Pedro Lilienfeld

1. My Early Childhood Years

My father, Erich Lilienfeld, was born in 1905 in the small town of Merzig in the Saarland region of Germany, not far from the French border. My mother, Gerda Anker, was born in 1906 in Berlin, Germany. They married in 1931. My paternal grandmother, Julia Berl, was an opera singer who — after her first husband, Isidor Lilienfeld, died — married Louis Fourestier, who was to become the principal conductor at the Paris Opera.

My father graduated as an electrical engineer from the prestigious Technische Hochschule (now called Technische Universität) in Berlin in 1929. He started his professional career as an engineer at a company in Berlin, Germany, that manufactured electrical and electronic equipment. He was one of several dozen in the engineering design and testing pool. The company, named Aron Elektrizitätswerke, AG at the time he started work there, had been founded in 1883 by a Prof. Dr. Hermann Aron who was a physicist who developed the first accurate electromechanical watt-hour meter. In 1923 the organization started the fabrication of radio receivers with the trademark name of Nora, the reversed spelling of Aron, a patently Jewish name to be avoided for obvious marketing reasons. The company became Heliowatt Werke Elektrizitäts AG in 1933 before being forcibly integrated into Siemens in 1935 after the son of H. Aron, his successor, had been interned in a concentration camp. This “sale” to Siemens bought him his freedom, and he and his family then managed to escape to the US.

As he described to me in later years, the morning after Hitler’s takeover in January of 1933, when my father arrived at work, he found to his utter surprise and disgust that none of the other engineers returned his morning greeting treating him as if he had suddenly become a non-person. All of them were sporting brown shirts, in obvious solidarity with Hitler and his SA henchmen. The image of the uniformly enthusiastic identification of that engineering staff with Nazism was to be emblematic of Germany’s absurd path during the subsequent decade. This crass behavior may have been for us a blessing in disguise. Perhaps it saved my family (and eventually myself) from the grim fate in store for six million European Jews. An understanding supervisor at his company proposed that my father transfer to their Spanish subsidiary which was searching for a technical director. My father accepted immediately.

My father had been labeled at that time as a “bohemian”, an artistically inclined non- conformist, perhaps the antithesis of the typical engineer of our times. For him, the prospect of a short stint (In 1933, the prevailing impression was that Hitler’s reign was a passing storm which was not expected to last more than a year, or so) in exotic Spain must have appeared quite enticing. Gerda, my mother, although from a well-to-do bourgeois family, had completed a secretarial-type high school and developed adequate language skills in English, French and Spanish in order to work as a translator at an international patent office in Berlin. She could communicate with the Spaniards, a distinct advantage even over my father whom she always considered an intellectual demigod, food for her perennial and yet comfortable inferiority complex.

Madrid, 1933. A veritable culture shock after a worldly and dynamic Berlin. An apartment near the beautiful Retiro park, and an engineering job for my father who commuted to work on his motorcycle. His first efforts at mastering the language of Cervantes and Lorca were coached by his coworkers: choice curses to be hurled at inept motorists. He nearly provoked an international incident when, without suspecting the meaning of the epithet, he castigated a driver with “¡cabrón!” (acquiescing cuckold!).

Summer arrived soon and brutally. Madrid in pre-air-conditioning times was then studiously avoided by those who could afford escaping into the nearby Sierra de Guadarrama or elsewhere, and to be suffered through by the rest, including my parents. After work, my father would lie in the bathtub filled with cold water for an hour, or so, whenever the temperature exceeded 100 ⁰F, a frequent happening during July and August. Overdressed men and women (the latter mostly in black) quite often collapsed from heat prostration in the streets of Madrid. Winter, on the other hand, tended to be gentle and a snow dusting was infrequent.

My mother was overwhelmed by unaccustomed smells that pervaded the air: frying cod in olive oil, garlic, rancid butter (butter was mostly rancid since there were no refrigerators). At night, it was the street sounds that surprised her such as the hourly cry of the ‘sereno’ (night watchman), ¡Ave María Santísima, son las tres de la madrugada! (Most Holy saint Mary, it’s three in the morning). These men also carried large key bundles with which they opened the houses within their watch when the owners would return at late hours (often inebriated and unable to find their own house-key). Most cafés were barred to women, and it was utterly unbecoming for a young lady to be seen unaccompanied on the streets of Madrid. On my father’s first work day my mother had waited reading on a park bench a short distance from his work place. She found herself surrounded by a pack of mumbling, salivating, shabbily dressed old guys who seemed fascinated by the pretty, dark haired, blue eyed, primly dressed young ‘francesa’.

I was born on May 15, 1934, a “día de fiesta” in Madrid: the day of San Isidro (Saint Isidor). The delivery, attended by a host of nuns, was at the German hospital whose administration had barred the presence of my mother’s German Jewish doctor, perhaps the only German Jewish doctor of Spain at the time.

Soon after, I am placed under the frequent care of a benevolent Spanish “aya” (governess) whom I called “Mía” (mine in Spanish), a most convenient childish abbreviation of her inevitable María, and from whom I learn my first spoken utterances, most befittingly in Spanish, given that my name was Pedro and that my parents eventually opted for my Spanish citizenship. Pedro apparently was the name of choice of my French step-grandfather, Louis Fourestier, who telegraphed his recommendation from Paris upon hearing a, then popular, song by that name. As soon as my incipient vocabulary included the word “caja” (box) I proceeded to apply it rather indiscriminately, even to the shiny new automobile of my father’s boss, and to the dismay of his wife.

A few months after my parents arrived in Madrid, my maternal grandparents, Erich and Alice Anker, followed them abandoning their ancestral Berlin. In retrospect I consider their exodus as an astonishingly farsighted act not shared – that early after the Nazi takeover – by the vast majority of German Jews. I can well comprehend my young parents’ readiness to depart their hostile-turned fatherland. Erich Anker, however, was nearly sixty years old and a very successful and respected member of the rather integrated Jewish community of Berlin. He possessed a significant number of real estate holdings as part of his business, a chauffeur-driven American car (a Buick was considered a status symbol in inter-bellum Germany), summer sojourns in Portofino, and a comfortable villa in Dahlem, a desirably upscale suburb of Berlin. He had fought, as a good German, on the Russian front in the First World War. Against all odds he now decided to uproot himself to Spain, apparently with minimal misgivings, seeing quite clearly the proverbial “writing on the wall”. The only plausible explanation that I can muster for the surprising readiness of the Ankers to depart the comfort of their Berliner lifestyle is that they, as so many others, were under the assumption that the Nazi-Hitler phenomenon was merely a passing black cloud, a momentary – perhaps a year or two, at most – aberration in the course of German history. Two alternative reactions for the Jews of Germany were thus possible: sit it out in the old country, hoping not to be noticed during that “temporary” nightmare, or leave for a while with minimal deracination, hoping for a speedy return to a re-normalized fatherland. Most of those who chose the former path were to perish, caught in their own dilatory trap. My family happened to choose the escape path but, as we will see, it eventually proved to be very nearly insufficient.

My first, albeit fleeting, recollection is being on a beach, presumably San Feliu in Catalonia. Soon after, however, the fratricidal prelude to Europe’s chaos began in Spain. The guns of war resounded in Madrid and I am quoted to have reacted to that man-made thunder with “Hitsla boom-boom”, a somewhat precocious assessment by a diaper-clad incipient political analyst whose utterances obviously reflected the daily concerns of his parents. Eventually, the situation became acutely dangerous and my family decided to depart precipitously abandoning all their possessions in the Spanish capital, not before my parents were to make the first of their series of unsuccessful attempts to emigrate to the US, a matter which I will revisit later.

My father relates the subsequent events:

“For Sunday July 12, 1936, Gerda and I had planned one of our motorcycle trips to the nearby cool Sierra Guadarrama. In the morning at about 6:00 am… cannon shots in the artillery “cuartel” (barracks) in Madrid… We woke up, heard the racket, postponed our trip. The city later erupted with gun fire from roofs, out of windows, the pursuit of priests, killings – the wild chaos of the suddenly beginning Civil War… We did not believe the hostilities would last more than a couple of days, and decided to go for a few weeks on vacation to San Feliù de Guixols. We spent two wonderful weeks there but a return to Madrid soon went out of question. The civil war would not end soon. It was decided to leave Spain and visit my mother and her husband, Louis Fourestier, for a couple of weeks. So, Gerda with Pedro and her parents traveled to Paris, while I dutifully returned

to Madrid. The Ankers then continued their vacation and went to Vienna for a couple of weeks.”

“Soon I was harassed by Republican partisans urging me to join the International Brigade to resist the Fascists. I refused, and 4 weeks later, urged by a telegram from Gerda, decided to leave Madrid and join the family in Paris. It was risky, even dangerous, to obtain the exit visa: I trotted several times to the Madrid War Ministry building, and finally was allowed to fill out a form with many questions about why I had left Germany in the first place, my curriculum vitae, and indicate the reason why I wanted to leave Spain. The officer then left the room with that form in his hand. I sat alone for about 30 minutes on my chair, sure of being watched for what I might be doing while alone sitting at the other side of the large desk covered with stacks of papers… The officer reappeared, and without saying a word stamped the travel document with the visa, and let me go.”

