‘How can I fit my whole life into a suitcase?’ Sarah’s voice cracks; it is almost a wail. The tears she holds back sting her eyes and she closes them, tightly, to gather strength, and then opens them again and glares at her father, fierce and firm. ‘I can’t leave you, Papa.’
The other girls have gone to bed; she is alone with her parents in the small upstairs room they call the parlour, long and narrow, as is the house itself. Her mother, sitting next to her on the stiff-backed sofa, places a comforting hand on Sarah’s knee, and it is enough. Sarah throws her arms around her mother, and Leah holds the sobbing girl, pats her back, croons comforting words.
‘I won’t leave you! I can’t!
‘It’s all right, darling. It’s just a precaution. We will all be together again – soon.’
‘We should stick together now! Leave all together. We are a family.’
Now Josef himself speaks. He has finished adjusting the strings of the violin he holds and puts it carefully aside, laying it lovingly in its case on the dining table.
‘You must go, Sarah. We will follow when we can, in time. It is the only way.’
But his voice cracks too. He tries his best to hide it; he has to be brave, strong, for Sarah, for Leah. Only he knows that deep inside he is crumbling into pieces.
He closes the case, stands up, puts it away. He never brings work upstairs; he leaves his tools and instruments downstairs in his workroom – but this half-violin belongs to Sofie, his youngest. They keep their own instruments up here, in the parlour. A violin for each girl, five in all since Sofie has started to learn, his own precious violin, a cello for Leah. A string sextet, and Sofie. But they hardly ever play together now. Too loud; too dangerous. Who would ever have thought that a family playing music together of an evening could be dangerous? Surely it’s the most innocuous, the most pleasing of occupations? Surely even Germans should understand that?
But these are not ordinary Germans. Not real Germans. Since they marched into Colmar in 1940, Josef and his family have very quickly grasped the fact that, now, everything is different. Every little thing, down to the language they speak and the names they bear. They are lucky: their surname is Mayer, a quintessentially German name, and Josef, too, is German as well as Jewish. Sarah did not need to change her name: it is, fortunately, French, Jewish and German. But Amélie, Thérèse, Manon and Sofie: they were forced to change.
Now the four youngest girls are, officially, Amelia, Tanja, Inge and Sigrid. Josef still calls them all by their real names, deliberately. Leah rebukes him whenever he does; she uses the new German names. Always.
‘We might as well get used to it,’ she says, again and again. ‘For the duration. Just in case.’
‘Just in case of what, exactly?’ Josef always replies. ‘Do you think a gang of Boche are going to break down our door and ask the girls at gunpoint what their names are? What language they speak?’
The cheek of it, he’d raged at first. A person’s name is surely the most personal part of him or herself; how dare they take that away! But of late he has been forced to mitigate his rhetoric, and never speak of it outside the four walls of his home. For now, he knows – they all know – they could lose far more than their names. Losing your name is almost a joke, these days, when the secret grapevine brings news of what else Jews in Germany are losing.
Here in Alsace they had all cushioned themselves in a pad of complacence, at first. Hitler might have annexed their province, so that it was now Germany instead of France. But it had been German before, and then French, and then German again and then French again, like the baton in a relay race. Who cared, as long as life went on as ever? Now, German has been made the official language instead of French. Josef speaks both fluently, as does his wife; and the girls, who cannot remember the last time Germany was in charge, had, like all other Alsace children, simply had to learn and get used to the new language, the new words for everything. As children do, they learned swiftly. Now they are all fully bilingual.
The street name has been changed, of course, the old sign torn down and a new one nailed on: now it is Gerechtigkeitsgasse, Justice Lane, instead of the much more fitting rue des Géraniums. Their own little house, just one in the row of lopsided timber-framed traditional Alsace buildings lining the lane, is one of many whose windows in summer carry boxes of geraniums flaring out and over, spilling down in cascades of brilliant red blossoms lovingly tended by Leah. Other wives place flowerpots overflowing with flowers in front of their homes, around their doorsteps, fixed to the walls. In these days of swastika banners and posters all over the town this backstreet has somehow escaped the regulation defacement; the Nazis haven’t found it – not yet – and flowers still reign supreme.
