, and didn’t even know we existed. It was impersonal – we just happened to be there. But this pilot was coming after us, as individuals! He must actually have been looking at us!
“Lisa,” I asked, “Why did he try to kill us?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed, still shaken up.
The more I thought about it, the more frightened I became. Will that plane come back and try again? Might the jovial Viennese soldiers we saw at the hotel also try to kill us, or do only pilots do that?
When we got back to the hotel, the kids were still riding around on their bicycles and happy to see me again. I spent the rest of the afternoon taking turns with them riding their bicycles around the town square.

Chapter 50. The Return to Le Touquet

We spent the night in a small room at the hotel. Lisa com¬plained to the proprietress that the bed sheets were dirty. The proprietress explained that there was no water for doing laundry.
The next morning we were told that the fighting along the highway had stopped and that it was once again safe to travel on it. The weather was beautiful and we got an early start. We strapped our luggage to our backs, this time with padding so that the ropes wouldn’t cut into our shoulders. For the next eight hours, we walked and rested, walked and rested.
Even with the padding, Lisa’s shoulders became sore from the straps. I kept urging her to stop and rest. I felt somewhat respons¬ible because part of the baggage she was carrying was mine. In the late afternoon we reached the outskirts of Le Touquet. We were exhausted and felt really fortunate when a milk truck gave us a lift for several kilometers. I was happy to see the familiar landmarks of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage again.
When we got home, Lisa found that our landlady had cleared out our belongings, including some valuable hand-stitched linens that were mementos from Lisa’s parents. When Lisa later asked for them back, the landlady refused to return them. I felt really sad for Lisa.
Having found our house cleaned out, we went next door to the Cousins’ house, where we received a warm welcome. I was thrilled to see Monique again. Madame Cousin served us some rabbit stew, my second rabbit stew dinner in two days. Again, I devoured as much of it as I could hold, and slept very soundly that night in my old bed.
Le Touquet-Paris-Plage had changed. The German military was in evidence every¬where. They were building trenches in many of the empty lots and parks, and some near our house. All around town, they were setting up anti aircraft batteries and various types of fortifica¬tions. It was rumored that they were preparing to invade England, though I had trouble believing that this could happen. My playmates and I discovered that the trenches made wonderful playgrounds when the Germans weren’t in them, which was most of the time. They were like mazes, neatly lined with sandbags that were held in place by solid, beautifully crafted wooden rafters.
Particularly fascinating to me was the gray green lichen color of the German soldiers’ uniforms. I spent endless hours attempt¬ing to repro¬duce that color with my wax crayons.

Chapter 51. Filip Baer Enters Our Lives

Shortly after our return to Le Touquet, Lisa answered an ad that asked for a German to French translator. She got the job. A wealthy middle aged French lady, Mme. Roi, the wife of a wealthy banker, had been conducting a romantic correspondence with a German-speaking lover, and needed a translator to help overcome the language barrier. She and Lisa soon became good friends. Mme. Roi was short and plump with black hair, always warm and good-humored.
When Mme. Roi’s correspondent arrived in Le Touquet soon after¬ward, she introduced him to Lisa. His name was Filip Baer and, like us, he was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. He was in his forties, handsome, athletic, balding, sun-tanned, jovial, and had a deep baritone voice. I always wondered whether his name bore any relationship to the fact that he was quite hairy. Lisa described him as crude but fun. He had a way of smiling a tense smile and then scowling, in rapid succession, giving the impression of having an on-edge temper prone to unpredictable flare-ups.
Lisa was extremely attractive at 36, very bright and charming, and could always make people laugh. Baer’s romantic involvement with Mme. Roi soon ended, whereupon he started to visit us daily.
I enjoyed watching Baer flirt with Lisa in the Viennese style. They would dance in the kitchen as he sang “Komm, mein Bussischatzi, gib mir einen Kuss!”—a song I remem¬bered from Vienna days. Lisa seemed happy with Baer. But in the weeks that followed, I got the feeling that Baer didn’t like me and that I somehow irritated him. I also noticed that Lisa sometimes made special arrangements to be alone with him, making me feel that my presence was an intrusion. Accordingly, I made every effort not to be in Lisa’s way lest she experience me as a burden.