“When we eventually returned to Madrid – four and a half years later – in March 1941, we went to our house to find out what had happened: The apartment was empty – everything had been stolen, and my motorcycle, left in a garage when we went vacationing, had also vanished.”

Resuming my 1936 narrative, we traveled by train from Madrid to Paris, a journey that my mother recounted as particularly exhausting because of my relentlessly mercurial behavior. I do recall that first nighttime impression of the banks of the Seine as viewed from the taxi in which my Parisian grandparents (the Fourestiers) transported us to their home on the rue du Bèlvédère in Boulogne-sur-Seine. On seeing the shimmering reflections of light in the water I am purported to have pointed my two-year old finger and exclaimed appropriately: “Agua”. After that my incipient Spanish language skills hastily retreated into a five-year long remission during which French and German alternated and competed within my intellectual development.

My father set up shop in the basement-like lower floor of the Fourestier’s house, custom building radios and sound reproduction systems for the well-to-do music amateurs of the circle of friends and benefactors of the Parisian musical scene, including members of the influential Jewish Mayer family.

Upstairs, in the beautiful music room adjacent to the living room, my grandmother, would give her singing lessons to the French operatic divas. Frequent visitors to this beautiful house during that period were – among many others I can no longer recall – the brothers Busch (of quartet fame); Martial Singher, a well-known baritone; Ida Rubinstein, a dancer/performer who commissioned Ravel to compose the Boléro, and choreographed and danced for Debussy. I remember her in particular because she sometimes would lift me up in her arms, and gave me a set of miniature toy cars the last remnants of which accompanied me during our World War II wanderings. There was also Germaine Lubin, an operatic singer who later was to be accused of collaboration with the Germans during the Nazi occupation of France.

My life in Paris during the three years after our arrival in 1936 was that of a thoroughly pampered little boy, surrounded exclusively by adults who hovered over me trying to satisfy my puerile whims. My utter unfamiliarity with others of my age, combined with my mother’s somewhat asocial idiosyncrasies, made me neurotically shy to the point of experiencing paralyzing fear in the presence of other children (especially in the absence of my parents), feelings that were probably compounded by my distinctly girlish appearance. My mother insisted on letting my blond hair grow beyond shoulder length locks (a result of some subconscious anti-male phobia) until Fourestier, my step- grandfather, against her will, had those locks lopped off at a nearby barber shop.

My first recollection of the Paris Opéra was a performance of Le Festin de l’Araignée (The Feast of the Spider) by Albert Roussel, which impressed me as I still remember the gigantic spider web and the dancer hanging from it. On returning from that performance our taxi collided with another vehicle and I recall distinctly that all adults got very excited (while I did not really know what was going on), made me leave the car, then held me next to the busy Parisian street sidewalk, and proceeded to lower my pants entreating me to void my bladder, on the old-fashioned misconception that children in this kind of assumed shock should be made to urinate.

Flashes of pleasant memories from that gilded sojourn in inter-bellum Paris include walks in the Bois de Boulogne with various dogs, sitting on my grandmother’s lap and listening to fairy-tales or her gentle singing, the noise of the Rou-rou (the dumb-waiter elevator used to raise and lower food and dishes between the kitchen and the dining room), the hourly creaking of the 18th century grand-father clock in the dining room, the excitement of – non-denominational – Christmas with melodious singing of O Tannenbaum, and other German traditional folk ‘lieder’.

A distinctly painful recollection is associated with my brutal and almost fatal bout of whooping cough which lasted over half a year, and compelled my mother to take me on a long recuperative visit to the shores of Lake Lucern where we stayed in the delightful small town of Weggis. That childhood illness resulted in a further diminution of my already exiguous physique, including a deep hollow below my breastbone which was to accompany me for the rest of my life, although it became less and less apparent as time passed. Other medical recollections include a partial excision of my tonsils preceded by an ether–induced loss of consciousness, and followed by an ice cream cone to soothe the discomfort and staunch the flow of tears. I also remember having scarlet fever and measles, the childhood burdens of the pre-vaccination Middle Ages.

On the subject of Christmas, the environment in which I grew up in Paris was utterly irreligious. Neither my grandmother nor my parents practiced Judaism in any form. And neither did Fourestier practice his ancestral Catholicism. For me Christmas had no religious connotation, it was simply a time to set up a small decorated tree and receive some minor gifts, all combined with more pleasant singing.

I was the undisputed center of attention of that thoroughly adult world of family, friends, artists and miscellaneous acquaintances. My pathological timidity was provoked to extremes when I was taken to a kindergarten where I refused any contact with my peers, and later when I had to spend several months at an Ecole Maternelle at one block from the apartment on the rue Paul Michaud to which we had moved. I still remember the deep and traumatic discomfort of being merely noticed by other children at that school where, for the sake of convenience, my given name was Gallicized to Pierre, although within the Fourestier entourage I was always called by the German diminutive Peterlein, for the rest of their lives and beyond. My real given name of Pedro did not resurface — and then gradually — after our return to Spain in 1941.

Mention of my childhood in Paris managed to enter the corpus of French literature. My father had a close family acquaintance in his birthplace Merzig, the Steinthals. During our Paris sojourn, Wally Steinthal and her daughter Eva, a few years older than I, visited the Fourestiers with some frequency. I only have a fuzzy recollection of Eva, the young girl, but I do remember the mother, a gynecologist. Eva eventually became a French writer of some note after the war. One of her books was an autobiography about her early years preceding World War II, and is entitled ‘Mon enfance avant the déluge’ (My Childhood Before the Debacle). In it she describes an incredibly unsettled and troubled childhood that ends with the suicide of her mother, Wally, just before she was to be interned by the German-controlled authorities in Paris. Eva Steinthal also mentions several times that during her visits to the Fourestier’s house — which she characterizes as a haven of beauty — she saw me as a blond blue-eyed little boy – Fourestier’s grandson – to whom she would tell stories. Recently, on searching the Internet for information about her, I came across the photo of Wally Steinthal, her mother. I was utterly shocked at recognizing her some 64 years later. Eva Steinthal, whose nom de plume was Eve Dessarre, died of cancer in 1990, at the age of 64.

Around the age of four I started to suffer – and there is no more adequate expression for it – from recurring nightmares. These would burden me every night, and involved a mythical and largely invisible being whose abode was any hanging ceiling lamp from where it would descend to terrorize me. It had a name: Rezinus. Sometimes it would pursue me through rooms whose lights only flickered briefly when turned on. Or, I was compelled to summon it by glaring at a dark and threatening cloud. Eventually, I learned how to escape the demonic pursuit: by turning over in my bed just in time, at the climactic point, and I would wake up – with a frenetically pounding heart – and be safe, at least for the moment. These nightmares persisted until I was about 10 or 11 years old, after which they occurred more and more sporadically.

My mother made what was to be her last attempt at furnishing beautifully our home in the new apartment with rather handsome modern oak and other light colored furniture which I remember distinctly. I also recall that I was extremely afraid of being swallowed by the bathtub drain which, I insisted, could not be opened until I was safely out.

In the summer of 1939 my parents rented some rooms, together with other family members, in Saint Brévin, a resort town on the Atlantic coast, near St. Nazaire. I remember the pine trees which grew almost to the shore line; a big shrimp dinner at which I astonished Fourestier with an unprecedentedly ravenous appetite – considering my heretofore exiguous diet; bicycle rides in the small streets near the ocean; another traumatizing, although well-intentioned, attempt by my parents to get me to join an organized play-group on the beach (athletic teacher, huge beach ball, and several other children); jelly fish on the beach; massive evening mosquito-hunts in our bedroom using slipper-against-the-wall throws at which my father excelled (screened windows had not reached that part of the world). My father and Fourestier came from Paris for weekend visits, and the rest of us, including my mother’s parents, stayed in St. Brévin for several months until — what I can only characterize as — the day on which our entire lifestyle suddenly collapsed…It was the 3rd of September of 1939.

The French declaration of war on Germany immediately unleashed the following chain of events. My father, who had, several months before, volunteered for the French army reflecting his anti-Nazi feelings, could not be enlisted because he was a German citizen. And as such he was classified automatically as an alien, a potential enemy – as the French would label “étrangers indésirables” (undesirable foreigners) and placed in an internment camp for such aliens. The rest of us, that is my mother, my maternal grandparents (Erich and Alice Anker) and I were ordered by the French government to immediately relocate to the small city of Chateaubriant in nearby Brittany, one of a few selected locations in the French provinces where foreign women, children and the elderly were to congregate and remain until further notice, presumably to keep such people from traveling around, and be under surveillance to prevent so called “fifth- column activities” by “non-able-bodied” aliens during wartime. Travel from such locations was thereafter forbidden (except with special documentary dispensation) under threat of summary execution. I believe that we had to move directly from our vacation spot to the assigned town without being able to gather any of our Parisian belongings. All this, of course, did not apply to the Fourestiers in Paris who were French citizens, and with whom we tried to stay in contact as long as possible, and who attempted by various means to help my father and the rest of us in whatever way they could.

