The Woman I Wanted to Be (3 page)

My father arrived in Brussels two years after my mother and her family moved to Belgium. He was seventeen in 1929 and was planning to follow in his brother’s footsteps and train to be a textile engineer, when something went very wrong in Kishinev. My grandfather’s business went bankrupt, which actually killed him, and my grandmother was no longer able to send money to my future father. He stopped studying, although I am not sure he ever officially entered school in Belgium, and went to work, taking any job he could find. He had no plan to go back home and enjoyed his freedom as a young, good-looking man even though his life as a refugee was not always easy.

I
t was the war that brought my parents together. When Germany invaded and occupied Belgium in 1940, many people fled south in what was called L’Exode. Thousands of cars jammed the roads escaping from the occupation. My father and his best friend, Fima, drove south to France and settled, temporarily, in a small hotel in Toulouse. They were young and very handsome and even though it was wartime and the situation was serious, they laughed a lot and had many women
along the way. My mother also arrived in Toulouse with her aunt Line and uncle Simon. They made the trip rather regally in a Cadillac with a driver.

Fima had money but my father did not. He hated being dependent on his friend, so every morning he went around on a bicycle looking for the jobs that had been posted, but in every place he arrived, the job had been taken. “Try the train station,” a sympathetic would-have-been employer suggested. There he met a man named Jean who began the sequence of events that would draw my mother and father together.

“I know someone who needs to go back to Belgium and has to sell a very large amount of dollars because Belgium won’t allow anyone to bring in foreign currency,” Jean told him. “Do you know anyone who wants to buy dollars? He paid thirty-four French francs for them and is willing to sell at thirty-three.” My father certainly didn’t know anyone who wanted to buy dollars, so he paid little attention. A few days later, completely by accident, he met another man called Maurice who had a friend looking to buy dollars and was willing to pay a rate of seventy-six French francs for them.

My father couldn’t believe his ears. Was he understanding right? Jean had a seller at thirty-three and Maurice had a buyer at seventy-six. So much profit could be made with the difference. The problem was that my father had no idea how to find Jean. He didn’t know his last name or where he lived, so he raced around Toulouse on his bicycle for three days and three nights, looking for him. On the fourth day, my father went to the cinema and, realizing he had left his newspaper when he came out of the theater, went back for it—and bumped into Jean!

It took days to smooth out the many complications and finalize the transaction, because the sum was very large and my father had to
prove he could deliver the money. He had to borrow some from his friend Fima to do a small sample transaction first, to prove he was trustworthy and, after a few days, completed the whole exchange. Overnight he went from having no money at all to actually being rich. In his diary my father recalls feeling so ashamed of his worn-out suit during the transaction that the day it was completed he bought three suits, six shirts, and two pairs of shoes. His good fortune didn’t end there. As fate would have it, the man who was buying the dollars turned out to be my mother’s uncle Simon. And that is how my parents met.

Theirs was not an immediate romance. Leon Halfin was twenty-nine, ten years older than my mother, and very interested in being a ladies’ man. But Lily was a Jewish girl, and as far as he was concerned, you didn’t touch Jewish girls—you married them.

The news from Belgium was that things weren’t so bad under the German occupation, and in October 1941, my parents returned separately to Belgium. My mother couldn’t go to university because of the racial laws, so she went to fashion school, studied millinery, and learned how to make hats. My father, who now had a lot of money, did not go back to Tungsram, the electronics company he had worked for, but became an independent businessman in the radio field in Brussels. They saw each other at gatherings of older relatives and family friends, but my father always treated my mother like a little girl, teasing her and pinching her cheeks. There was no romance although they clearly liked each other. Leon didn’t know my mother had a secret crush on him.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1942, when the SS started rounding up Jews in Belgium and deporting them that the danger began in earnest. Lucie, my father’s very good friend and ex-colleague at Tungsram, advised him to get out of Belgium and flee to Switzerland.
He bought fake papers from the Belgian underground and began to plan his escape under the assumed and typical Belgian name of Leon Desmedt. He did not go alone. Lucie arranged for Gaston Buyne, a nineteen-year-old Christian boy to accompany him through France to the Swiss border. In a surprising turn of events, they were joined by Renée, a nineteen-year-old girl my father had just met. She was a Belgian Catholic girl who had fallen in love with my father and wanted to run away with him. Her mother had recently died and she didn’t like the woman her father had taken up with. That was the unlikely trio who set out together on August 6, 1942.

