Chapter 9. At the Plateau d’Avron
In Paris we were met at the railroad station by my Aunt Lisa who had arrived from Vienna a few months earlier. With her was her chubby, round-faced first cousin Raymond Feingold, and uncle Heini, Grand¬mother’s youngest brother.
Raymond then drove us in his car to the Feingolds’ mansion on the Plateau d’Avron, a suburb of Paris in Neuilly Plaisance [PLATE 7, TOP LEFT].
“We are going to stay with the Feingolds for about two weeks and then leave for Saint Nazaire,” Father told me. “From there, we will take a ship to Cuba.”
My days at the Feingolds’ were stimulating but stressful. As I didn’t know any French, I found it difficult to converse or ask for things. I kept running to Lisa.
“How do you say such-and-such in French?” I would ask her all day long. Also, I missed being spoiled. Meals were formal, and I was expected to exhibit table manners and a level of decorum for which I had not been trained. Worst of all, I had to eat whatever was brought to the table. No one offered me the usual choice of a hard-boiled egg or schnitzel when the served food was not to my liking. Once during lunch, Raymond’s sister (and Lisa’s close friend) Suzanne [PLATES 2 AND 3]—a tough, outspoken, attractive 36-year old woman —sternly said to me, “François, you must get used to eating all types of food.” I knew I was in trouble when neither Father nor Lisa leaped to my defense.
I found Suzanne intimidating. When she spoke she radiated competence, intelligence, and energy, and had a haughty way of jerking her head back with her chin tucked in and her lips pressed together in a trace of a smile conveyed a kind of righteous disdain that seemed to say, “Any right-thinking person would agree with me.”
Chapter 10. I Miss Vienna
I missed my own bed when I was put to sleep on the couch in the library. Father would usually tell me a story and sing to me for a while, but not long enough to satisfy me. I sensed his eagerness to join the animated gathering in the adjoining living room. At those times I missed Grandmother’s unlimited patience and staying power in singing me to sleep almost every night.
While trying to fall asleep after Father went into the living room, I would stare at the Venetian blinds in the library where I slept. As I looked at those slats across the room, I kept wondering how it was that I could easily convince myself that they were exactly one centimeter wide, even though I knew that in fact they were about twenty centimeters wide. Would they still look one centimeter wide if I viewed them from closer up? I was always preoccupied with why things looked the way they did, perception versus reality.
On days when the weather was nice, Father and I went butterfly catching. About 100 meters down the road from the house, the road made a sharp downhill bend. Instead of following the bend, we walked straight ahead into a long and narrow little meadow that looked like an overgrown former roadbed, with tall trees all around it. We caught mostly day-flying moths called Bärenspinner in German, one of the few species still on the wing in mid-October. The fondest memories of my childhood, from the time I was four years old, were the butterfly catching expeditions that Father and I used to go on regularly.
I was already starting to miss the life I had left behind in Vienna, but took comfort in the knowledge that Father and I would be leaving for Cuba in two weeks – I was counting the days.
Chapter 11. A Traumatic Event
Finally came the night before our departure for Cuba. I could hardly contain my excitement at the thought that Father and I would be leaving the fol¬lowing morning for the land of exotic tropical butter¬flies and alligators. Yet something didn’t seem right. No one seemed to be resonating with my excitement.
That evening, when I was in my pajamas ready to go to sleep, Lisa came into the library and sat down next to me.
“Listen, Franzi,” she said gravely. “You will stay here with me for a while, and Father will go to Cuba by himself. In a few months Mother will come to pick you up and take you with her to New York.”
I didn’t believe her at first, but felt a shudder of terror. “No,” I said firmly. “I’m going to Cuba with Father. He told me that I’m going with him. Where is he?”
I ran out of the library to look for him. I didn’t have to go far because he was standing at the end of the hallway with Suzanne. I grabbed him around the legs.
“I’m going to Cuba with you, right?” I asked.
“It’s not possible, Franzi,” he said in a choked voice. “You’ll stay here with Lisa until Mother comes to pick you up. She’ll be here in a few months.”