Initially, we stayed in various inns in Chateaubriant for several weeks. I remember one of them quite well. It was a country farm and the family included two young women in their late teens or early twenties who were very kind to me. One of them was particularly attractive and awakened a definite liking in my incipient five-year old manhood. I also remember that, among the few toys that I had been able to retain, there was a French soldier’s cap and sword. My mother decided that the possession of that hat could get us into trouble if the war turned in favor of Germany, and decided to dispose of it by stuffing it into the toilet bowl (toilets must have been more forgiving then). Eventually we rented the lower floor of a private home owned by the local Coteux family who lived above us on the second floor.

In the meantime, we had been able to determine the whereabouts of my father through information provided by the Fourestiers. My mother and I went to visit him in Les Sables d’Olonne. I distinctly remember the large communal sleeping hall with straw pallets along one long wall, and the camp mascot in the enclosed yard of the facility: a raven whose wings had been clipped to prevent its departure. Later, my father was to describe to me that an impromptu chess club was created there in which about two dozen fairly good players – including Erich – participated. Most of them had brought a chessboard to the camp in expectation of long idle hours. The best player was no less than the champion of Czechoslovakia, a young man in his twenties who would engage a dozen or more simultaneous contenders without ever seeing their respective boards. Each of these adversaries would sit along the long mess table while the champion was lying on his straw mat. The moves were announced by the players. The best any of them could do was to draw the master.

My father’s fortunes then took a sudden upward turn, unexpected and paradoxical. One day, the internment camp commander ordered my father into his office. The official seemed perplexed. He had a document on his desk indicating that my father was a volunteer of the French army; against all odds, the paperwork had slowly filtered through the French bureaucratic maze. For a few days my father mutated from inmate to guard of the camp, after which he was released. On the strength of his engineering background he was then assigned to work at a secret submarine factory in the port city of Le Havre. Shortly after, my mother and I were permitted to join him there. Meanwhile, my maternal grandparents remained in Chateaubriant. We stayed in an apartment on the second floor of a house in Le Havre. It was early spring of 1940. I recall waiting anxiously for my father to return from work every afternoon sitting on a wall outside our temporary home.

Soon, however, the situation in Le Havre became increasingly ominous. Rumors indicated that the strategic port would become a target of German aerial bombardment. My parents decided to send me back to Chateaubriant where my grandparents had remained. In the custody of another German Jewish refugee, a Frau Fürst, who happened to travel in that direction and somehow had the requisite travel authorization, I was returned to that – at least for the time being – inconspicuously safer town in Brittany’s back countryside.

In view of the rapidly deteriorating military situation, the submarine factory ceased its operation and my father was released from his job there. The French authorities, in their helplessness, confusion and xenophobia, re-interned him to another refugee camp for able-bodied foreign undesirables, “The Scum of the Earth”, as the famous writer Arthur Koestler would title the book describing his own similar reminiscences about wartime France.

In the meantime, the paranoia of the French government had reached pitched levels and any unauthorized travel became ever more an invitation to summary execution. My mother was thus trapped in Le Havre, alone, frightened, and unable to rejoin us in Chateaubriant. Very soon, the dreaded aerial bombardment of the port city by German aircraft started. After some initial hesitation, she decided that the risk of illegal train travel was preferable to the distinct possibility of obliteration by the falling bombs that thundered around her. What ensued left her scarred for life. She went to the train station and purchased a ticket to travel to Chateaubriant, normally a 150-mile trip. She had traveled about half that distance when the train was stopped at a checkpoint. An inspector boarded the train and proceeded to review everybody’s papers, going from car to car. My mother surmised what was in store for her. She had no papers authorizing her presence on the train, and if caught she could have been summarily shot as a “fifth columnist”. Before the inspector entered her car, she got up, went to the exit door, looked around outside, and when she didn’t see any of the officials, she ran across the tracks to another stopped train. She boarded it, found a seat and tried, as nonchalantly as possible to regain her composure. She had no idea about the destination of this new train, nor could she ask without arousing suspicion. Eventually, the train started up, continuing its – unknown to my mother – itinerary. A few hours later it, in turn, came to another check point and my mother went through the same frightening escape sequence, narrowly avoiding the inspector’s capture. She related that, with minor variations, she managed to outwit the train inspection routine several more times trying, at the same time, to reach her elusive destination. It took her 36 harrowing hours without sleep or food to finally arrive in Chateaubriant. My grandparents and I, totally unaware of her perilous voyage, were on a walk through town when she stumbled into the Coteux house. I distinctly remember returning home, unsuspecting of her arrival, and finding her lying in a darkened room in a nearly catatonic state.

On at least one occasion, my father was able to visit us. There was a piano at the Coteux home, and I can recall him playing parts of Stravinsky’s Firebird.

Incredibly, considering the circumstances, the Fourestiers managed to send me a new bicycle for my sixth birthday, which arrived in a wooden frame. Although I had learned to ride in Paris, this new bicycle was taller than its little toy-like predecessor and I had to reacquire the skill with the help of my grandfather, Erich Anker, who was willing to run behind me holding on to the seat until I was able to propel myself unaided.

The Coteux family upstairs would, on occasion, invite us to join them, and I remember the old matriarch of the family systematically blaming her small Pekinese lap dog for her own unseemly noises with what became a classic — within our family — utterance of “c’est le Nanuk qui pu!” (it’s the Nanuk who farts).

Very soon, the news on the radio became increasingly frantic. The German Juggernaut was over-running the French defense lines and then proceeded to penetrate deeper and deeper into France. One day, as the Germans had advanced about half way into French territory, the Coteux family packed up and left, presumably to travel southwards joining the multitude of French who clogged the roads hindering any attempts by their military forces to move against the German onslaught. Somehow and mysteriously, Monsieur Coteux would reappear occasionally and, with an archetypal Gallic Epicurean concern, undeterred by the dire circumstances, would give stern but friendly advice to my mother about the proper way to roast a chicken: “Arroser, Madame, il faut l’arroser!”, (Baste, Madame, you have to baste it!) while the Germans were virtually at the town gates.

The fateful day arrived. The Coteux family and a sizable fraction of the French population of Chateaubriant had disappeared for good. It was June 17, 1940, we heard tanks, motorcycles, landing crafts and other military paraphernalia of the German army rumbling through town. Word had circulated that German soldiers would be billeted in Chateaubriant homes, in preparation of the invasion of Britain. Five days later, France signed the armistice with Germany…

Then came the dreaded knock at our door… My grandfather, Erich Anker, opens it and is faced with two young German soldiers, loaded with military gear and holding a motorcycle. As they request in badly broken French – on the assumption that we had to be ‘locals’ – that we let them enter the house, my grandfather takes a bold and dangerous gamble. He cuts short their bumbling utterances by announcing to them, in faultless German, and with nary a hesitation: “Wir sind Juden!”… (We are Jews!). The two soldiers’ reaction is just as unexpected. As if pre-programmed robots, simultaneously they come to attention, click their boot heels and state in unison: “Sind Sie Wertheim oder Tietz!”. Momentarily taken aback, my grandfather then responds that we are not related to either of those two Jewish families — to whom the largest department stores in Berlin had belonged, and who had escaped from the Nazis. This appears to satisfy the two soldiers who then announce that they have no interest in whether we were Jewish or not, which they state “was a matter for the Gestapo”. I remember their last names: Bucholtz and Horn. They must have been between 18 and 20 years old, and most likely dead a few years hence.

In retrospect, I do believe that my grandfather’s daring ‘confession’ was one of several bold moves that were to save us from obliteration. He had felt that if we had attempted to pass for French citizens, the soldiers’ suspicions would have been aroused leading to our immediate denunciation to the Gestapo as spies or else. In fact and to the contrary, the two German soldiers became embarrassingly friendly to us. I was delighted by demonstrations of their weapons and motorcycle which they kept cleaning assiduously. Most uncomfortable were their gifts to us of large boxes of succulent sweets and candies that they had captured from the retreating British troops in the debacle at Dunkerque (or Dunkirk), shortly before. I still have great difficulty comprehending how the British troops could have been in possession of such earthly delights under battlefield conditions and in the midst of a harsh and desperate retreat.