The train ride to Nancy, where they would transfer to another train to Belfort, was very dangerous. Gaston, a Belgian with legal papers, carried a lot of Leon’s money—banknotes in his shoulder pads, gold coins in his shoes and socks, and more Swiss notes in his toiletry bag. Because Gaston looked Jewish, much more so than Leon, he turned out to be the perfect foil. There were many, many checkpoints at which the German SS would randomly order male passengers to pull down their trousers to check whether they were circumcised. Gaston was ordered to drop his pants. “Sorry,” the SS man apologized to him, and didn’t bother with my father who was sitting next to him.

They arrived in Nancy at night and checked into a hotel. The train to Belfort left at 5:15 a.m. and they had another run-in on board with a young SS soldier who wanted both Gaston and Leon to drop their pants. This time it was Renée who saved Leon by smiling coquettishly at the young soldier until he moved on to other passengers.

Belfort was even more dangerous. There were many, many Jewish refugees checking into the same hotel, but my father’s fake ID saved him. The German SS raided the hotel that night and arrested all the Jews, but not Leon Desmedt. (My father’s diary records that he made
love to Renée twice that night.) Later they heard that all the people arrested that night were killed.

Leon and Renée parted ways with Gaston the next morning as they approached the Swiss border. They took a bus to Hérimoncourt, at which point Leon hired a local guide to lead them through the mountains and pastures into Switzerland just six kilometers away. That last leg of the escape cost fifteen hundred French francs with no guarantee of success. A few more refugees joined in as they met the guide at five a.m., among them a woman with a baby. She gave the baby a sleeping pill so he wouldn’t cry, and they set out on foot through the alpine mountains to the border. “Run, run, run in that direction,” the guide pointed and sent them off on their own. I remember my father telling me that it was the cows and their noisy bells that made their escape possible. By following the bells, Leon and Renée arrived at the Swiss border town of Damvant on August 8, 1942.

“Why do you carry so much money?” the border police asked my father. He told them that he was an industrialist from Belgium, but the police did not believe his story. “Your papers are fake,” they said. They confiscated his money but did allow him to enter Switzerland. “You can claim it back when you leave,” the police told him.

My father was very lucky. Although he remained under surveillance by the Swiss authorities, and was unable to travel freely or have access to his money without going through long bureaucratic requests, he spent a few fairly pleasant years there. He separated from Renée, who eloped with a policeman soon after their arrival, and began to miss Lily, the vivacious “little” girl he’d left behind in Belgium. The occupation of Brussels had become very severe and he was worried about her. Lily and her parents had to abandon their apartment and live separately. She was hiding in a resistance house where she worked. My
aunt Juliette sent her son, my cousin Salvator, to live with his Christian Belgian nanny.

Curious Lily went to her family’s apartment one day and discovered that the SS had ransacked it and stolen all their belongings. She also discovered something that would change her life. There was a letter in the mailbox, an unexpected letter from Switzerland, from Leon, the man she had met in Toulouse and never forgotten. After reading and rereading it many times, she responded. It started a daily correspondence between them, carefully crafted because all the letters had to go through censors as the wide blue stripe across the stationery indicated. I am lucky to possess those letters, which, over time, became more and more intimate and passionate. They wrote about their love and about the moment they would meet again after the war, that they would marry, build a life together, have a family, and be happy forever. It was all about hope and love.

Then, suddenly, Lily’s letters stopped. (It was then, I recall my father telling me, that the mirror in his bedroom, on which he had taped a photo of my mother, fell and broke.)