Chapter 52. Eking Out a Living; the Luftwaffe Guys

Lisa earned money during the summer of 1940 by knotting macramé belts using colored, lacquered cord, a skill she had learned in Vienna. She had a supply of spools of about a dozen different colors, but never used more than two or three colors in any one belt. She received 50 francs per belt, which seemed like a fortune to me. I thought her belts were works of art, and spent hours watching her make them. As I learned some of the knotting tech¬niques, I practiced them with leftover cord. I hoped Lisa would someday let me make complete belts and thereby contribute to our income. But that day never came.
In July of 1940, Lisa got a job as the sole salesperson in a tobacco store owned by a Belgian businessman whom she had met through Baer. She was uniquely qualified for the job because she spoke German. The store was constantly packed with German Luftwaffe personnel. Lisa said that they were homesick and savored hearing German spoken by a woman.
I was allowed to sit in a corner, provided I was quiet and discreet. I looked for ways to make myself useful to Lisa by helping her maintain the store’s inventory of cigars, cigarillos, cigarettes, and wrist watches. I enjoyed listening to her chat with the soldiers, mostly Luftwaffe personnel, but was not allowed to converse with them myself. In particular, Lisa had warned me never to reveal to any of them that we were Jewish. I knew the importance of that only too well.
At first I was a bit afraid of the German soldiers, but after a while I began to regard them as nice, pleasant, jovial guys who reminded me of Vienna. They spoke my native language and I felt far more cultural affinity with them than with the local French folk. I desperately wanted to talk to some of them, and it was difficult for me not to answer them when they spoke to me. But it wasn’t long before some of the steady customers caught on to the fact that I, too, spoke German, and the prohibition against speaking with them soon broke down. Once I was allowed to converse with the customers, I really enjoyed myself in the tobacco store.

Chapter 53. The Family Roi

Through Mme. Roi, we soon met the rest of the Roi family. In the late afternoons, after Lisa finished work at the tobacco store, we often went to the Rois’ home for conversation and sometimes for dinner. They lived in one of Paris-Plage’s luxurious seaside villas overlooking the seashore parade grounds and the manicured park that separated the villas from the beach.
M. Henri Roi was or had been a very wealthy owner of banks. He was short and rotund, ebullient, entertain¬ing, energetic, fast moving, and in control of every situation. He was always ready with his strong, defini¬tive, views, which he expressed articulately in a firm, high-pitched voice. When Mme. Roi ordered a macramé belt from Lisa, he unhesitatingly asserted that the only color combina¬tion to be consid¬ered was a dark emerald green and a warm light gray. What brilliant aesthetic insight, I thought. I noticed that if those two colors were mixed together, they might come very close to matching the color of the German soldiers’ gray-green lichen-colored uniforms.
The Roi family included a daughter, Suzanne, age 18; a son, Jean, age 20; and three delightful Polish sisters, 16, 18, and 20 years old, who were the Rois’ live in domestic help. The twenty-year-old, I soon learned, was M. Roi’s mistress, and the eighteen-year-old was Jean’s.
I always enjoyed our visits to the Rois’ villa. The people there liked me and made me feel that I was a credit rather than a burden to Lisa. I was allowed to read a collection of old Paris Match magazines, which carried the first comic strip I had ever seen, “Le Petit Roi” (the little king). It was inconceivable to me that the comic strip’s main character, a short and plump king, was not modeled after M. Roi himself.
From the large picture windows of the Rois’ living room we would often watch brilliant and enthralling German military parades. They were staged in the grand manner, complete with huge swastika flags, goose-step¬ping marching bands, and choruses of soldiers performing stirring music. I loved that music and found it difficult to reconcile the fact that men who could make such beautiful music could also be our enemies.
Once, from that same window, we also saw a British reconnaissance plane approach the shore from the direction of England, fight a brief air battle with German interceptors, and head back.