I became hysterical. “I want to go with you! I don’t want to stay here. Please take me with you. You promised. Please! Please! I hate it here! Take me back to Vienna then! Just don’t leave me here!”
I held on to his legs with all my might. All of my skills in getting what I wanted seemed to be failing me this one time I really needed them. Father said nothing, but started to walk toward the library, moving my whole body with each footstep as I clung to his legs. When we reached the door of the library, someone pried me away from him and carried me to my bed. Lisa sat with me until I had cried myself to sleep.
My first thought when I woke up the next morning was that I’d had a nightmare. As soon as I realized that I hadn’t, I jumped out of bed to find Father. Perhaps he had changed his mind overnight. I soon found Lisa in the kitchen having breakfast.
“Where is Father?” I asked anxiously.
“Come and have some breakfast,” she said. “He left early this morning for St. Nazaire. Suzanne went with him.”
I burst out crying again, and for many days afterwards I cried at the slightest provocation. Each morn¬ing, I had to convince myself afresh that it was really true that Father had left without me.
Chapter 12. My Sanctuary
Everybody tried to console me, but it didn’t work. Lisa got me a wooden truck about 14 inches long and a set of hand tools—a hammer, a saw, a hand drill, and pliers. I painted the truck soap-green and used the tools to make it more elaborate by adding extensions and compartments. My goal was to be able to load it up with all of the butterfly catching equipment Father had left me—a net, some butterfly pins, and a box with sliced wine bottle corks glued to the bottom into which to stick the pins. Raymond [PLATE 3] let me tie the truck to the back of his car and he pulled it along the road at a moderate speed.
Whenever the weather was nice, I would pull my little truck, loaded with the butterfly equipment, to the small meadow at the bend of the road where Father and I had gone butterfly catching. That meadow reminded me of the many meadows in which Father and I had hunted butterflies in Austria. I would pretend that Father was still there with me, temporarily out of sight behind some trees or bushes. I would call to him when I sighted a Bärenspinner and sing myself songs that we used to sing together. When the bubble of the illusion popped, as it invariably did, I would be free to cry to my heart’s content, in private.
Chapter 13. Louise Feingold (“Tante Louise”)
During the month at the Feingolds, I spent most of my time with Suzanne’s retarded daughter Nicole [PLATE 3]. I spent the rest of the time reading and memorizing the duck hunting equipment catalogs stored on the bookshelves. Lisa was usually gone during the day because she had a job in Raymond’s jewelry store in the city.
I was unable to develop any kind of rapport with Tante Louise [PLATES 2 AND 3], the ever-present lady of the house and mother of Suzanne and Raymond. She was a formal, strict old matri¬arch with a Germanic authorita¬ri¬an voice, raised as a Catholic and proud to stem from Strasbourg. She often admonished me to eat slowly and chew my food thoroughly, and became nervous and irritable when I didn’t obey her various strictures, which generally seemed arbitrary to me. I liked how she sang, but even when she sang me the song “O Strassburg, O Strassburg, Du wunderschöne Stadt,” I felt that she was trying to convince me of something that had no meaning to me.
Chapter 14. The Perpetual Motion Submarine
Marie, the good natured and energetic live in housekeeper and cook who had been with the Feingolds all her life, was always very attentive to my needs. She would scurry around to get me whatever I re¬quested for my various projects—string, scissors, paper, cardboard, glue, wood, nails, pencils, pins, or a knife.
One of my memorable Plateau d’Avron projects was my “invention” of a perpetual motion jet submarine. I made it out of paper. The submarine was a three sided hollow spindle, triangular in cross section. I cut out paper strips and glued them together. The spindle had one opening in the front and one in the back, making it, essentially, a spindle-shaped paper tube.
The submarine’s theory of operation was straightforward: Water enters through the front opening as a result of an initial push from me, and exits through the opening at the rear. As the water exits through the rear, it propels the ship forward in jet fashion, thereby causing more water to enter through the front, etc. I reasoned that this propulsion system should keep the ship moving forever.
Marie provided me with the paper, scissors, and glue. But on its maiden voyage in the bathroom sink, the submarine stopped within a second after the initial push. I asked Marie if she could explain to me why it didn’t keep going.