One of the first things the Nazis did after marching in on 1 November 1940 was to deport all the Jews. They were packed onto trains and transported down to Vichy to await an uncertain fate. At least, people said, at least not to Germany. They had been allowed to take one suitcase of personal items and 100 francs each.
But Josef Mayer refused to go, taking refuge in his very German-sounding name and the fact that he was not a practising Jew, never attended the synagogue, hobnobbed with very few Jewish people and was, basically, simply a violin-maker of Colmar, happy to make violins, maintain his home, pay his bills, love his wife and raise his daughters. What more could a man want, and why should the Nazis notice him, and care? He scoffed when his friends advised him to leave. He refused to run away. Where would he go to? His life was here. His workshop, filled with the most exquisite instruments, each one unique, handmade, irreplaceable.
It was true that even in the years before the war demand for expertly made instruments had declined drastically, but they managed. His reputation was good, and reached right up to Strasbourg in the north and Freiburg in the east, in Germany. There was no way he could start again from scratch in a faraway country, no way he could take all his precision tools with him and no way he would leave it all behind.
And so he had simply gathered his family more tightly than ever around him, advised them to keep a bland presence in the town, stay at home as much as possible, keep their heads down, and life would continue as ever. They weren’t really Jews. What was a Jew anyway, but a human, like everyone else? He simply couldn’t believe that life would get worse in Colmar, worse than swastika banners and posters and Boche everywhere and everything in German. He had changed his own sign in his shop window, from Violin-maker Mayer to Geigenbauer Mayer. Surely that was compliance enough?
They, the Germans, couldn’t demand more.
But they did. A year later everything had changed. The reports coming out of Germany – they made his blood run cold. That Reichskristallnacht – could it be true, that the Nazis had rampaged through the towns and smashed in the windows of Jewish businesses? That Jews were being forced to wear yellow stars, driven from their homes, carted away, to who knows where? It was too far-fetched. Josef refused to believe it at first. He thought that caution and silence would protect them, as well as the innocuous name Mayer.
‘Keep your heads down. Don’t discuss politics, not with anyone. Fade into the background,’ he told them all, and that had worked, for a while. Officially, now, Colmar was Judenrein, free of Jews. Nobody knew.
But then…
Early one recent morning Josef woke to the sound of smashing glass, followed by footsteps running away. Hastening down to the street, he cried out: ‘Merde!’
Glass shards and splinters all over the cobbles before the shop, a huge hole in the shop window, the rest of the glass splintered and cracked. His own soul splintered at the sight. And he knew at once: the respite was over, they were no longer safe.
Leah appeared at his side.
‘Josef, j’ai peur!’ she whispered. And he too, for the first time since the war had started, knew fear: real fear, for his family, for their lives.
What were the most precious violins worth in comparison? Nothing at all. His instruments, his livelihood, they were all nothing. The fear was a visceral, living thing, coiled through his being like a venomous snake poisoning him from within. It was over, this silenced life they’d been living.
Who had done it? They would never know. Who knew they were Jewish? Who would harbour such hatred? A few close friends knew, but he couldn’t imagine any of them doing this. But people are only human; they talk, they gossip, and sometimes an ill-advised word or two could spread in the wrong direction. It didn’t matter, their time was up.
He and Sarah cleaned up as best they could. A few neighbours came out to help: Yves Girard, his friend the cobbler from two doors down, and the haberdasher and his wife, the Petits. They all whispered among themselves, expressing shock and disbelief and hatred of the Nazis, of what had become of their charming town. Other neighbours, those who didn’t come out, watched from behind twitching curtains. Had they approved of the attack? Had they known? Had one of them, perhaps…? The sense of trust and bonhomie that had made this little cobbled lane with its picturesque timber-framed houses and flower-boxes a haven in the Nazi stronghold that Colmar had become had been shattered along with that glass.
