Paris, the magnet for the refugees of Europe, was a strange place to spend a war. What was I, an Italian, doing in Paris at a time like this? Why wasn't I at home, preparing for war rather than living abroad? Over and over, I asked myself these questions. I suppose every refugee in every other war has asked himself/herself these same questions. What am I doing so far from home? Alas, perhaps the more appropriate question might have been, "Do I have a home any longer?"
But I was Jewish and somehow that was answer enough. We were the wanderers of the earth, the first in the line of refugees, a people without a nation, a heritage without a country, a culture scattered to the far corners of the world. I was on the run.
Like thousands of other refugees packed into Paris we were dreamers. Our conception of reality was so tragically distorted that we steadfastly refused to see the situation as it really was. We were victims of our own delusions. We were absolutely convinced that within several weeks – at the very most – the anti-Semitic riots would be over, that Mussolini and Hitler would be ousted from power, and that the Jews could return to an Italy, Germany and Poland exactly as they had left them in the "good old days."
We were fools.
For France, World War II began with the German attack on Poland. Using a new invasion tactic known as blitzkrieg, "lightning warfare," the Germans were able to strike hard and deep into Polish territory before the beleaguered Poles had time to react. In response, the Polish cavalry – to be long remembered as the world's most courageous warriors or most colossal fools – attacked Nazi panzer divisions, the armed corps of tanks, on horses with sabers. It was symbolic of the slaughter to come.
As far as France was concerned, she lay safe behind the Maginot Line. Massive guns were cemented facing German to the east while beneath and behind the cannons ran deep subterranean tunnels which housed thousands of troops as well as an underground train system that allowed rapid transportation of men and material from one sector of the Line to another. At ground level the walls were as high as forty feet and as thick as one hundred feet.
With such a fortress, it was difficult for the French to imagine that any army on earth, regardless of its mechanization, could penetrate France. So, the French basked in the false security that they would remain untouched by the holocaust threatening to consume all of Europe.
After the lightning attack on Poland, the war seemed over. Germany and Russia quickly divided the spoils, ie. Poland, and peace seemed to settle across the continent. Norway was creating some problems for the Germans, but that was far away. All along the Maginot Line, the fears of blitzkrieg slowly melted and the war became one of sitzkrieg. But spring would bring an end to this "Phony War."
That winter my family and I lived in a small hotel near the Vaugirard Metro station. It was quite a change from our spacious home in Torino. Instead of having a room apiece, a library so large we had to index the books, servants and an enclosed garden, we had a small, two-room apartment with a minuscule "kitchen" in my parents' room. We had to share the toilet with everyone else on the second floor. There was no running water, so the dishes had to be washed in a small wash basin with water drawn from the tap over the tub.
While the lifestyle was miserable, the waiting was worse. Like thousands of other refugees from across the breadth of Europe, we had nothing to do but wait and hope that tomorrow would allow us to return home. Each day brought a new hope of a change for the better. Another day and another hope would pass. And another day, and another day and another day until the days seemed but a continuum of shattered hopes and daydream dreams of a return to an unchanged Italy. Tortuously the days worked into weeks and the weeks into months and still the war dragged on and on and on. Soon our most frequently used expression, coined from our adopted country, was Attendant mais, Je ne sais pas quoi. (I am waiting but for what I do not know.) We were strangers in a strange land awash with the hope of tomorrow but a fear of the future.
For the refugee life was a colossal bore. Alas, you say, how is it that Paris can be such an experience for the traveler yet you found it so boring? Quite simply that to be in Paris and have to watch every sou tends to take some of the glitter off the bright lights. Since no foreigner was permitted to work without a special permit -- which was impossible to get – each day the refugees saw their financial reserves depleting and felt as though their life blood was slipping away franc-by-franc. Thus, we were forced to amuse ourselves with anything that was free or, at the most, incredibly cheap. Each day my brother and I would get out a map of Paris and chart an itinerary that would take us someplace we had never seen before. Most of the museums were closed because of the war so we had to content ourselves with walking the streets, slowly, until we knew them better than the Parisians. (To this day I can still remember many of the parks in Paris down to the most intimate detail. My wife marveled that after forty years I could still use the entire Parisian subway system without a map, even to knowing which way to turn to arrive at a certain address after we exit the Metro.)