“Because the paper got too soggy,” she said.
I didn’t agree with her. The real answer was inadequate propulsion. I decided to double the propulsive power by inserting another propuls¬ion stage into the interior of the ship. So I made a new ship with a triangular partition with a hole in it glued across the ship’s middle. According to my theory, the hole in the parti¬tion would serve as both the water intake and exit, thereby providing added propulsion.
For days I pondered why the submarine still wouldn’t move on its own. I finally realized that if I kept adding partitions packed along the entire length of the submar¬ine, the series of holes would form, in effect, one long tube. So why not use a long tube to begin with? I eventually reduced the problem to the question of why an ordinary tube wouldn’t keep moving forever when given an initial push. I was unable to come up with an answer.
Chapter 15. Nicole
At the Feingolds’, Suzanne’s daughter Nicole was my only playmate. At the age of 17 she had the mentality of a four-year old. She was about 4½ feet tall, very thin and frail, wore thick eyeglasses, and spoke in a high-pitched voice. All day long she would sit in her fauteuil (easy chair) by the window with her boxes of Extraforts (one centimeter-wide colored silk ribbons), which she rolled up and unrolled as she rocked back and forth in her chair, chanting the same phrases over and over in a sing song tone.
I marveled at the speed and accuracy with which she could roll up the Extraforts, and spent hours trying to emulate her. I never came close, but Nicole laughed with delight as she watched me try. I may have been Nicole’s first and only playmate and companion, and certainly the first person ever to spend hours with her rolling up Extraforts, as all of her social contacts were pretty much limited to the people who took care of her. It was a very mutual friendship, as Nicole was the only person at the Plateau d’Avron who gave me the feeling that she loved me and my company.
“Can I come in too?” I once asked Marie at the end of the day when she took Nicole to her room to undress her and put her to bed.
“No, you can’t,” was the firm answer, offered without further explanation, as the door to Nicole’s room was purpose¬fully closed behind them. So I peeked through the keyhole. Nicole stood with her back to the door as she was being undressed. I compared her bare behind with those of the many little girls I had seen in Father’s office in Vienna as they lay unclad on his examining table for ultraviolet light treatments. I thought some of those little girls had really cute behinds, but now I felt that Nicole was in a different category—she was really shapely.
My contemplation was interrupted by the appearance of Suzanne at the end of the hallway. Had she seen me peeping through the key¬hole? I hoped she hadn’t.
After that incident, I wanted to see Nicole’s body some more. But when and where? Nicole was supervised almost constantly.
There was a little enclosed gazebo at the far end of the rose garden. If only I could get Nicole into the gazebo without anyone noticing! I started taking Nicole on little walks through the rose garden, leading her by the hand. She followed me happily wherever I took her. Soon, I took her to the vicinity of the gazebo. Finally, one day when I felt we weren’t being watched, I took her inside.
She seemed eager to cooper¬ate as I tried to undress her. But I doubt that we got very far, as I don’t remember any special outcome. All I remem¬ber is that Tante Louise later told me, in her usual stern tone of voice, not to take Nicole to the gazebo any more. Did she suspect something?
Chapter 16. Life in Robinson
In November, after we had been living at the Plateau d’Avron house for about a month, Lisa told me that we would be moving into an apartment in Plessis Robinson, an outskirt of Paris. We would share that apartment with friends, Fritzi and Leo Zimmermann. Fritzi [PLATE 3, LOWER RIGHT] was the sister of Lisl, who was the wife of Lisa and Mother’s brother Erich.
I was sad to leave Nicole.
“I think that Suzanne and Tante Louise were envious of the contrast between Nicole’s intelligence and Franzi’s,” I heard Lisa explain to Fritzi and Leo.” Though that explanation sounded plausible to me, having always sensed a cold wind from Suzanne’s direction, I didn’t tell Lisa my secret suspicion that the real reason they wanted me to leave had to do with the gazebo incident.
