D-Day plus Chewing Gum and Cigarettes
D-Day. Was there ever a shorter and more modest name for a battle, not just any battle, but the most monumental and momentous one in modern history? Actually, D-Day also had a last name, Operation Overlord. But I like D-Day. It has a strength to it, sinew, short and to the point. But to me D stands for Deliverance.
On that day, I was a couple of months past seven years old, and I was living with a French family, Marcel, Suzanne, and Gaston Leclère in a Norman town called Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf, about 75 miles northwest of Paris. To locate that town in your mind, it was also a little over a hundred miles due east of Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the five landing beaches shown on the graphic below. But the landing beach that figures more into my story is Juno beach.
On today’s roadways it’s about 86 miles, but fewer miles as the crow flies, and the crows then would have been military planes.
Vignette No. 1
Allow me to introduce you to my family of origin: my father Samuel, my mother Sonia, my sister Alice, nine years older than me, and my brother Simon, seven years older, then me, of course. My siblings were born in Paris, as was I, in the 14th arroundissement. You who have been to Paris are likely to know that word, but if not, it’s a subdivision of Paris, analogous in some ways with a zip code, but it’s also an administrative area, having its own “city hall”, police station, etc.
My parents migrated from Poland in 1926. I say “migrated” because they did not actually immigrate. They were allowed to enter because the French state needed workers in many kinds of occupations, due to the massive loss of men in WW1. In those days, the male of the house was the breadwinner. My father was a watchmaker, a skilled profession, but perhaps not quite what you imagine. The working part of a watch was manufactured in Switzerland and was purchased by the watchmaker, as were the other parts, the case, the wristband, etc. There was a neighborhood in Paris where one could buy the necessary parts, and all later assembled by the watchmaker.
Vignette No. 2
I also have or had an extended family, most of whom I never met. They were siblings of my mother or father. To my knowledge, they were all Poles. My mother had five siblings. Their parents were Tessie and Isaac. The oldest was Simcha (Yiddish for Sam) and the youngest was our mother. Uncle David was the next youngest. Our mother’s given name was Syma, and I was under the impression that she changed it to Sonia in France, but Alice says that she called herself Sonia to appear more Polish (than Jewish). The other three siblings of my mother were Manya, Sarah, and Golda, about whom I know nothing.
Our father’s parents, Abraham and Sarah, had six Children: Our father, Shmuel, actually, Wolf Samuel (1898); his sister Fela (1900); and his brothers, Jacob Aron (1902); Simcha (1904); Moshe (1906); and Zvi (1910). We also know that Jacob married Yeda, and Fela married Abraham Weinberg and had two children, Vladik and Renya. All that information tells us little but their names.
Vignette No. 3
As you can imagine, it takes courage to leave one’s own country, even if you’re at best a second-class citizen there. But my father, who was well-read, had a sense of the political climate in France, a certain atmosphere of liberty, even if anti-Semitism also existed. France was looked upon as modern and politically liberal. According to my brother, my father often said that France was a beacon of freedom and equality: going to France was one of his fondest dreams come true.
The French revolution gave rise to the “Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen”, “The Declaration of the rights of Men and of the Citizen”, adopted August 26, 1789. This Declaration is an expression of universal human dignity that is true at all times and in all places. It served as one of the foundational documents of the French Revolution and of France itself thereafter. The Déclaration gave rise to what I like to call republicanism, meaning that the Republic is the central guide for the people, even above religion. Much of my own outlook on life and values are rooted in this concept.
Vignette No. 4
As I intimated earlier, my father was probably doing cartwheels, watchmaking style, when that invitation arrived. However, he took a circuitous path to France. Perhaps anticipating difficulties in crossing the border, because he did not have an actual job yet, and most likely not having enough money to show self-support, he first went to Belgium for a temporary visit. That was a strategic move because it wasn’t clear if France would have let him in, directly from Poland. I assume that coming from Belgium would have sent a better signal to the border authorities than from Poland.