He wrote to her again and again, begging in vain for an answer. On July 15, two months after my mother’s arrest, he received a letter from Juliette, my mother’s older sister, written in code to get through the censors.

“Dear Leon,” she wrote. “I have very bad news. Lily has been hospitalized.”

W
hen my mother returned from Germany in June 1945, my father was still in Switzerland. By the time he came back to Brussels four months later, she had gained back much of the weight she had lost, but she wasn’t the same naïve, mischievous, fun-loving, passionate girl
he had been corresponding with and planned to marry. That girl was gone forever. This new young woman had endured true horrors and would carry the wounds forever.

In his diary, my father wrote with great honesty about their reunion. He admitted that he barely recognized the girl he had been separated from for more than two years. She was different, a stranger to him. Lily sensed his unease and told him he was under no obligation to marry her. The love was still there, he reassured her as he hid his doubts away. They were married on November 29, 1945.

The doctor warned them, “No matter what, you have to wait a few years before having a baby. Lily isn’t strong enough for childbirth and the baby may not be healthy.” Six months later, I was accidentally conceived. Remembering the doctor’s warning, both my mother and father were concerned. They thought they could get rid of the pregnancy by taking long rides on his motorcycle over the cobblestoned streets, but it didn’t work. Finally one morning my father brought home some pills to induce a miscarriage. My mother threw those pills out the window.

I was born healthy and strong in Brussels on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1946, a miracle. Because of the price my mother paid for that miracle, I never felt I had the right to question her, complain, or make her life more difficult. I was always a very, very good little grown-up girl, and for some reason felt it was my role to protect her. In his diaries, my father confesses that at first he was disappointed that I was not a boy, but within a few days he had totally accepted me and fallen in love with my mother again.

I
have long suspected that if I hadn’t been born, my mother might have killed herself. If nothing else, my existence gave her a focus and
a reason to keep going. For all the strength and determination of her personality, she was extremely fragile. She hid it very well, and when people were around she was always light and fun. But when she was alone, she was often overtaken by uncontrollable sadness. When I came home from school in the afternoons, I would sometimes find her sitting in her darkened bedroom, weeping. Other times, when she picked me up from school, she’d take me to have a patisserie, or antiques shopping, laughing with me and giving no hint of her painful memories.

The people who went to the camps didn’t want to talk about it and the people who weren’t in the camps didn’t want to hear about it, so I sensed she often felt like a stranger or an alien. When she did talk about it to me, she would only emphasize the good—the friendships, the laughter, the will to go back home and the dream of a plate of spaghetti. If I asked her how she endured, she would joke and say, “Imagine it is raining and you run in between the drops!” She always told me to trust the goodness of people. She wanted to protect me, but I realized that it is also how she protected herself . . . denying the bad . . . always denying the bad and demanding that the good forces win and, no matter what, never appearing a victim.

She did the best she could to put the war behind her. She had the two sets of tattooed numbers removed. And in a wonderful gesture of defiance, and to override her memory of the bitter cold she’d endured, she bought a very expensive, warm sable coat with the restitution money she got from the German government.

I
spent a lot of time alone as a child, reading and imagining a grand life for myself. My childhood went smoothly, though life in Brussels was often gray and boring. I loved my big school, I loved my books, and I was a very good student. I loved my brother and my girlfriends,
Mireille Dutry and Myriam Wittamer, whose parents owned the best patisserie in Brussels. On the weekends, our family spent Sundays in the country at my great-great-aunt and -uncle’s villa. They had a beautiful house on the edge of a large forest, the Forêt de Soignes. I loved walking in the woods, picking chestnuts in the winters and berries in the summers. My father would play cards with the men and my mother gossiped with the women. We ate a lot of good food. On the long, gray days, I lost myself reading Stendhal, Maupassant, Zola, and, on a lighter note, my favorite,
The Adventures of Tintin,
comic books about a daring young boy reporter created by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. I lived vicariously through Tintin’s travels and exploits. Would I ever discover all these exotic places in the world? It seemed like nothing would ever happen to me.