‘I warned you,’ Yves told Josef. Yves was his closest friend, a widower in his seventies, who Sarah and her sisters all called ‘Uncle’; he had fought in and survived the last war. And yes, Yves had told him to get out right from the start, to go with the other Jews. But now it wasn’t a smug ‘I told you so’. Now, while brushing up the last tiny splinters from between the cobbles, Yves said, ‘I can help. We’ll talk tonight.’
That night Yves had come round with a bottle of Riesling, given to him by ‘a friend’, and while emptying the bottle – which was necessary after the morning’s shock – Yves told him how, exactly, he could help.
‘You must go,’ he said, ‘you must all go, one by one. But first, tell me – you once spoke of a brother in America, do you think he would help? Take you in if you came to him?’
Josef nodded. ‘He would, Karl would help. But how can I go? There are seven of us, five of them children! How could we ever escape?’
‘There is a way – I have friends who can help. There is a woman near Ribeauvillé who hides Jews. She knows the right people. They are taken over the Vosges Mountains and into the Zone Interdite and then from safe house to safe house through France to Spain or Switzerland to safety. You must go as soon as possible. This is only the beginning. Trust me. I’ll send Jacques to you.’
A few days later, Jacques came with more information and advice. Jacques, it turned out, was a Resistance leader from further north, doing what he could to defy and defeat the Nazis. He spoke little of himself, but later, Yves told Josef more.
Like all men of Alsace under the age of thirty-five, Jacques had been conscripted into the German forces, the Wehrmacht. He would have been forced to fight for the Third Reich, and against France. There was no right of refusal; men who refused were sent to camps and even, perhaps, executed. If they ran away, their families were persecuted. Jacques was an exception because his father was one of the best and most prominent winemakers of the region, and good wine was Alsace’s treasure, the very reason why France and Germany had played tug-o-war with the province throughout history.
Jacques had not minced his words. ‘You all have to go, but you can’t go together. It has to be carefully planned. Give me two weeks, then you must send your eldest daughter – the seventeen-year-old. What is her name?’
‘She is Sarah.’
‘Sarah must go first. Then two more, the next two daughters. How old are they?’
‘Thérèse is fourteen. Amélie is twelve.’
‘They must go as soon as possible after Sarah. Sarah must go first, with an escort. I already know of a possibility. Then we will find someone for the next two girls.’
‘Can’t all three go together?’
‘No. Again, a group of four is almost impossible. Too much responsibility for the escort, who will also be a Jew needing to flee; her safety is also at stake.’
‘How can I send young girls out into the world? They are still children, they must stay with their parents!’
‘There is not space in safe houses for a family of seven. It is just too dangerous and too difficult. Yes, your daughters are young but we will provide reliable escorts for them, women of middle age, like mothers. The youngest girls, how old are they?’
‘Manon is seven, Sofie is only five.’
‘These two youngest can go with you and your wife. You must understand, it is very difficult to arrange for a whole family to escape. Difficult and dangerous. We will do it, but we must reduce the family as far as possible.’
‘How can I send young girls away? My daughters? How can I send them on a perilous journey without us? They have always been so protected, so safe…’
‘You cannot protect them, and they are no longer safe. Not one of you is safe. The longer you stay here, the more dangerous it will become. You should have left in the early days.’
‘I know that now.’
‘Very well. Now I must go. Prepare Sarah, and I will come back and take her away.’
‘You will take her yourself?’
Jacques shrugs. ‘I will do my best to come myself. I cannot promise.’
‘I can’t send my daughter away with perfect strangers! She would be terrified, so would we! You understand, she has lived a very protected life. She is very close to us and hardly ever leaves the house.’
‘I don’t expect you to give your daughter into the hands of a stranger – I will arrange it. If I cannot come myself, I will send someone you can trust absolutely. More I cannot promise.’
‘But where will she go? How…?’
So many questions, so many uncertainties. Danger everywhere – how could he do it?
‘She will be taken first to the safe house in Ribeauvillé. The woman there is very brave and good. I will escort her myself, if possible. If I send someone, they will have a password.’
He thinks for a while, and then says, ‘The password is this: you will say to them, how was the wine harvest this year? And they will reply: not as good as 1917. That was the best year. Remember those words and don’t forget to ask.’