As to the overall situation, our young German ‘guests’ informed us that they were preparing for the immediate invasion of Britain which, in their view, would take place within a few weeks, and which would be concluded victoriously after another month, or so. These recruits had been thoroughly brainwashed into believing that Germany was set to carry out these plans as precisely and as inevitably as clockwork. One of the most striking behavioral characteristics of these two soldiers – and presumably – of the German army at large, if not the majority of Germans, was the degree to which their minds had been manipulated into rigidly programmed beliefs. There was something frighteningly eerie about the uniform and machine-like manner in which their thoughts had been organized. In retrospect, I am loath to attribute such behavior to a – hopefully erstwhile – uniquely German trait of blind acceptance of authority, but I have great difficulty to imagine any other European culture receptive to that degree of mental manipulation.

My mother managed to find temporary work at the town mayor’s office using her French-German translation skills. She was thus also in tune with the local and regional German occupation gossip. She was particularly mindful of the not-so-veiled and more than ominous warning about the Gestapo, volunteered by the two German soldiers, Bucholtz and Horn. The secret police henchmen would eventually swoop in after the fighting troops were to move on. We could not wait for that. My mother quietly and methodically gathered information about the recent creation of Vichy France, the southern region that would remain free of German occupation for another two years, and which represented a potential — relatively speaking — haven, the only one left for us at that point. Fortunately, under the initial German military occupation, the preceding wartime French travel interdictions for foreigners had been forgotten. My mother decided that it was time to make our move.

We packed a few of our belongings – the absolute minimum to avoid arousing suspicion – and traveled south by train to Bordeaux. We rented a small apartment near the center of the city, and my mother proceeded to scout out the situation. Bordeaux was near the newly established border with the unoccupied southern sector, under the puppet regime of Marshall Phillipe Pétain, about whom I will have more to say, later. I remember distinctly that whenever we walked by Bordeaux’s imposing municipal building, where the Nazis had set up their military headquarters, the otherwise rigid German guards, placed at intervals near the building gates, would communicate with each other producing oddly sibilant signals without revealing any distortion of their faces. Another, more pleasing recollection is that of tasting a delicious chocolate cake that my mother had picked up in a food store near our temporary apartment. As food, in general, ceased to be readily available, my earlier dietary fussiness had evaporated and my interest in eating became more normal, while the surrounding circumstances became less and less so.

How to get out of the German army controlled area and into the Vichy zone, however? Border crossings were closely and stringently guarded and controlled. My mother concluded that our only chance – although slim – was to attempt such crossing at the most inconspicuous of such checkpoints. She eventually identified a bus line used mainly by French farmers to carry their small produce and fowl from one side of this newly drawn border to the other. Carrying the smallest possible handbags we embarked on such a bus. It immediately became obvious that we were the only non-French as well as non-farmers taking this ride. I can only surmise the deep anxiety of my mother and her parents as the vehicle rolled through the countryside. My own six-year old awareness was still inchoate.

 At the border checkpoint — about 50 miles southeast of Bordeaux — our bus came to a stop. There were two German guards with machine guns slung over their shoulders who proceeded, with slow and deliberate steps, to walk around the bus while scrutinizing the passengers with piercingly inquisitive gazes through the open windows. It was, after all, summertime. We sat in frozen and suspended animation barely daring to breathe, as my mother related years later. After what seemed an eternity, the two soldiers joined and one of them said to the other in German: ‘You know, there are some Jewish pigs on board. What do you want to do?’… The other guard seemed to ponder while our four lives hung from a thin thread… After a true eternity of some ten seconds he made a gesture of boredom and responded with: ‘Let the pigs go this time, I’m tired’… Moments later, the bus starts up and we are saved… momentarily.

We are now in the so-called unoccupied (by the German forces) southern third of France, administered by the Vichy regime, however beholden to the Nazis. We traveled in a southeastern direction, towards the Languedoc region. Our provisional destination was to be the small port city of Sète, south of Montpellier.

Let us return to my father. We had left him after he had been re-interned in another French concentration camp, this time near Lisieux, in Normandy, just south of Le Havre. There were about one thousand inmates which this time did include some older men. They were ordered to dig trenches on the assumption that World War I would be replayed. It was also a task that would keep the inmates active and tired. By then, my father had lost touch with his two erstwhile internment camp relatives, Herbert and Gerhard Anker, who were to eventually make their own escape by different ways from the European hellhole.

As with us in Chateaubriant, the ominous news about the German advance was watched with growing apprehension. Finally, after hearing of the fall of Paris, the camp commander gave the order to abandon the compound. The inmates were instructed to carry all their possessions and to march westward toward the Atlantic coast, under the surveillance of the guards armed with bayonets which they used to prod the prisoners along. None too soon had they left the camp. Still in view of the marching men, German dive-bombers attacked the compound building setting it on fire. Shortly after, the throng of marchers and their guards on the country road were spotted by the aircraft. Most men – my father among them – managed to dive into a ditch on the side of the road. A few were not so lucky and were mowed down by the low flying planes. Once the attackers departed, the group resumed the march.

The French guards produced a number of bottles of wine and proceeded to get drunk on the way. After several miles, a few of the older inmates, burdened by their possessions, tried to rest on the roadside. The inebriated soldiers, after a few futile attempts at prodding the stragglers on, became enraged and speared them with their bayonets. All semblance of civilized behavior had broken down. Horrified, the rest of the column continued the march… After several hours, all French guards had evaporated into the countryside, never to be seen again… The camp prisoners were on their own… Those able to do so marched on into the night. After having walked some 30 miles they reached the city of Angers, a significant railroad crossing. Parts of the town were in flames after a German aerial bombardment a few hours earlier. A few of the more enterprising of the group decided to assemble a train in the abandoned rail-yard, commandeer it and try to head south towards the Spanish border. At knifepoint, the desperate group compelled a reluctant train operator, whom they had found nearby, to hitch several available freight cars to a locomotive. Almost at daybreak this aim had been accomplished, and the group of several hundred – by now – ex-prisoners jumped on board. The conductor was instructed to run the train southward at its maximum possible speed and to avoid any stops.

It became a wild ride. The violent oscillation and shaking of the careening train forced all the men to lie on the floor of the cars. There were no windows and they had no idea of location or direction. Suddenly my father heard the sound of diving airplanes, followed by several violent explosions. At the end of the hellish ride he discovered that the last two cars had been blown up when they were hit by the bombs. On spotting that recklessly speedy train the German air force must have become very suspicious and decided to attack. Finally, the train came to a stop somewhere in the southern Languedoc region, unable to continue. The badly shaken ‘passengers’ disembarked and dispersed into the countryside.

Eventually, by an incredible combination of luck and planning, we met up with my father. It appears that there was a veritable network of refugees in that region helping dispersed family members in their searches. In addition, I believe that we were able to communicate our respective locations through the Fourestiers in Paris.

Thereupon, we rented a small summer cottage, called Quo Vadis, on the Corniche, the coastal strip adjacent to and west of the port city of Sète on the Mediterranean Sea. There, my parents made strenuous – renewed, as far the US is concerned – attempts at obtaining visas to emigrate to any country outside the German controlled world. It was a dangerous undertaking because both consulates and anchored ships in the port where potential traps set up by the Nazis to ensnare fleeing Jews. Finally, my father decided that our only hope was to obtain Spanish visas through the mediation of his erstwhile boss in Madrid, Jaime Schwab. He wrote to him as a last resort, hoping that the letter would reach Madrid.

It was early October 1940. I was matriculated in first grade at a public school in Sète, the École Élémentaire Publique Paul Bert. It was about 11⁄2 miles from our home on the Corniche. I was the only one of Jewish extraction in the class of about forty children mostly from local fishermen’s families. As we were being taught to write, the calligraphy teacher observed that I was holding the pencil in my left hand. I may have received an initial verbal admonition to which I did not yield. I remember well, however, the ensuing sensation of sharp pain in my left hand fingers, inflicted by an expertly wielded wooden ruler. Henceforth, I wrote with my right hand and drew with the left. The art teacher had no similar handedness preference.

Usually, my father accompanied me to school in the morning by riding on the public transportation bus into town. Frequently, I would walk home alone in the afternoon having been emphatically instructed never to take the seawall road but a higher and safer path. That proved to be too much of a temptation. I infringed the dictum a few times with that inner tickle of forbidden adventure. It was not such a trivial transgression: the bus in which we traveled to school was more than once doused by the violent sea that would break against the high wall, wetting the passengers seated on the exposed side. These buses were called “gazogènes”. They were powered by means of coal and wood combustion in a process generally called coal gasification. The combustion generator was attached to the rear of the vehicle making it look like a humpback. These conveyances were slow but reliable. Gasoline for internal combustion engines had been confiscated by the Germans.

Food became ever scarcer. My father would, quite frequently, go the town market early in the morning and wait there for hours with the hope of finally snatching a few bunches of produce that would trickle in during the day. I remember walking with him one day, and jumping on a half-rotten potato, lying on the street, which we then carried home triumphantly. Very soon, I showed some signs of deficient nutrition in the form of infected boils on my legs and groin which were then relentlessly treated against further infection by applying iodine ointment. On rare occasions we were able to eat locally caught tuna which I found delicious. The other unforgettable treat were fresh figs gathered from a large tree that stood between our home and the adjacent property. Our neighbors provided us with long canes with cup-shaped split ends with which the figs could be harvested without dropping or bruising them. These neighbors, whose last name was Mestre, were republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War. One of their children, a boy a few years older than I, often accompanied me on my walk home from school. He once showed me, very secretly, a drawer-full of toy cars, a treasure with which he was allowed to play only on special occasions. I was quite envious, the only toys we had managed to escape with were two or three little cars left of the extensive set that I had received from Ida Rubinstein in Paris.