At first most of our acquaintances were other refugees. With them we had something in common. We would meet for a cup of coffee and political discussions in some of the more inexpensive bistros. Occasionally we would run into the same refugee two or three times during the same day in different parts of the city. They were doing the same thing we were, walking out the war in the parks of Paris. But gradually we steered clear of the other refugees. Rather than developing a feeling of camaraderie, the meetings tended to remind us just how isolated we really were. Eventually even the letters from Torino became depressing. Occasionally I dated to take my mind off France and Italy, but I had no money, and my future was speculative at best. As the gay Parisians danced to their heart's content, supposedly safe behind the Maginot Line, I ended up like a derelict, alone on a park bench, too poor to be drunk and too sick at heart to enjoy the stars above.
Though I do not now believe it would have been possible, the money got tighter. The longer we stayed, the more conservative we had to become with our finances. Except for the basics of food and lodging there was no money left. Medical expenses were minimal and, except for the pulling of one of my teeth, we had no health difficulties. (Halfway through the extraction, a German plane flew overhead, and everyone ran for the basement. I, with my tooth half-in/half-out, had to suffer with the pain until the plane departed.) The only pleasure we allowed ourselves was a daily copy of the Paris Soir which we read from front page to classifieds every day.
After more than six months in Paris it finally dawned on us that perhaps we had best get ourselves some "insurance." Just in case, we kept saying to ourselves, just in case. We applied for a visit to Palestine, but the British consulate would not answer our letters. The British were not too keen on letting homeless Jews into Palestine. Then we made the rounds of the various consulates – just in case Paris should fall.
One of the first things we discovered was the incredible insensitivity of some consulates who were supposed to represent civilized nations. Worst of all were the South American consulates who didn't even bother to be polite. One ambassador even flatly told us "We don't want any Jews in _________."
Then there was the paperwork. Every embassy that would take an application gave us a virtual mountain of forms. At each consulate there were 10 to 15 pages of forms. Multiply this by 30 or 40 consulates and one can suddenly appreciate the amount of work involved. But, as time was the one commodity we could afford to lavish, we filled out the paperwork.
Our last stop was the American consulate in Place de la Concorde. With hesitation we entered. None of us could speak English and the abuses we had received from the other consulate were almost enough to deter us from trying at all. But what a change! Even the janitors were friendly.
We were ushered into the office of the American Consul, a Mr. Miller, who listened to our story in French. He asked us for some documents relating to our citizenship and ability to financially care for ourselves in America. Then he asked us to return in a week. That was an old story. We gave him the documents and left without much hope.
We did not honestly expect much to happen. Nothing else had happened at the other embassies, so why should the American representative be any different? Maybe the entire world hated the Jews. We were so used to filling out paperwork, paying "incidental fees" and returning in a week that we made the rounds of the consulates more out of habit than hope.
But when we returned to the American consulate, to our joy and surprise, Mr. Miller handed us four visas. We were ecstatic! At least we had some security short of running blindly across a border, any border, just one jump ahead of the Nazi war machine. But fools that we were, we looked upon the visas as security blankets, not ticket to freedom and this one mistake came very close to costing us our lives.
As he gave us the visas, Mr. Miller gave us two bits of advice which, to this day, I regret we did not follow. "Do not wait," he told us. "Go now. When you get to New York, take the first train west and go as far west as you can. Do not stay in New York." We, of course, had other plans. We were the willing victims of our own delusions.
Looking at out Italian passports, Mr. Miller informed us that we would have to get an extension on them to include the United States. This, however, could only be done at the Italian consulate. The Italian Consul, a short, heavy man who, ironically, had a strange physical resemblance to Mussolini, was less than thrilled that we were going to America. In no uncertain terms he told us to return home. Our passports would not be extended for any reason. But we had risked our lives getting out of Italy so there was very little chance of our going back. When we left, the Consul recorded our names and undoubtedly informed OVRA of our presence in Paris and our intentions.