They discuss more details, of the route Sarah will be taken over the Vosges Mountains into the neighbouring province of Lorraine. Jacques reassures Josef that it is safe; he himself has done this before, many times, escorted fugitives over the mountains, into Lorraine.
‘There, they are helped to Metz, where they’ll meet more helpers, and then from safe house to safe house to the South of France. Some fugitives traverse the Pyrenees into Spain and then perhaps to the Americas; a few make it into Switzerland. Yes, there is danger but it is minimal compared to the far greater danger of staying in Colmar.
‘And once you have all escaped, you can meet again and build a new life together.’
Jacques speaks calmly and reassuringly. Meanwhile, Josef battles his fears. This is the only way forward. He knows it in his head. And yet his heart cannot accept it. Josef shakes his head.
‘I cannot do it. Cannot send my Sarah away, my Amélie, my Thérèse. My daughters are my life!’
After all they have spoken of, after all Jacques’ calm reassurance, he cannot do it.
And so, the next day, another visitor knocks on his door with the three prearranged knocks, and when he calls out from the window above, who is it?, an impatient voice: ‘The wine harvest was good this year, Monsieur Mayer, and now would you please let me in.’
The voice sounds female and when he descends in the dim light of the stairwell at the back of the house to open the door, he sees that he has not misheard: the visitor is a woman. Middle-aged, she wears a long black skirt, a black blouse and a black hat, but her face is pale and drawn, her hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. She holds out a hand to him. He shakes it.
‘Margaux Gauthier. You are Sarah’s papa. I believe Jacques has told you a little of me. You have certainly drunk my wine.’
She is the woman from Ribeauvillé, the woman Jacques has spoken to. She is different from Jacques. She does not speak calmly, reassuringly; she does not try to convince. She speaks dramatically.
‘Monsieur Mayer,’ she says. ‘Imagine you are in a three-storey house. There is a fire downstairs, the whole ground floor is in flames. You and your family are trapped on the top floor. You cannot go down the stairs. Smoke is creeping under the doors; you are already breathing it in. Your children are crying. Your wife is terrified. You go to the window, open it, and down there, in the street, you can see the dark shadows of your friends, your neighbours. They are holding out a sheet; it is a safety net, firm and solid, held tightly by them all. They are calling to you to jump. What do you do: do you wait for the fire to engulf you, do you jump yourself, or do you push your first child out?’
There is very little Josef can say, after that. He agrees to send Sarah, and the other girls, as soon as it is possible.
‘Thank you,’ he tells Margaux. ‘You are a stranger to me, and yet you risk everything to help me. I cannot thank you enough.’
He is almost in tears, but Margaux’s answer is unsentimental.
‘I do it for Alsace, for liberty. We must free our home from this pestilence. If all goes well, one day you can all return. This is what I hope and pray for: that Alsace may live again, as France, and free.’
The two weeks between the shattering of the window and the planned departure of Sarah have been fraught not only with fear and danger but with heartbreak and gloom.
Josef and Leah understand with their heads that they must flee, and that Sarah, as the eldest, must flee first. That they must send her off into the wide world, a world of peril; that they will not know for months, perhaps years, how she has fared. They grasp it with their reason, with common sense. But hearts are sometimes strangers to common sense, and their hearts will never grasp it, never agree. Their hearts cling to her more than ever, refuse to let her go just as she refuses to go; at the same time persuading her that she must go. How can they do it, all of them? How can they push her out into the terrible unknown, how can she leave them to what is, perhaps, an even more terrible unknown? How can any of them survive that rift, the tearing apart of an entity so closely welded together it is, really, just a single entity, that whole and wholesome thing, an intact family?
She is their firstborn, the child that changed them – as firstborn children always do – from unformed post-adolescents with hopes and dreams and all the world open before them into mature adults with responsibilities, cares, an unbreakable bond not only to a scrap of wailing humanity but to a place and a home and money and work and food.