As the season advanced towards winter we discovered the thermal shortcomings of our little summer abode. The walls had no insulation and there was no heating. We were able to obtain a small electric space heater that proved not only insufficient but had the unsettling effect of melting the icicles that formed quite frequently inside the living room. I remember distinctly having great difficulties buttoning my jacket because of the numbness in my fingers. This discomfort was further compounded by the fact that the toilet was located outside, on the opposite side of the small backyard. One morning, as usual, my father and I marched off towards the bus station a few hundred yards from our house. The freezing wind blowing against us proved excessive and we were forced to return home. It was a far cry from the customary image of a sunny and warm Mediterranean France.

At this point, perhaps the most paradoxical and absurd incident of my life ensued. One day, a few days before Christmas 1940, our first grade art teacher at the École Paul Bert assigned all students to draw a picture about any subject, and to the best of our abilities. It was to be a competition. I recall drawing – most probably surreptitiously with my left hand – a panorama of the port of Sète with its lighthouse, some boats, seabirds, etc. We all handed in our incipient artistic productions… About 6 or 7 weeks later, the art teacher proudly announces that the winner for the best drawing by first graders in the Hérault province of France is…Monsieur Pierre Lilienfeld! He then proceeds to hand me an official-looking letter addressed to me at the school, with the seal of ‘Le Chef de l’Etat Français’. It was no less than a personal letter to me, beautifully handwritten and signed by none other than the Maréchal Henri Phillippe Omer Pétain, Premier of Vichy France, hero of World War I, and chief French stooge of Nazi Germany! The letter which unfolds to show his photographic portrait, reads in French: “Christmas 1940. My child. Your drawing has pleased me. You have made it with a care that shows that you have a talent for such work. I congratulate you. Continue. (signed) Ph. Pétain”. Here is the same head of state who forbade all Jews, in various decrees he signed between October 3rd, 1940 and June 2nd, 1941, from exercising most professions and occupying any government positions! As described in Pétain’s Crime by Paul Webster: “Soon after the Fall of France, a law would be signed by Pétain, on 3 October 1940, which made every Jew of whatever nationality an enemy of the new Vichy state.” Eventually he would authorize the deportation of Jews to the German extermination camps. Did he know that he was writing this personal missive to a small refugee of Jewish extraction? I can only surmise that he was probably too senile by then to worry about such minutiae.

In retrospect I shudder at the thought of one of Pétain’s secretaries, in particular, Louis Ménétrel, his fanatically antisemitic doctor who screened all his mail, seeing my – rather obviously – German-Jewish last name and alerting the local Sète authorities to proceed with our detention.

The danger in our precarious situation, however, was far from over. One day, several official looking agents appeared at our door and served notice that my father was to present himself at a Vichy-administered internment camp for alien able-bodied men. Once more he was thus imprisoned, this time near Castelnaudary, not far from Carcassonne, and later, near Albi. Oddly, the French authorities were still rounding up Germans, Czechs, Austrians, etc. as likely subversives. This was a potentially dangerous, if not catastrophic, development for us. Erich was now exposed to deportation which would lead to the German extermination camps, while leaving my mother, her parents and myself adrift in Sète. What had led the Vichy minions to our location and my father’s detention? My step-grandfather, Louis Fourestier was later able to determine that his brother-in-law who — at the time — lived in the Vichy sector, a rabid French catholic right- winger, had denounced Erich as a Jew to the authorities. That Nazi-sympathizer was to be duly punished after the war as a ‘collaborator’. I believe he died in prison.

To compound our misery, shortly after, while Erich was in the detention camp at Castelnaudary, my mother ate some mussels from the Étang de Thau, an inland brackish water lake near Sète. The mollusks were contaminated and she got a bad case of food poisoning. Presumably, because of weakened resistance, she then developed pneumonia, pleurisy and para-typhus and had to be transported precipitously to a hospital in Montpellier. There she hovered between life and death for several weeks. This was, of course, before the advent of antibiotics. Her fever charts were somehow relayed to my father at the internment camp where they were poured over by several of the other inmates, some of whom were well-known Viennese physicians. Day-by-day predictions of the outcome were being deduced by these doctors who, at distant seclusion, were powerless to influence the course of my mother’s illness. Finally, and almost miraculously, my mother’s fever relented and she started the long road to recovery. In my mother’s absence, I was placed in the care of the same dear woman, Frau Fürst, who had taken me from Le Havre to Chateaubriand about a half year earlier. She had also settled in Sète after escaping from the German occupied northern zone. She was a somewhat brusque but kind lady with whom I was to stay for at least one month. I will never forget her stern admonition to towel-dry properly between my legs after each bath lest I would get a skin irritation. I still follow her dictum, more than 80 years later. My memory of her is filled with affection as well as deep sadness. She did not manage to escape the Nazi roundups of Jewish refugees by French police that took place in Sète between August 26 and 28 – even before the German occupation of Vichy France in November of 1942 – which resulted in her subsequent murder.

One day, a delegation of German army officers arrived at the concentration camp where my father was being held by the Vichy authorities. As expected, such a sudden visit arose intense feelings of alarm among the inmates, many of whom were Jews. Their concern proved unfounded. The mission of the German brass was to assess the living conditions in the camp. After their detailed inspection they proceeded to berate the French commander for the inadequacy of the sanitary services at the camp. The Germans then ordered the cowed and bewildered Frenchman to have proper facilities installed within 48 hours, or else. The inmates were, after all, “citizens of Greater Germany”, as the Teutonic officers viewed them… Oh, the ironies of wartime Europe!

It was April 1941. The potentially grim fate of our small group of five suddenly underwent a barely expected major gyration for the better. As my mother returned home, still extremely weak, my father received notice that our entry visas to Spain, through the good offices of his former boss, Jaime Schwab in Madrid, had been approved and issued. On that basis my father was released from the Vichy administered internment camp, joined us, and we immediately packed our few possessions and took the next available train towards the Spanish border. My father had to carry my mother on boarding the train. She was not yet ambulatory. The names of the two towns on opposite sides of the border have remained incised into my memory banks: Cerbère and Portbou. In the latter, on the Spanish and finally safe side, during the train’s customs halt, we ate turrón (Spanish nougat) for the first time.

My family must have breathed a huge sigh of relief as the train continued on to Barcelona, our first extended stop. We were, for the first time after about one-and-a-half years, out of acute danger.

We stayed in Barcelona for a few weeks to recover physically and emotionally. By comparison with Sète, it was a paradise. There was decent food, a relative feeling of security, and the chance to do some clothes shopping. I remember being suited up with a pair of knickerbockers of which I was quite proud.

The map below depicts our journeys through France (pink dashed line) from the start of the war until we crossed back into Spain, as well as the border between the Nazi-occupied and the Vichy-administered zones.

 Eventually we continue on to Madrid where we spend a few nights at the plush Palace Hotel before settling in at a small family-owned inn, called Hotel Aguilar, on Carrera de San Jerónimo. My father returned to his old job at the firm under Jaime Schwab who so effectively contributed to our miraculous escape from France. I wish I could express to his descendants – if he had any – the deeply felt gratitude of our family for the role he played in our survival.

It was early summer of 1941 and we sojourned in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a small town surrounded by wooded hills near the imposing monastery built by and for Felipe II, king of Spain, in the 16th century. The Schwabs had a villa nearby with a swimming pool, which we visited quite frequently. This was my first conscious exposure to submersion in water deeper than a bathtub. Erich spent weekends with us away from the stifling heat of Madrid.

We often walked towards and around the monastery grounds, and through the nearby pinewoods whose smell I will never forget. Further, I have three distinct recollections from those perambulations. One was that we would frequently meet another family who included a beautiful girl about 6 years old, to whom I was quite attracted. The second, was the taste of fresh honey which was produced and sold by a religious order nearby. Lastly, one day we walked to the famous Silla de Felipe II, a rock carved into the shape of a seat on a hillock overlooking the site of the Escorial monastery. The 16th century Spanish king often sat on that rock to oversee the construction of this building whose austerity would become a faithful reflection of his own. As we approached the site, a Spaniard in military garb, leading his family, came upon us and very stiffly and aggressively raised his extended arm in the Falange salute and shouted ¡Viva Franco! ¡Arriba España! My father felt it necessary to respond with a similar gesture lest we would be considered with suspicion — as republican sympathizers — which could, at that time, be potentially disastrous for us.

