Alex's Wake (25 page)

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.