Returning to the American consulate we were afraid that the validity of our visas hung on the extension of our Italian passports. But Mr. Miller, well used to the bureaucratic tie-ups, simply issued us an Affidavit in Lieu of a Passport.
"It's just a matter of red tape," he assured us. "They say no. We say yes. Just red tape." Again, he told us to leave and, again, we ignored his advice. We were still absolutely convinced that the governments of Hitler and Mussolini would collapse any day. It was simply a matter of time, we kept assuring ourselves, just a matter of time.
The last item remaining on our escape agenda was the acquisition of a visa de sortir, a French exit visa. Incredible though it may sound, it was necessary to get a visa to leave France. (For the "get," substitute the word "purchase.") Actually, this was just another way of putting the bite on the foreigner. We applied through the regular channels, but we were learning fast. The experience of my escape from Italy taught me that the fastest way to any document was through bribery. France, like every other country in the world, ran its bureaucracy through favors. It was not what you knew but who you knew. Discussing our difficulty with our landlord, he suggested he knew a gendarme who, in turn, knew someone who knew someone. And, of course, for "a bit of money," so on and so forth. It was another old story we had heard a lot of lately. But we were too desperate not to gamble.
But it was still dangerous. The landlord might take the money and never see his connection – if he even had one. The gendarme might take the money and do nothing. Worse, someone might be caught with our names in their possession. Then, as the American expression goes, "the jig would be up." Any illegal activity would have resulted in our immediate deportation. But gambling to get four visas de sorter was just one of those calculated risks one must take in life.
Three days later I went to the Bureau de Visa de Sorter in downtown Paris. What I had hoped would be a quick check for the documents turned out to be a six-hour wait in an undulating line of refugees. It was obvious that every other refugee in Paris was trying to get out of France. The next day the wait was even longer and the answer the same. By the third day the wait and the refusal had become yet another ritual.
Then, suddenly, the roof caved in. After six months of sitzkrieg, German panzer divisions smashed through the Belgium countryside and penetrated France. British, Canadian, Australian, and French troops were caught by surprise and forced to retreat. Within a month they were pocketed in a tiny port city on the English Channel by the name of Dunkirk. Then the mechanized might of the Third Reich advanced on Paris.
But we, the fools that we were, still clung to the hope that German would be defeated by the Allies and that it was only a matter of time before this inevitable military conclusion was reached. Besides, we rationalized, the Maginot Line would keep the Nazi beast out of Paris.
We were now on the very lip of self-destruction.
Then, on May 10, 1940, the Paris Soir printed a rough map of the Maginot Line with the city of Sedan behind the Maginot Line. The next day the Soir had the same map with Sedan on the German side of the Line. By the newspaper's map, Sedan had moved 20 miles during the night! "My God," my father yelled as he looked at the two maps. "It's time to get the Hell out of here!"
We were fools no longer.
Desperately we began to pack. If the visas de sorter did not come soon, within three or four days at the most, we would be forced to choose between remaining in Paris or fleeing south to Spain. But we knew either choice would be the end. Concentration camps stood at the end of either option. The camps would soon be full of fools such as we who believed too strongly in their own delusions.
Now waiting at the Bureau de Visa de Sorter became a necessity of life, not a ritual. Rather than spend the whole day waiting, I decided to go the Bureau at 5:30 am. The next day I was first in line. Each proceeding day the line started earlier and earlier. Usually by 6 am the string of refugees was down the sidewalk. By 8:00 it was around the block.
On May 11 there was nothing. On May 12 there was nothing. On May 13 there was nothing. On May 14 the doors opened promptly at 8:00 am and a bored civil servant began taking names.
"Name?"
"Levi. Vittorio, Amalia, Fausto, Mario."
"Fifty francs," he stated with no enthusiasm as he held the documents. I was so surprised that I didn't know what to do. Someone behind me snapped, "Pay the man so we can get on with it."
I paid the man.
"Where are you going?" the bureaucrat asked with indifference.
"America," I said as if the word was synonymous with the ends of the earth.