At the end of the summer I was enrolled in the second grade at the Lycée Français of Madrid on the assumption that my French was in considerably better shape than my Spanish. As all schools in Spain at that time, it was a Catholic institution, requiring participation of all students in catechism classes. No exemption from this rule was to be achieved on my behalf in spite of concerted efforts by my parents. There were two other classmates who had to suffer under the same intransigence: two Protestant Irish twin brothers (Jerry and Mickey) with whom I became quite friendly, and whose mother and my mother would take frequent walks together.

The French Lycée had been founded in Madrid in 1919, but was closed during the three years of the Civil War; therefore it had been reopened only two years before I was matriculated there, at which time it had an enrollment of more than 1,000 students. The school was located within walking distance of the small hotel where we lived. Most of the time my father would accompany me to school, and I would return by myself. In retrospect it is surprising that, at the age of seven, and as shy as I was, I would have been willing to walk unaccompanied along busy city streets. I recall that during the morning both father and son would be mesmerized by the almost daily sight of two automobiles (I believe a Lincoln and a Mercedes) racing each other along the wide Castellana avenue (hardly imaginable, at present). I also remember repeated encounters with a Mr. Forst, a friend of my father, who would invariably and jokingly propose that I sell him the schoolbooks that I was carrying. The walk to school would take us by a gourmet restaurant (I believe it was called Gambrinus) whose sidewalk smells would waft enticingly into our nostrils. We could not afford its prices, however.

We stayed at the Hotel Aguilar for about eight months. My parents considered our stay in Madrid as temporary and this arrangement dispensed my mother from having to manage a household under difficult post-Civil War conditions. Access to food was limited and irregular. Our small hotel managed to provide acceptable meals, although normal bread had disappeared and was replaced by small hardly edible rolls baked from milled corn. On Mondays we were served only a famously named ‘plato único’ made exclusively with ‘garbanzos’ (chick peas) – a government dictate. Occasionally, we were able to obtain a precious fresh loaf of bread, sold clandestinely and dangerously on the street, under cover of a building entrance.

One of the more disturbing images that I conserve of our stay in Madrid is the pitiful spectacle of numerous civil war cripples plying the streets of the city for a small handout. They were poor crouching, crawling, prostrate human wrecks of that terrible fratricidal carnage that had ended in 1939, only two years before.

Immediately after we had arrived in Madrid, the Spanish authorities demanded regularization of our status as immigrants. My father was required to present himself at none other than the Nazi German embassy where, as soon as he showed his German passport identifying him as a Jew, he was summarily shown to the door – minus his passport. We were thus suddenly citizen-less – excepting myself, ironically. I remained a Spanish citizen at age 7. The Spanish government issued a temporary resident passport to legalize my parents’ status. Our family had, however, come to the understandable conclusion that Europe in its entirety was hostile territory from where we needed to escape as soon as possible.

For us, Spain in 1941 could not be relied upon. The repeated flirtations of the Caudillo with Hitler at that time, such as sending the División Azul against the Soviet Union, the establishment of an internment camp at Miranda, the repeated meetings between Hitler and Franco to discuss the conditions for Spain’s entry into the war on Germany’s side, all spelled potential disaster for any Jews who had found temporary refuge on the Iberian peninsula. The eventual course of the war was to disprove these fears later on but, in 1941, Germany seemed very much on the road to victory, and Spain’s precarious neutrality seemed of dubious permanence.

Only after the war did it become known that Franco may have had a hidden pro-Jewish agenda. This unlikely attitude seems to have been driven by his recognition of the immense cultural and social heritage left by the Sephardic Jews, and the injustice of their expulsion from Spain in 1492. At some point after the war, he apparently granted the right to Spanish residence — if not immediate citizenship — to all “returning” Jews, regardless of any Spanish descent, a claim that would have been very difficult to prove.

My father, once more, set his sights on the United States as the true haven and goal. He once again made a concerted effort for our small family group to gain access to that country of promise. He formally applied for an immigration visa and even secured a voucher from a very good friend in Portugal who posted some U$20,000 (a huge sum at that time) on my father’s behalf as guarantee before the US government. All this in addition to the fact that he was a highly trained engineer, ready to make significant contributions to the technological know-how of that country. My father pleaded for months with the functionaries at the American embassy in Madrid. All to no avail. Our petition was finally and definitively rejected for “insufficient justification to immigrate to the United States”. I have now lived in the US for more than a half century, and yet I will not forgive this country for its lack of human understanding and compassion when we were in dire need and acute danger. This country failed us utterly and repeatedly, and I came to consider my stay in it as a favor that my family and I have bestowed on this nation, rather than the opposite. I also came to regard citizenship as a matter of convenience rather than allegiance.

My own insecurities at that time reached a crisis point when, during one protracted visit by my parents to the American legation, I was left alone in our room at the hotel (maybe my grandparents accompanied them in their futile endeavor). As a reflection of the numerous family conversations about departures and escapes, I became firmly convinced that my entire family had decided to abandon me at the inn. My desperate screaming and crying attracted the attention of the hotel staff who came to assuage my fears.

Other anxieties resulted from our religious alienation from the prevailing Catholic religiosity. I have already mentioned my forced exposure to catechism at school. Even more disturbing to me were the repeated insinuations of some of the young cleaning girls working at the hotel with whom I had struck a passing friendship. Suspecting that we were not ‘good Catholics’ they inquired about my baptismal status. When I informed them of my state of apostasy they were totally horrified and affirmed their conviction that I was condemned to hell lest I be promptly baptized. I relayed this dreadful concern to my parents who eventually managed to calm my fears of eternal damnation.

My second grade sojourn at the French Lycée was reasonably pleasant with some ups and downs. My class teacher, Mme. Chaumeil, a warm hearted woman, liked me and I reciprocated. I must have been a very good student in that, after about three weeks of school start, I, alone, was promoted to the third grade. There, however, the teacher resented my sudden appearance in her class and proceeded to harass me with humiliatingly bad grades. I was promptly and thankfully returned to second grade. We had an excellent Spanish reading book, Segundo Libro de Lectura, published by Seix y Barral, that continued to stimulate my intellect for several years hence, and may have made a significant contribution to my overall cultural development. Paradoxically, this book, as all other publications of that time in Spain, required the latin nihil obstat seal of ecclesiastic approval, an anachronistic and yet ominous remnant of Inquisition rules. At the end of the first trimester, the school report card read: “Excellent petit élève appliqué et travailleur. Donne entière satisfaction” (Excellent little student, dedicated and hard-working. Fully satisfying).

Every Saturday at noon (only Saturday afternoons and Sundays were free), the class teacher would distribute a small certificate called ‘satisfaisit’ to those students deserving of praise for good work and behavior during the week. It was always a bit traumatic for those to whom this piece of paper was denied. To my relief and great satisfaction of my parents, I got mine most weeks.

I remember an enormous military parade on the Castellana avenue, presided by Franco in full regalia standing in an open large-model Fiat, with his arm stiffly extended in the typical fascist-nazi-falange gesture. I also recall the day that the United States entered the war: newspaper boys running along the Avenida de Alcalá proclaiming the momentous happening.

Once immigration to the US had become, again, an unreachable utopia, my family decided to find a remote country, anywhere, to which we could escape from the unpredictable dangers of Europe. We heard that my mother’s cousin, Gerhard Anker, had found refuge in Ecuador, a country which was purported to have liberal immigration laws in contrast to the barriers imposed by the vast majority of countries in the Western Hemisphere – including the U.S. Where is Ecuador? In fact, Herbert Anker, my maternal uncle, and Gerhard Anker, my mother’s cousin, had managed to escape/emigrate from France to Ecuador (via Portugal). We decided to send my mother’s parents there a few months ahead of us. My parents and I departed Madrid by train on the 25th of May 1942, cutting short my school year, for the second time, by about two months. It was ten days after my eighth birthday.

And, in the interim, What was happening to the Fourestiers in Paris? As the war broke out, Louis Fourestier, was one of the principal conductors at the Paris Opéra, and professor at the Conservatoire. My grandmother Julia gave singing lessons to the divas of the time. Both were of course French citizens, one by birth and the other by marriage to a Frenchman.

Soon after Paris fell to the Germans, and anti-Jewish laws – such as having to wear a yellow Star of David – were enacted, my grandmother made the decision to remain in permanent seclusion at their home on the rue du Bèlvédère, until further notice. She was never to set foot outside her house for the four-year duration of the Nazi occupation. Her husband Fourestier had a secret chamber built for her behind a large framed picture where she would be able to hide in case of unwanted inspections. I found a short typed paragraph wherein my father relates: “Did you know that Julia converted to catholicism, after the Nazis lost the war and left Paris, in 1944, grateful for the help by the Boulogne Bishop protecting her in her home by dispatching a special crew to build a small hidden cubicle on the spiral staircase in Rue du Belvédère? She spent many, many fearful hours in that cubicle. And all her neighbors never divulged that she was Jewish…”.