Once we moved to Robinson, I got to see much more of Lisa. She was fun, interesting, almost always in a good mood, and had a great sense of humor. We would go on daily walks around the tree-lined suburban streets of Robinson and explore the neighborhoods that lay beyond the somewhat sterile redbrick apartment building complexes like the one we lived in. We tried to learn the names of the streets and made fun of the more esoteric ones, such as Rue de L’Étang de L’Écoute s’il Pleut—a rather nonsensical name. We laughed a lot together. In the mornings, we would go to the outdoor market on the main square and shop for the day’s provisions.
I also enjoyed spending time with Leo Zimmermann, who was interesting to talk to and who took me on walks to the local chestnut forest.
Around December, Lisa enrolled me in a local Jewish day camp a few blocks away from our apartment in Robinson.
“I hate going there,” I complained to Lisa. “I can’t stand the food they serve and I’m scared of the rabbi who runs the camp. He keeps screaming at the kids.” Once, when he thought that a boy had been in the toilet too long, he opened the door of the toilet, yelled at the boy and without giving him a chance to get off the toilet and pull up his pants, grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out, onto the floor. I had never seen such meanness.
Chapter 17. My New Mother
I was becoming quite enamored of Lisa and began to compare her favorably with Mother. Lisa inculcated me with her strong belief, which she had learned from Grandfather and followed religiously, that it is important for one’s health to end every hot bath or shower with a cold shower. She also inculcated me with her moral code, which she also traced to Grand¬father: One must never lie, and when the issue was keeping a promise or following through on something I had said I would do, she would say “Ein Mann ein Wort” (Loosely translated, this means, “A man is only as good as his word”). I was impressed by these precepts, and once said to Lisa that she was much better at child rearing than Mother. I could not help but contrast Lisa’s joyous and ebullient temperament with Mother’s more morose and retiring disposition.
Chapter 17. Raymond Feingold
On most weekends we visited the Feingolds. It was a long trip, starting with the taxi collectif from Robinson to Paris, followed by a railroad ride from Paris to the Plateau d’Avron. Raymond would pick us up at the station. I was happy to see Nicole on those occasions. Also, my food tastes had broadened so that I was starting to enjoy the fine French food that was served.
After lunch, as we sat around the big round dining room table, after the dishes had been cleared but the white table cloth was still in place, Raymond sometimes entertained us with his mathemat¬ic¬al prowess. He would ask Lisa to write down a long column of seven-digit numbers. After looking at the numbers for two or three sec¬onds, he would write down their sum. Lisa checked it and found, to everyone’s amazement, that it was correct. Lisa, like most people, adored Raymond and made no secret of it. Raymond, then in his early thirties, was brilliant, warm, jovial, and outgoing.
On some other weekends we went on long drives with Raymond and his wife, Lucy [PLATE 3].
“You are the prettiest lady I have ever seen,” I said to Lucy one day. Although Lucy had genuinely nice features, I was impressed mainly by the fact that she wore lipstick, unlike my other relatives.
Raymond drove a black Chenard with green grills. He loved that car and I soon loved it too. He would show me how that car could climb steep hills and reach a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. It was thrilling. Raymond conveyed to me his very definite views regarding the relative merits of Pack¬ards, Buicks, Rolls Royces, Fords, Simcas, Renaults, Citroëns, and Chenards—views that I quickly made my own.
Inspired by Raymond, I became obsessed with cars and spent endless hours drawing them, with compulsive attention to getting the grills, fenders, and designs of the various models just right. I told Lisa that when I grew up I would buy her a chauffeured white Rolls Royce with silver trimmings. I had come to love Lisa a lot and wanted to make her happy in any way I could.
Chapter 18. Cat Fantasies
The Zimmermanns’ apartment was on the ground floor of a four-story redbrick apartment complex that wrapped around the whole block, enclo¬sing a big courtyard. The courtyard had trees, lawns, walks, and benches and was populated by about half a dozen cats. I was obsessed with those cats, imagining that they had been abandoned by their owners. At night before falling asleep, I listened to their plaintive-sounding nocturnal meowing, which resonated with my own feelings of abandonment. I spent hours in the courtyard, day in and day out, trying to lure the cats to me.