Chapter 54. Demoralization

In spite of the social activities at the tobacco store and at the Roi household, I was generally unhappy that summer. I missed Vienna, and it was months since we had last been able to correspond with our family. We knew they must be worry¬ing about our safety. Lisa seemed to be spending more time with Baer and less with me, reminding me that I had no real claim on her time and attention. To make matters worse, Monique’s mother suddenly seemed to disapprove of me and made it hard for me to see much of Monique. “Il est méchant” (He’s bad), I once heard her say to Monique. I kept wondering why she said that. Was it because the German occupation was making it unwise to associate with Jews? Could it be that Monique had told her about our “games”?
Mostly, I was demoralized because Lisa no longer sounded optimistic about when I would see my family again. Having lost contact with them, I knew that any hopes for an early reunion were now unreal¬istic. I kept looking for chances to be by myself. Being alone made it easier to daydream vividly and forget my real situation. As before, I would often go wandering through the pinewoods and sand dunes and cry undis¬turbed while reminiscing and fantasizing about my former life in Vienna.

Chapter 55. “The Enemy”

At the tobacco store, Lisa and I became friends with a Luftwaffe officer named Willi. He was tall, slim, and elegant—a soft-spoken, cultured, pleasant person with whom it was fun to talk. He seemed to be genuinely fond of me, and I quickly got past the fact that he was in the German military. We would go walking together and have long conversations about many different subjects. It had been a long time since I had enjoyed that type of relationship with any man, and I was still more comfortable speaking German than French.
Willi soon started joining us at our regular dinners at the house of the Roi family. Lisa thought that Willi knew we were Jewish but was “too deli¬cate” (zu fein) to bring it up. One time, when Willi was about to go home on furlough, Lisa bought a big blonde doll for him to bring to his daughter as a present, and also something for his wife.
Nonetheless, there were times when the fact that we were on opposite sides of the war intruded. One day, when we were all sitting around in the Rois’ living room, Willi told us that he was very upset because some of his Luftwaffe comrades had not returned from a bombing raid over England.
“That’s good, isn’t it, Lisa?” I said within earshot of Willi, playfully wanting to probe the boundaries of Lisa and Willi’s divergent allegiances.
“You may be glad, but it’s very rude to show it when you see that somebody is upset about it,” Lisa responded sternly. I felt terribly guilty at having been so insensi¬tive, as I was genuinely fond of Willi, and mortified at having embarras¬sed Lisa.
Not long afterward, it was Lisa’s and my turn to be upset when we learned from Willi’s comrades at the tobacco store that Willi had failed to return from one of the raids. We were quite depressed, and thought it ironic that the first war casualty we mourned was a German officer.

Chapter 56. Willi Saves Us Posthumously

Late one Friday afternoon, in early September of 1940, a big car with several Luftwaffe personnel pulled up in front of the tobacco store. There were already two or three soldiers in the store. Two of the Luftwaffe officers came in. They had been friends of Willi’s.
One of them said to his friend, in front of Lisa, “Monday morning an edict will be issued requiring all Jews and Poles to register with the Gestapo.” Having said that, the two officers left the store, got back into their car, and drove off.
Lisa was sure that their statement was a warning intended to save us. She believed that they must have heard from Willi that we were Jewish and that the Roi household harbored three Polish girls. We now saw that our friend¬ship with Willi had paid off in a most unexpected way.
“That’s it, we’re getting out of here,” said M. Roi in his usual decisive manner that same Friday evening when Lisa told him what she had just heard. “We have three cars. You, François, and Baer come with us. We’ll go to La Bernerie, a little fishing village in Bretagne where I have three beautiful summer vacation houses on the seashore, side by side. We’ll be safe there.”
Sunday morning, as our luggage was being loaded into the cars, Monique and Ginette came running up the steps of the Roi mansion, carrying flowers, followed by Mme. Cousin. They came to say good¬-bye, all dressed up in their white Sunday finery, fresh from church. I had anticipated that saying good-bye to Monique would be very painful, but having to do it in front of so many people made it even harder. I was embarrassed at having to show my love for her in front of her mother, sister, Lisa, and all those other people. But in spite of my embarrassment, I cried bitterly as I hugged and kissed her good-bye, knowing that I would never see her again.