The main potential danger resided in the general knowledge of the French musical world that my grandmother was of Jewish origin. Notwithstanding the widespread collaborationism of the French, it must be recognized that, as far as she was concerned, there were no leaks, denunciations, or indiscretions that could have endangered her or husband during those perilous years. She continued with her lessons as a discrete, low level activity with pupils she felt very secure about. Fourestier, on the other hand, pursued his conducting work at the Opéra within the constraints of the German occupation and control.

The highest drama and potential threat to their security came from non other than the Führer himself. One day, the German authorities contacted Fourestier with an official and personal invitation from Hitler to appear in Berlin with the cast and orchestra of the Opéra. Several performances were to be scheduled in the German capital. The invitation explicitly included “Madame Fourestier”. My grandparents were terrified. This could spell doom if the Germans were to investigate, as they usually did, the precise background of any personages who might be meeting with Hitler. To escape this perilous exposure Fourestier kept finding excuses in order to postpone the dreaded trip to the “devil’s den”. The delays dragged on until, finally, the deteriorating war situation for Germany forced the cancellation of the French operatic visit. The Fourestiers breathed a mighty sigh of relief. Soon after, the Allies liberated Paris.

After leaving Madrid, I have a vivid image of walking with my parents along the waterfront of the port of Cádiz eating a banana. When I threw the peel into a trash can, a small horde of ragged street urchins materialized seemingly out of nowhere and scrambled to grab and eat bits of the banana peel. This was post-Civil War pitiful Spain.

The beautiful white ship eventually arrived and we boarded it. It was called the ‘Cabo de Buena Esperanza’, and belonged to the Spanish company Ibarra. It displaced 22,000 metric tons (a piece of trivia that has remained with me for all these years). It had a sister ship called… obviously, Cabo de Hornos, with which my maternal grandparents had departed a few months earlier.

Little did we suspect the conditions under which we were to travel on board of this transatlantic liner. It was to be anything but a pleasure cruise, as I will describe further on.

We thus departed Europe for good. my father and I were to return only for vacation or business trips, never to live there again.

We had escaped, sometimes narrowly, from under the Nazi claws. How narrowly? One can speculate about the most acutely dangerous situations that could have led us to disaster. Bucholz and Horn, the two German soldiers who stayed with us in Chateaubriant could have denounced us to their superiors or informed the Gestapo. My mother could have been captured during her train odyssey. The German border guards near Bordeaux could have been a little less lackadaisical. My father’s boxcar could have been the one hit by the bombs during that wild train ride. We could have been unable to obtain the Spanish visa… And what of the less obvious instances that were overlooked, How many times were we at the precipice’s edge without even knowing it?

We managed to dance around the hellish traps into which so many others fell to perish in what was to be later called the Holocaust. Were we Holocaust survivors, however? That term has been abused, and I believe it should be applied only to those who survived Nazi captivity, or uprisings such as that of the Warsaw ghetto. By a combination of luck, wisdom, foresight, happenstance, endurance –- of both my father and mother — and help from others, we were spared the terrible fate of so many European Jews, some with whom we crossed paths during our continual displacements.

There is another aspect that merits reflection. Throughout our vicissitudes a measure of normalcy tended to prevail that is difficult to project forward to our times when describing the disruptions, anxieties, privations, dangers and oddities that permeated our lives. I went to first grade and learned to read and write in Vichy-controlled France, we traveled by train and bus while the country was falling apart, I played with German soldiers housed with us, I received, shipped from Paris, a new bicycle for my birthday while we were sequestered as dangerous foreigners in a small French town, we gathered figs together with Spanish republican refugees in Sète. Daily life tended to continue undeterred by events that would be considered overwhelming by any standard. Human nature creates that shield of apparent continuity to preserve sanity.

Of course, the true extent of the fate of European Jewry during the war years was not known to us at the time. Fragmentary information did circulate among the refugees intimating details of the situation. But these remained largely episodic and yet frightening bits of information. Not until the end of the war did we, as most of the rest of the world, come to understand the horrific magnitude of the Holocaust that we had managed to graze and evade.

The feelings we harbored towards the Germans during the latter years of the war are very similar to those expressed so eloquently by the author Peter Gay. We came very close to advocating the total eradication of that, to us, “cursed” people. We had no reservations or doubts about the need to bomb Germany into oblivion, even before we knew the full magnitude and nature of the crimes committed by that nation.

We embarked on the Cabo de Buena Esperanza in Cádiz and soon after the ship departed on a course that followed the southern coast of Portugal. As night arrived we were instructed to descend to our sleeping quarters. That descent on steep steel staircases seemed never-ending. One flight, a second, a third…. to a total of five. Finally, we were in the ship’s hold, a gargantuan, dark, dank and cavernous abode, filled with hundreds of triple level bunk beds (I have never seen triple ones again). A mass of humanity accompanied us and proceeded to settle into these sleeping “facilities”. Sleep, however, was to be difficult to achieve. Communal moaning, coughing, snoring, shuffling and crying ensured a wakeful night. There were even to be the occasional screams of a woman giving birth. A rather hellish scene, compounded by the continuous grinding noise of the nearby propeller shaft.

Towards early morning the misery reached a climax when the ship kept following the southern coast of Portugal, a notoriously choppy stretch of ocean travel. The Cabo de Buena Esperanza danced to the swell, and the majority of the souls in our sleeping cavern became seasick, including myself, requiring precipitous ascent through the five flights of stairs. Only a few managed to reach the deck without voiding our stomachs on the way.

Meals were heavenly, by contrast. We sat on deck at one of several long tables protected from sun and rain by equally long tarps, where we were served reasonably decent food. My first delighted recollection of those communal meals was the unlimited availability of crusty white bread, which we had not tasted for, what seemed, all eternity. After several days of navigation, my parents were able to “upgrade” our sleeping quarters. We were given cots at a higher level, out of the ships “undercroft”. These were smaller areas with a dozen or so people in each. Men were separate from women, and I shuttled back and forth between those gender-separated sections – eight-year old boys being considered still sex-less. I do remember some rather unpleasant undercurrents among the ship’s inmates – I have trouble calling them and us ‘passengers’. More than once the cordage supporting the meager mattress of my father’s cot had been severed, and he fell through to the floor when lying down for the night.

The ship’s passengers were a motley band. In addition to refugees of our own kind, there was a large contingent of Spanish families –- especially Basque farmers — on their way to Venezuela where they expected to settle on large agricultural properties to provide their animal husbandry expertise. There were a number of suspicious characters, presumably nazi, fascist or other unsavory agents on their way to Argentina, a known haven for such rascals. Eventually, and after overcoming my usual timidity, I joined a little band of children of my age who took over the ship’s deck running, jumping, playing, and climbing all over the large rope winding machinery that caused all members of this urchin band to be covered with oil and grease at day’s end. My mother had to deal with the required body scrubbing. There were a few large communal bathtubs, which could be filled with sea water, sometimes containing small fish.

Although I am quite sure that my parents were far from elated by our transatlantic crossing, I for one was delighted by the unprecedented freedom, the feeling of adventure, discovery and overall excitement. The latter reached dramatic levels when we were about five days out of Cádiz, near the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on our way to the northern coast of South America.

When we got up to the deck that morning an astounding view greeted us: we were surrounded by what looked like dozens of war ships, all the way to the horizon. It was a large allied — US and British — naval convoy consisting of at least one huge battleship, and many cruisers and smaller vessels. It was an overwhelming sight after the continuous watery emptiness that we had experienced until then. The surprise to all on board of our ship turned to concern and then dread when one of the cruisers proceeded to steam in our direction and then position itself in parallel to our vessel, only a few hundred yards away, directing all its guns at us. The sight of this array of gaping canon holes all pointing at our ship was truly terrifying. Of course there were no PA announcements to illuminate us as to the meaning of these maneuvers. We were left to wonder if and when the cruiser would open fire, and why? The Cabo de Buena Esperanza being a defenseless passenger boat.

The tension was finally relieved –- up to a point –- when a motorized launch was seen to be lowered and embarked by a group of naval officers. The small boat then steered directly towards us, and its crew boarded our vessel.

The word quickly got around that British officers had arrived who then set up an interrogation office in one of the upper class cabins of our ship, and that they would query selected passengers. Indeed, my father was called in eventually. He related to us later that when the interrogators had determined that he was a German Jewish engineer, he was asked to provide any information he had on major industrial and development centers in Germany and their precise location. My father was quite well informed on those matters and they thanked him for his help. Whether it was a coincidence or not, a few months later we heard on the radio in Quito that at least one of the lesser known German centers mentioned by Erich during his interview had been the target of intense bombardment by the allies.

Not surprisingly, several of the suspicious individuals on board were taken off our ship when the group of officers returned to their cruiser. Only then where the canons turned away from us, and the war ship departed to rejoin the convoy which, later that evening, disappeared from view.