“Vien chez Maman, vien chez Maman” (come to Mommy), I would call to them in a sweet and seductive tone of voice while holding out my hand as if offering them food. But my intentions were not benevolent. I planned to win a cat’s confidence and then hit it hard enough to make it meow loudly. Fortunately for the cats, none of them ever came close enough to put me to the test, and, in any event, my malevolent fantasies soon ceased. They made me feel guilty and ashamed of myself. I worried that I might be turning into a mean boy, the kind of boy I despised. I felt increasingly protective toward those poor aban¬doned cats with which I identified so strongly. I started to fantasize about cuddling and feeding them, and treating them the way I would have liked to have been treated.
Chapter 19. My Introduction to Airplanes
One sunny day, while in the courtyard, I heard a loud noise that seemed to come from the street. It must be a huge, noisy truck, I thought, and fixed my eyes on the street gate to catch a glimpse of the truck as it went by. But in a matter of seconds, the noise turned into a deafening roar. There was a loud crash directly overhead and the sky was suddenly darkened with the silhou¬ette of a huge plane flying at roof level. Pieces of the building’s chimney came tumbling down and electric wires were torn as the plane crossed the courtyard, bounced off the roof of the building at the other end, and then exploded as it crashed into the corner of the block of buildings across the street.
I ran into the house screaming hysterically and grabbed onto Lisa, who was standing in the kitchen. I buried my face in her apron, and it took me a long time to calm down.
The next day I learned that the plane was a bomber based at a nearby military airport. For about a month thereafter, I refused to go into the court¬yard or street unaccomp¬¬anied, for fear that I would see or hear an airplane. Even when walking in the street with Lisa, I put my fingers into my ears whenever I heard a plane, no matter how high in the sky it was flying.
“You’re being silly, Franzi,” Lisa said. “Planes can’t hurt you when they are flying high up in the sky.” Even though I realized that she was right, I couldn’t help it.
A few weeks later, when the burnt out fuselage of the plane was being hauled away by a giant truck, Lisa insisted I watch, to help me get over the trauma. I finally agreed to take a quick peek, but found the sight so horrible that I refused to look a second time. I had never seen an airplane up close, and found the blackened and charred wreckage huge and menacing.
Chapter 20. Airplane Barter
As a result of this incident, I became obsessed with airplanes. I began to build large fleets of all types of paper airplanes, using origami techniques described in a book that had been given to me. I studied the paper planes’ aerodyna¬mic properties and discovered the importance of perfect symmetry, accurate folding, and curvature of the folds.
One day I built a plane out of pieces of wood I nailed and glued together. I convinced myself that the plane actually glided when I threw it through the air. I took it with me every¬where I went. One of my friends at the Jewish day camp was so impressed with the plane that he offered to trade me his prized pocketknife for it. That was a deal I couldn’t resist. I valued the plane, but had always wanted a pocketknife. With a heavy heart, I made the deal.
That evening, I missed the plane unbearably. I tried to console myself with my paper planes, but couldn’t. I kept making them glide across the room, but this only made me miss my wooden plane all the more. I cried on and off until I fell asleep. The next morning I couldn’t wait to get to school where I might see my beloved plane again. Perhaps my friend would let me play with it for a while. My heart was pounding as I caught sight of him with the plane in his hands.
“Can I play with it for a little while?” I asked him sheepishly.
“Sure,” he said, handing me the plane. The thrill of holding it in my hands again made me realize how profound my love for it really was.
“Can I keep it if I give you back the knife?” I asked a bit later, without much hope.
“Sure,” he said with a happy smile. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I was really grateful to that generous boy, and felt happy for the rest of the day.
Chapter 21. The Model Airplane
A few days later, Lisa bought me a pocketknife. That knife launched me into my next major project—carving pitched-blade propellers.
I had seen a model airplane with a pitched-blade propeller that could be wound up on a bundle of rubber bands stretched through the length of the fuselage. The ingenuity of the pitched-blade propeller blew my mind. So that’s what makes planes fly! From that point on, all of my aero¬nautical endeavors were focused on carving pitched-blade propellers out of sticks of wood. When I carved, I held the stick of wood in my left hand with the wrist pressed against my left ribs for support, and the knife in my right hand with the wrist pressed against my right ribs. As a result, my ribs were constantly sore due to the back-and-forth carving movements, which rubbed my wrists against my ribs for hours every day. But this discomfort did not deter me.