They discovered for themselves the terrible thing that all new parents realise for the first time: that there is something, someone, in their lives more precious than they are to themselves and to each other; something, someone, the loss of whom would destroy them, shatter them – just as that glass pane has been shattered. Irreparable. Letting her go is like pitching a diamond into a river, trusting it will be carried to safety, to be picked up downriver by someone trustworthy and handed back to them intact. Impossible to conceive of, yet they must do it. That night Jacques convinced them, over that bottle of Riesling, with some help from Margaux. Jacques, so young himself, yet so experienced, so passionate, so credible. He had talked into the night and somehow calmed their fears, led them to trust and to find the strength within their hearts to do the impossible. To cast that diamond. They must do it.
But it is not just the spectre of personal loss and fear for Sarah that has churned up their lives in those two weeks. Something else happened, something that terrified Josef and Leah to the core. It happened just a week ago.
Josef and Sarah were both in the shop, working quietly together on the only commission they’d had all year. It was for the eldest daughter of a well-situated burgher and businessman of Strasbourg who had done well, thrived, even, since the Nazis had taken over. Such people were the only ones who could afford to give their children something as precious as a violin. They were known as collaborateurs, and reviled by the Alsatian citizens loyal to France. This man’s daughter had shown such musical talent as a child she must now have an exquisite adult instrument, handmade especially for her. It pained Josef to take a commission from such a person, but really, what choice did he have? He had to maintain his family, and work was scarce, and besides, could anyone afford to refuse to work for the Nazis and their helpers?
And it wasn’t the violin’s fault that it was going to a collaborateur; it would still receive the luthier’s full attention, and the same love would be poured into the making of it as were it a violin destined for the greatest maestro on earth. Josef had been taught this by his own father: even the most mundane job, do it with love. That is the secret to a good and happy life. His father had learned it from his own father, the last of the male Goldberg line of expert luthiers. Now, even the Mayer line was dying out, as far as males were concerned, which was why Sarah, and not a non-existent son, was his apprentice.
Sarah has been following him into his shop since she was a girl of five, watching him work, peppering him with questions. She has listened to the voices of violins from their very beginnings, when they were just crude blocks of wood, right up to the moment when she can hold a finished instrument in her hand and draw a bow across its strings and hear its final voice. She has grown up with violin voices. But most of all, she knows how to give a violin its voice, its best voice.
No son could have been a better apprentice. It is as if Sarah’s fingers, Sarah’s very heart and soul, have inherited the collective wisdom of all her luthier ancestors, concentrated and intensified, Goldberg-Mayer-Plus-X. She possesses a sensitivity he has rarely seen among his colleagues, and certainly surpassing his own. She is more than a craftsman; she is an artist.
Josef has always known that creativity requires the ultimate humility; that arrogance and bluster have no place in creating a true work of art, that the I must disappear to allow the juice of genius to flow. But Sarah does it better.
On that particular afternoon, they were working together, as usual, in the narrow room behind the ground-floor shopfront, Josef’s workroom. The walls were hung from floor to ceiling with the tools and paraphernalia of his trade: planes of different sizes, purfling tools, saddles and nuts, bridges; ribs and templates, loops and tailguts and, of course, the precious wood, pre-cut into blocks, spruce from the Vosges forests.
Sarah had been given the collaborateur’s daughter’s violin; she called it the Adrienne, for that was the girl’s name. The Adrienne was to be the first violin Sarah had made completely on her own, from start to finish, without even a word of advice from her father. And she had promised herself it would be as good as any violin made by any seasoned violin-maker in Alsace, in France, in Germany; she would give it her all, because it was her first, and because it was going to a girl, like her; a musician who, she hoped, would treasure it for ever, just as she treasured her own violin. She had chosen the wood for it, holding the initial rectangular blocks next to her ear, tapping them with her finger to hear their inner voice; she could now recognise at once the potential of each block.
Having chosen the best Tonewood wedges, centrejointed and flattened, she’d used the finished rib assembly placed on the flattened side to draw the final shape of the violin. Sawed to outline, she’d carved the long arch then the cross arching, then using thumb planes shaving and smoothing, switching to toothed blade thumb plane to smooth yet finer again, finally finishing with thin scraper steel to create the finish.