Our fear upon seeing the guns aligned against our ship had not been entirely unfounded. Spanish registry ocean liners were regarded with great suspicion by the allied forces. More than one Spanish boat had been found to carry weapons and other forbidden materiel bound for various Axis-friendly destinations. The Spaniards, in 1942, were considered potential allies of the Nazis and a hotbed of agents and spies, some of whom where probably on our ship on their way to Argentina and other South American countries. We were quite elated to have been rid of them during our high-seas boarding by the British.

A few days later we encountered another naval convoy. It included a number of bomber airplanes that buzzed us several times before departing.

About 9 or 10 days after our departure from the coast of Spain we saw land for the first time. It was the island of Trinidad, off Venezuela. We stopped in Port of Spain for a day and then continued along the Venezuelan coast until we reached Puerto Cabello, about 100 miles west of Caracas. There, the large contingent of Basque farmers disembarked. We would have preferred to do likewise and travel to our final destination, by the shortest route, either through Venezuela and Colombia, or on another boat through the Panama Canal. We were barred from either of these alternatives because we could not obtain the so-called “transit visas” required to pass through those two countries, nor was the Panama Canal open to commercial navigation during that time of war. We had to resign ourselves –- that is my parents, I was quite happy to prolong the trip –- to a long detour to reach our goal (see our travel itinerary, further on).

Our next stop was the Dutch island of Curaçao and its capital Willemstad which I remember as a quaint port with small red-roofed houses. After that it was the open sea again as we proceeded around the Guayanas and the northeast coast of Brazil. We made a brief stop in Pernambuco (now called Recife) and continued to Rio de Janeiro.

All I recall about that otherwise stunning city is that a monsoon-like rain persisted throughout our stop there and that we decided to forgo a possible visit. We then continued to Santos, the port city of Sao Paulo where we did disembark although no lasting impression has been left with me of that stop. The next halt was in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, after which we crossed the broad mouth of the Plata river and arrived in Buenos Aires, the end of the long journey on the Cabo de Buena Esperanza. On arrival, we had been on that ship for over four weeks. However, we were not allowed to disembark.

My parents had applied for the infamous ‘transit visa’ in order to cross Argentina and reach Chile (for which we did have that prized and indispensable document). The Argentines, however, had led us to believe that the visa would be handed to us on arrival in Buenos Aires. Presumably because we were neither nazi nor fascist spies, nor saboteurs, nor other scum, the visa was held up in a bureaucratic tangle. In fact, we were actually in danger of being sent back to Spain by the Argentinian authorities. We were to wait on board of the anchored ship for another 9 days until the local Jewish relief agency was able to secure our release. During that time we were provided, at least, somewhat improved living quarters on board: a second class cabin for the three of us. No luxury but at last some privacy after four weeks of communal living.

On the insistence of my parents, we were allowed to disembark once for a limited time. We had to be accompanied by a secret agent who followed us through the streets of Buenos Aires as if we were criminals on leave. We visited the wife (a daughter of one of the Busch brothers of quartet fame) and children of Martial Singher, the baritone friend of the Fourestiers in Paris who, at the time, had a singing engagement at the Teatro Colón in the Argentine capital. We also ran into a department store, eluding our shadowing agent, to buy a toy for me. I had no toys left at this point and the little motorcycle I received in Buenos Aires was to be treasured by me for months. Finally, the papers came through and we were able to leave the ship for good. Even I was relieved at that point. It was getting quite boring to walk around a moored and deserted ocean liner for days on end.

We took the train to cross the Argentine pampas, a 650-mile trip over flat grassland, until we reached the city of Mendoza near the Andean foothills. Mendoza was a pleasant town. We stayed there a few days before continuing our journey. The reason for the stop in that city was that the railroad traversing part of the mountain passes to Chile had been obliterated during a recent earthquake. The only available mode of transportation was by automobile in a group of a dozen vehicles, as insurance against possible breakdowns. I remember approaching the forbidding wall of the Andes and then rising along a narrow and winding road into these mountains, the highest on the Western hemisphere. Near the highest point of the pass, at a height of about 16,000 feet, I threw up on the side of the road. After a short distance, we reached a mountain relay and I had an omelet which I recall with delight as it settled my digestive nerves. As we rode on we were able to get some rather horrifying glimpses of train cars that had crashed into yawning precipices during the earthquake that had destroyed the tracks.

We continued the mountain crossing until we reached a snow bound small village surrounded by high mountains, Cabeza de Vaca, from where the train was able to resume its runs toward Chile. We boarded the train which then chugged through a forbidding pass within a few miles of the Aconcagua, the highest peak of the Americas. I remember distinctly the frightening experience of crossing over trestle bridges spanning huge precipices. These precariously built bridges had no side railings and it appeared as if the train was suddenly airborne. Ominous creaking noises could be heard as the train was half way across these marginally constructed structures. Finally we made it to the Chilean border; we stopped at Los Andes, and continued down to the major seaport of Valparaíso, our temporary destination.

We were to stay in Valparaíso for almost three weeks awaiting the ocean liner that would take us north on the Pacific Ocean up to Guayaquil, the main port of Ecuador. In Valparaíso, we stayed at a modest “pensión” on the high section of the city overlooking the port. My father managed to buy some basic tools from an elderly European refugee who lived nearby.

We eventually embarked on the Imperial, a small ocean liner probably half the size of the Cabo de Buena Esperanza, but this time in “second class”, in a real cabin. The first night at sea, I nearly fell out of the upper bunk, as the ship swayed in rough seas. I got a bit seasick until I regained my sailor’s balance again. We stopped at Concepción, a Chilean port actually south of Valparaíso, and then continued north to Antofagasta which I remember as one the driest places I have ever visited. From there the Imperial continued up to Callao, seaport of Lima, the capital of Perú.

 The next leg of the trip took us to our point of disembarkation, Guayaquil, a notoriously hot and steamy river port. I remember the small rickety launch that took us to the dock. Soon after we boarded another small vessel of dubious seaworthiness to cross the wide Guayas river to reach the rail station. We then boarded the small train that then proceeded inland. After a short stretch of tropical flatland, the Andes loomed again as a formidable barrier to be surmounted. The train started its labored ascent in strange zig-zags, going forward and backward repeatedly along a steep mountain called Nariz del Diablo — The Devil’s Nose. We all got headaches as the ascent proceeded. The 250-mile trip to Quito took 17 hours.

We arrived in the Ecuadorian capital on August 28, 1942, 95 days after we had departed Madrid. That journey had lasted longer than Columbus’ first voyage of the European discovery of the Americas.

See map below depicting our convoluted trek between Madrid, Spain and Quito, Ecuador. around most of South America, requiring two ocean liners, three trains, and an automobile convoy.

How close we were to our final destination when we were in Puerto Cabello in Venezuela, and how far we were forced to travel from there to reach our goal? The distance from Puerto Cabello to Quito by the shortest land route would have amounted to about 1,500 miles. The actual distance we covered from Venezuela was probably close to 9,000 miles — in addition to the trans-Atlantic crossing — thanks to the absurdities of international politics during the war period. As I mentioned above, it could have been far worse; we could have been forced to return to Spain from Buenos Aires — presumably another 4 weeks in the ship’s hold!

I had enjoyed the lengthy trip and it added invaluably to my baggage of life experiences. For my parents, it was more of a vicissitude fraught with unknowns, discomforts and one more major deracination to be endured. But we had escaped the European cauldron and arrived at a potentially peaceful destination, finally protected from persecution and death at the hands of barbarians. Ecuador was, indeed, to be a true haven for our small family group for the next 16 years.

A small house rented by my maternal grandparents conveniently awaited us. It was located in a residential area on –- what was then — the northern fringes of Quito. When my mother tucked me into bed that first evening, I asked her when we would be leaving. She responded that she hoped we would not have to ‘leave’ anymore and, besides, she did not know where to, anyway. I had obviously become convinced that our existence would be perennially itinerant, as it had appeared for the last three — and for me — very formative years. I thus became acquainted, early in life, with the meaning of the ‘wandering Jew’.

At our new home, my father set up his electrical appliances repair shop. He put up a shingle on the outer wall of the house to advertise the repair and construction of radios, phonographs, and other electrical appliances, a challenge even to his inventiveness, given the meager local supply of electrical and electronic parts in the midst of a world war.

My mother, the day after we arrived, went into a decades-long state of mental and physical ‘siege’. She had obviously held up during the entire period of peripatetic instability preceding our arrival at our final destination in Quito. Once external stability seemed assured her internal disruption surfaced. She was to spend most of her waking hours in bed, mending, reading, dozing, writing letters, keeping detailed accounting of money in- and out-flow (I remember her bookkeeping details that included the price paid for bananas and other fruit). She seldom left the house, and her cooking was utterly minimal. Her socializing seldom went beyond playing bridge, at home, with my father as partner and my grandparents as opponents.

Less than two months after our arrival in Quito, I was enrolled in third grade at a private school near our home. I commuted to this school riding my French bicycle which we had, incredibly, managed to bring with us all way from war torn Chateaubriant.