Perfectly Ordinary People(19)

The next morning we got up and it felt like we’d been moved to Germany overnight. We didn’t know it yet, but Hitler had decided to re-annex Alsace. There were already flyers on the lamp posts saying it was forbidden to speak French and a few days later they changed all the street names to German. Actually, and this is a funny story for you: they made the mistake of renaming Rue de Sauvage [NT: Savage Road] Adolf Hitlerstrasse. That really made everyone snigger. It was so appropriate! When the Nazis realised their mistake they renamed it Wildermann Strasse. My father used to secretly refer to it as Sauvage Hitlerstrasse. But having to speak German was a shock. Most of us knew how to speak a bit of German, but we weren’t by any means fluent. I remember my mother asking my father if it was too late to leave now, and he said, ‘Leave? To go where?’

‘Anywhere,’ Mum said.

But Dad replied that this was our home. He said that if things went well, if the Germans had learned the lessons of the Great War, then maybe we wouldn’t have to leave. And if things went badly – and he thought they would go badly – then someone would have to be there to kick the bastards out. Mum pleaded on our behalves, but Dad said that for better or worse it was our home as well.

The following day, defeated French troops began streaming through the town on their way to German prison camps. They marched through Mulhouse by the thousands – actually I think there were hundreds of thousands – it went on day and night. And all the families who’d sent their men to the front stood at the side of the road calling out the names of those they’d lost contact with, hoping to get news. No one ever knew if they really wanted to know – perhaps someone would tell them their father or brother or son was one of the hundred thousand dead. Or maybe someone would answer to his own name, which meant he was on his way to a prison camp – the Germans had taken almost two million prisoners, I think. So was it better to hear or not? But people stood and called names all the same, and the noise of that marching and calling was awful; it was chilling. When I went to bed at night I’d stuff bits of material in my ears to try to drown out the noise but it always worked its way into my dreams, turning them into nightmares. I had constant nightmares during the war. Everyone did.

About a week after the Germans had arrived Leah’s younger sister, Dinah, knocked on our door. It was late at night, well after the curfew, so we were scared to open the door. She’d come to tell us, tearfully, that the Germans were making them leave, and by the next morning when I got to work, they were gone. The whole family had been sent packing – along with thousands of others – over the border to France. The Germans called it ‘cleaning out the undesirables’ from what they now considered was part of Germany. They’d had to leave in the early hours with whatever they could carry. Many left with food still on the table.

So with the Rosenbergs gone, who ran the bakery?

That first day a soldier asked me if I knew how to bake bread and I lied and said I didn’t, so they sent me home. And then two days later a German man called Schumacher knocked on the door and told me to get back to work. I never knew, or dared ask, where he and his wife had popped up from, but from that point on they ran the bakery. The bread they made was horrible, and the locals all joked that it tasted like shoe leather. Oh, you didn’t get the joke, did you? Schumacher means shoemaker. So we had a baker called shoemaker who made bread that tasted like shoe leather.

And do you know what became of the Rosenbergs?

I do, I’m afraid. They spent some time moving around in occupied France and then got over the border to what was then Zone Libre. Leah’s brother, Joshua, got separated from the others at some point and escaped to America, but her parents, grandmother and sister Dinah were all interned by the Vichy regime and then shipped off to the Sobibor extermination camp, where they died in ’43. Leah died earlier on, in Vorbruck-Schirmeck camp in late 1940.

My God, that’s horrific. Is there a reason Leah died first?

Yes, it was because she didn’t leave at the same time. Her family went when the Germans kicked them out, so they were rounded up later on in France. But Leah didn’t believe that the Germans were sending them to France at all. She was convinced that they were all going to be shot at the side of the road, so she and her husband went into hiding.

I’m guessing that by now people’s illusions about the polite Germans had begun to fade?

Oh, totally. They only pretended to be friendly for a few days – just long enough to fill the town with troops. I think it was about day four when they started rounding up the Jews and shipping them off, and then after that it was the communists and gypsies and any criminals. People who’d fought in the Great War, and homosexuals, of course. There were so many people the Nazis didn’t like.

Were you scared they’d come for you?

Not so much. Unless you were caught working for the resistance or something, women generally slipped under the German radar. Nazism, like most ‘isms’ of the time, was pretty macho. I just don’t think they considered women important enough to spend any time worrying about lesbianism. But I was terrified for my father – he’d been wounded in the First World War, after all – and for Pierre and Johann and all our friends. Everyone I knew was in some kind of danger.

I’m wondering: how did the Germans know who was who?

I’m sorry . . . Who was who? I don’t . . . ?

How did they know who was communist and who was gay, for example? How did they know who’d fought in World War One?