With the mould removed from the rib assembly, she’d glued on the back and then the belly to make the corpus of the violin.
Once the corpus of the violin was made came the most exciting part: to knock with her knuckles and listen to the resonance of the corpus imagining how the finished violin will sound. This was specialist work, the crux of a luthier’s skill, but from the beginning Sarah had an instinct for it: a sure planing hand, a finely tuned ear.
Now, she balanced the violin’s back plate on her thumb. It hovered there, perfectly straight, perfectly poised. Satisfied, she viewed the Chladni patterns made by tea leaves: she sprinkled the leaves into the slight curvature of the back plate, adjusted the frequency of the plates beneath the violin, watched the tea leaves jiggle and dance and finally settle themselves into a particular pattern, then read that pattern to decide that at last, she’d got it right: the violin had found its true voice. But this time the tea leaves gave a completely unexpected jolt as the door to the shop flew open and banged against the wall, and two soldiers crashed through it and into the tiny room, their jackboots crunching on the wood shavings and sawdust that littered the floor, to stand there glowering, arms akimbo.
Both soldiers were tall, Aryan to the tips of their long bony fingers and the icy blue of their eyes and the straw-yellow bits of hair beneath their black-visored caps, the only apparent difference between them being their age and the numbers and types of insignia on their lapels. One was definitely in his fifties, the other a young lad of hardly more than twenty. The older one spoke, the young one kept silent. Josef thought of them as father and son.
‘Herr Mayer,’ said the father, ‘we have reason to believe that you are Jews. That you are a Jewish family that has somehow evaded the compulsory evacuation that took place two years ago. Is this true?’
‘Of course not!’ Josef summoned all his bravado. Yes, perhaps it was cowardly to deny his heritage, but his family was at stake – their safety, their lives. He would deny till the end of his days and not feel a twinge of guilt.
The father produced a page of paper, and read from it. ‘Josef Mayer, Leah Mayer. Five daughters: Sarah, Amelia, Inge, Tanja and Sigrid.’
‘Why… why do you think we are Jews?’ Josef tried not to stutter, and was only mildly successful. His voice was too weak; with a deep breath, he summoned some splinters of courage and confidence.
‘We have German names! I am a Mayer – what could be more German than that? I have followed the legal measures demanded by the new regime and changed any French first names in my family to German, Christian ones. We follow the rules.’
‘Nevertheless, we have been informed that you are secret Jews, therefore of impure genealogy. You must provide within the next seven days a certificate of Aryan ancestry, an Abstammungsurkunde. We need papers for yourself and your parents and your grandparents. You must bring it to the civilian registry, to the Einwohnerbürgeramt, within those seven days. Once you have provided the paperwork for you and your wife, you shall be removed from the list.’
‘What list?’
‘It is none of your business. Just be assured that you are on a list of people who are still polluting our society. You shall be counted as guilty until you have proven your innocence. Good day, Herr Mayer.’
And just like that, they were gone, father and son both, clicking the heels of their black boots as shiny as black ice and just as treacherous. Gone from the shop, but not from their lives. Josef knew his days were numbered. The respite was over.
After that encounter there were no more excuses; no more delays could be countenanced. Even Josef knew now, without a doubt: Sarah had to go, and they had to prepare for their own departure. There were several problems, the biggest being time; time and papers.
The papers. How could they get an Abstammungsurkunde of Aryan descent for himself, his parents and grandparents, when Josef was Jewish, through and through? And in seven days? If he could not produce them, he had no doubt as to the consequences: they would all be deported into Germany’s darkest depths. Everyone had heard of the German camps: labour camps from which no one ever returned. Jews and other undesirables who entered those camps disappeared; they would not be heard from again until the end of the war. Nobody knew what went on within those camps, but rumours were rife and hair-raising, and nobody doubted that the camps were the equivalent of hell on earth, from which there was no return, black holes into which one simply disappeared, sank into the darkness.
Josef’s friend and neighbour Yves had, in the final days, been their constant guest every evening, advising them, calming them, consoling them.
‘It is fairly easy to get papers,’ he had said. ‘There’s a good forg
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