As soon as I had made a few good propellers, I proceeded to try to make the rest of the model airplane out of pieces of wood, matchsticks, and toothpicks. I glued them together laboriously to form the skeleton over which I intended to glue the paper. Although I did not have the ability or knowledge to match the model airplane I had seen in the store, I persevered in my attempts for weeks.
For my eighth birthday, on May 1, 1939, Lisa bought me a model airplane set. Within a few days I had assembled the plane. Now I saw what a real model plane looked like and realized how futile all of my amateurish efforts of the past few months had been. I admired the plane every day and counted the hours until the weekend, when we would be at the Plateau d’Avron where I would find enough open space to launch the plane on its maiden flight.
The great moment finally arrived. Standing on top of the stone steps of the house, I wound up the propeller with my finger and, with my heart racing, launched the plane. I watched breathlessly as it flew gracefully over the garden’s lilac bushes. Where will it land? Moments later, I had my answer. It crashed into the garden’s stone gate and broke into smithereens. I was heartbroken, and from that day on, my enthusiasm for model airplanes was gone.
Chapter 22. At 18 Rue de l’Atlas
Raymond had given Lisa a job in his jewelry store in Paris. Since the job required Lisa to be in the city every day, we moved to a small one room apartment at 18 rue de l’Atlas, near the store, in the northeastern sector of Paris near the Butchaumont Park.
We packed our things into Raymond’s Chenard and he drove us from Robinson to the new apart¬ment. While Lisa and Raymond were carrying our belongings upstairs, I stood watch by the parked car. In front of the Chenard another car was also being unloaded. Dozens of oil paintings were being taken from that car and stacked up against the wall of the building. I had a chance to study them while I waited, as people were taking them inside one by one. These were the first impressionistic oil paintings I had ever seen, and I felt that I got some new ideas and learned something from looking at them.
At that winter’s New Year’s Eve party, which took place at the Plateau d’Avron, Lisa met Paul Rosegg, who was also from Vienna and was now living in Paris. After that party, Paul often visited our apartment in the rue de l’Atlas. He would enter¬tain me with jokes and magic tricks, and brought Lisa and me free samples of the sausages and chocolates he sold. The only thing I didn’t like about his visits was that when Lisa put me to sleep at night she placed a folding screen around my bed.
One time Lisa wanted to go out with Paul for the evening and asked me whether I would be willing to stay home by myself. As special inducements, she offered me free access to a box of chocolates laid out on my bed and permission to stay up with my books as late as I wished, provided I stayed in bed. I agreed.
About an hour after Lisa’s departure, it began to thunder. I became frightened and soon panicked. I wondered whether the building had a lightning rod and decided that the only way to find out was to go and ask the concierge. So I got out of bed and went out into the hallway to look for her. When I realized that I didn’t know where to find her I began to cry. Tenants streamed out of their apartments and, at my insist¬ence, took me to the concierge, who reassured me that I had nothing to fear, as the building did indeed have a lightning rod.
Chapter 23. Memories of Paris
That winter and the following spring, I fell in love with Paris. I was enthralled by the Tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Champs Élysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Conciergerie, the grands boulevards, the métro, the colorful advertisements, the lights, the stores, and the unique look and smell of Paris’ streets. I spent endless hours drawing the Tour Eiffel, paying special attention to its exact curvature and the propor¬tions and placement of its three stories. Whenever we took the métro to the center of Paris—always a big treat—I was excited by the knowledge that we were passing under the Seine. I was fascinated by the serial cartoon-illustrated Dubonnet ads on the walls of the métro tunnel, which read DU BO (with the man looking at the glass)… DU BON (with the man drinking from the glass)… DUBONNET (with the man pouring himself more).
On the Champs Élysées there was a café all of whose interior walls were made of glass. Behind the glass panes there was a space in which parakeets and other tropical birds flew around. I was fascinated by those birds and always looked forward to going to that café to watch them.
On my eighth birthday, Lisa took me to the Place de la Concorde.