I have no information about what happened immediately after he entered France. He must have found some lodging, and soon started working for Monsieur Eichenbaum. Not very long after, he had accumulated enough money to be able to send for his fiancée, Sonia, and they were married in 1927 in Mr. Eichenbaum’s home in Vincennes, a borough just to the east of the Paris city line and contiguous with it.
Vignette No. 5
About a year after I came along, my parents moved to a neighborhood just north of Vincennes called Montreuil and still just outside the Paris city line. I assume my presence made for a crowded environment, and additional space was needed. I must mention, however, that by the time we moved, my parents had lived in Vincennes for about nine years, during which my mother had developed strong relationships with many of the local merchants. This saved my life.
It was an idyllic time for our family. My siblings went to the local elementary school, and I went to a kindergarten. My father had a lot of customers for watch repair. It should be pointed out that watches were basically the only way that people could know what time it was, other than the radio, and it was necessary to know the time to keep appointments of any kind, like going to work. My mother cooked and sewed, as was the custom then. She was probably the one among us who had the hardest job.
Vignette No. 6
On September 1st, 1939 (some dates are inscribed in one’s consciousness), Germany invaded Poland, and that was the beginning of WW2. It took only five weeks for the Germans to defeat Poland. And Germany then set its sights on conquering France. At that time, France was the only other country in Europe that matched Germany in the size of its army, but it did not match the German mechanized equipment, nor, and perhaps more telling, its planning and daring. France’s general staff still thought like its 19th century planners. France had an impenetrable defensive line on its eastern border, across the Rhine River, where it expected any invasion to take place.
Germany then simply went around that wall, and violating the neutrality of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Germany was in France before the French army could mobilize itself to respond. Thus, in a matter of six weeks, in the spring of 1940, Germany had defeated France. It would take close to six more years before Germany was defeated by the Allied armies of the US, the UK, and Canada and some volunteers from the occupied countries.
Vignette No. 7
Here again, our family was faced with a decision. Would the French police come back to try to “catch” the Jews it missed the first time, or not. It turns out they did not, but how would anyone know? Earlier I had mentioned that my mother had made many friends in Vincennes, the location of our first apartment, and there she went to work, that is to say, she visited the stores and merchants she had befriended to ask for help. A few of the merchants she knew let us hide in their, store-rooms for a few days but that could only have been temporary. However, eventually, Madame Garnier the owner of a pharmacy told my mother she had a “solution”, which was to connect us to a family by the name of Bonneau. How that connection had been made is open to speculation. It appears, however, that Monsieur Bonneau was connected to an “underground” network to save Jews, but, I suspect, children in particular. And I was a child.
The story is somewhat more complicated than what actually transpired, but, within a very few days, I was placed in the household of a French Catholic family named Leclere: Marcel and Suzanne and their son Gaston who lived in the town Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf in Normandy.
Vignette No. 8
In the previous vignette I went a bit ahead of myself. When Uncle David came to the Lecleres’ house, it was 1945, after the end of the war, at least in our region. But before that, between 1942, when I came to the Lecleres, and 1944 to 1945, France was occupied by the Nazis, (depending on the specific part of France). You probably know about the Allies’ invasion, made famous, among other stories by the assault on Omaha Beach (and other beaches) on June 6, 1944, popularly known as D-Day. The Allies were the US, the UK, and Canada. Their armies landed on a strip of beaches in Normandy, not all that far from St. Aubin. It was probably the most monumental battle in the history of man. D-Day defies a short description, but I have written a bit more about it in an essay on this website, called D-Day plus Chewing Gum and Cigarettes.
Vignette No. 9
It wasn’t long after the liberation of our town that my uncle popped up at the Lecleres’ front door. As I’ve said before, at that time, children were not consulted about whatever adults decided to do with them. And so, without any warning that I can remember, I was whisked off by my uncle. And I don’t remember any bundle or suitcase taken along, although that may have been the case.
We took the train to Le Grand Lucé, the town I mentioned earlier, where my uncle and his family had survived the war. There, in a modest hotel retreat, he had assembled his family and my siblings. In retrospect, I assume he had wanted to reconstitute our family, such as it was. But it had been so many years since I had seen my siblings that I did not recognize them. What happened next I hadn’t expected, if I had thought about it at all.