The moment I left the Bureau I telephoned my parents. Immediately they finished packing while I went to the American Express office. Now that we could legally get out of France, and had a destination, we still had to find a means of getting there. Planes didn't exist for passenger service then. Ships were few and far between since the Germans had been sinking ships with annoying frequency. Now that we had our paperwork in order, the last item on our escape agenda was the transportation and I rode the Metro to the American Express office wondering if there would be any ship that was in an open port that would leave before the Nazi war machine closed off all hope of escape from France.
Further, if there was, could we book passage with every other refugee in France trying to get out? And if we could book passage, could we get to the coast? We may have had our papers but we were still a long way from the coast.
The American Express office was half-empty even though other refugees with that precious document were also trying to book passage out of France. Oddly, the buying of ship tickets was easy. We were booked on the steamer Champlain to leave on May 18, my 26th birthday, from St. Nazaire on the southern coast of Brittany – well away from the advancing German units.
Now that we had our papers and bookings, we still had to get from Paris to St. Nazaire. There were only two ways to go: by train or by car. Going by car was out of the question. Even if we could have bought a used one, the roads would be so clogged with refugees that it would have been faster to walk. Whether a train was running and whether it was empty were other matters to be considered. We spent an uneasy night in Paris, our last, and the next day we went to the train station early.
There was only one train running to St. Nazaire and it wouldn't leave until that night. We quickly purchased tickets. Having learned from experience, we correctly expected the press of the mob, so we spent the day in the train station and boarded as soon as it was available. We were on board the 7:30 am. By 6:00 p.m. the train was jammed. There wasn't room to stand, much less sit, anywhere inside or outside of the compartments. The seats were filled, the aisles were full, the platforms between cars were loaded and, by the time the train left Paris, there were even people on the roofs of the cars. We were as packed as the proverbial sardines.
For 23 hours the train ran through the French countryside. It didn't stop for anything, even the occasional German fighterplanes which loomed overhead. It was a strange juxtaposition sitting on the train. Outside was calm and beautiful, a fine French spring day. Farmers were working their fields and sleepy little towns flew by the windows. But inside the train was the stench of fear, of a human mass scratching desperately for existence. We were all infected – even the children. One little girl in our compartment did not say a word for the entire trip. Outside, lining the roads like a legion of ants, were refugees – miles and miles and miles of people moving on foot or bicycle or in cars, moving south, south, south.
St. Nazaire was packed and hour-by-hour more and more refugees flooded into the city. The sleepy little coastal town probably didn't believe that there were that many people in the entire world, let alone in their backyard. For those of us with the visa de sorter and steamer tickets, the visit would be a matter of hours. For those without, the stay would be substantially longer. Only later did we discover that the Champlain was the last steamer out before the Germans took Paris.
The streets of St. Nazaire were teeming with refugees. The parks were full. The hotels were bulging. The alleys were throbbing with humanity. Even the docks had people sleeping in and around the machinery. After several hours of searching, we found a small room with a single bed on the fifth floor of a ramshackle building. For our last night in France, my father, brother, and I slept on the floor while my mother took the bed. We spent a miserable night; the stench of urine from the communal toilet across the hall was overpowering and the throb of the city, alive with refugees, kept us awake until the wee morning hours.
By 6 am we'd had enough. We staggered down to the docks praying that the Champlain would be in. It was. Within an hour we were aboard and for the first time in more than a year we felt somewhat safe – and a whole lot wiser.
Because the visa de sorter had been so difficult to obtain, the boat was only half-full. When we slipped away from the dock, we could see that the quay was black with people watching us slip into the Atlantic. Perhaps for the first time we realized just how incredibly lucky we were. We were on the ship, and they were on the shore.
"It's Armageddon," I remember telling my brother, "It has to be Armageddon."
And then the fog closed in behind us.
For the next eleven days the Champlain, without any sort of an escort, quietly crossed the Atlantic. Far to the north the Battle of Dunkirk was raging on the English Channel. Perhaps this drew off the submarines for we saw none. But we were still not home free and every morning we joined the other refugees on deck to look out over the gunnels of the ship hoping for the first glimpse of America.
Then, one morning, an object appeared out of the fog bank in front of the ship. At first we could not make it out. As the ship drew closer, we could see it was a huge statute holding a flaming torch over its head. The Statue of Liberty was beckoning us into New York harbor.
No one said anything.