“Okay, Franzi,” she said, “You now have your choice between seeing Walt Disney’s new movie Snow White, or going to the aeronautical museum in the Petit Palais.” This was an impossible choice for me. I had never been to the movies and visiting the aeronautical museum had been my dream for months. We ended up doing both that day.
Other thrills during those months in Paris included a trip to the top of the Tour Eiffel with Lisa and the woman who had been my pediatrician in Vienna, Dr. Saxl. We went for delicious lunches at Lucy and Raymond’s home in Paris. Lucy was a brilliant cook who introduced me to delicacies like coquilles St. Jacques. I also ate in French restaurants for the first time. Exposures to French cuisine helped wean me from my former provincial tastes, which had been pretty much limited to Wiener Schnitzl, potato salad, Naturschnitzl, and hardboiled eggs.
In spite of the excitement of these discoveries and the excellent treatment I received, I missed Vienna and my family terribly, and my homesickness always lay just beneath the surface. Every small reminder of Vienna, be it a tune, a letter from Mother, or a story, would elicit tears.
Chapter 24. School in Paris
When it became evident that Mother would not be picking me up any time soon, Lisa felt that I shouldn’t miss any more school. So, in January of 1939, she enrolled me in the local Paris public school for the spring semes¬ter.
I was apprehensive about starting second grade in the middle of the school year after having been out of school for so long. I didn’t know much French yet, and was intimidated by the assigned readings and small print in a book called Tom Pouce et Rikiki (Tom Thumb and Rikiki), which I didn’t understand. I thought that Tom and Pouce were two different people, and didn’t know that pouce means thumb.
The friendly young teacher immediately took a special interest in me. Every day she would take me on her lap, with the whole class of 38 children watching, and help me catch up by teaching me the material I had missed the previous semester. She quickly taught me carrying and borrowing in addition and subtrac¬tion. In most French schools, grades were expressed in terms of rank in the class. At the end of the first marking period she ranked me second. My new best friend Alain was ranked first. At the end of the semester, she ranked me first and Alain second.
I was in love with Alain. The high point of each school day for me was recess, when I could spend time with him. I loved him for his intelli¬gence, gentleness, generosi¬ty, and cute round buttocks. I dreaded the thought of parting with him at the end of the semester.
When that day arrived, Lisa came to pick me up. I had a lump in my throat as I said good-bye to Alain for the last time. As Alain walked up a staircase, we main¬tained eye contact through the banister. To delay the loss of eye contact as he neared the top of the staircase, he stooped lower with each step until his face was close to his feet. He lingered in that position for a few more seconds before taking the final steps that took him out of my sight.
Chapter 25. Erich and Lisl’s Visit
One Sunday, in May of 1939, Lisa’s brother Erich Ziegler and his wife Lisl (Fritzi Zimmermann’s sister) joined the family gathering at the Plateau d’Avron [PLATE 3, LOWER RIGHT].
I remembered Erich fondly from Vienna where he had sometimes taken me on long walks through the Prater. Erich, a physician, had a great sense of humor and was a warm and kind person. I also remembered his departure from Vienna to Prague by airplane, back in the spring of 1938. Our family and I had gone to see him off at a small airport. I remembered the sight and sound of Erich’s plane finally taking off and disappearing into the hazy distance. Just as memorable for me was a swallowtail caterpillar I found on some tomato plants that grew around the airport entrance, while the grownups were waiting at the airfield for the takeoff. I took that caterpillar home and over the next few weeks saw it pupate and turn into a swallowtail.
When Erich and Lisl arrived at the Plateau d’Avron, they brought me two little colibris (hummingbirds) in a small square cage as a present. I was thrilled. During the following days I spent hours watching those beautiful little birds with their shimmering and iridescent green plumage. Unfortunately both colibris died within a week. Marie, the Feingolds’ housekeeper, said that they died as a result of being chilled after a bath. She suggested that we take them to the cemetery and give them a decent burial. The following Sunday, Marie, two other children, and I took a long walk through the countryside to the cemetery. She also took us to some rural chapels where she showed me how to pray in proper Catholic fashion. I went along with it to please her.