Crossing the Borders of Time (39 page)

He signed it
ton Schatsy
, using the nickname she had given him, derived from
Schatz
, the German word for “darling.”

For the next several days, Janine lived belowdecks, drenched in sadness. In the dark of the hold, she lay with Roland in her memories and tried to pretend he was lying beside her under the blanket. For the first time she noticed how long months of limited rations had outlined her ribs and how her abdomen dipped like a basin between the bony peaks of her hips. But the hunger she felt was only for him. She tried to call up his smell and his taste, the pulse of his heart, the warmth of his skin, the soul in his eyes. It was not enough.
A baby
, he’d warned, resisting desire that night in Marseille. But how she wished that a part of Roland were growing inside her, traveling with her, linking them always, their love enduring through all generations by way of their child. Why had she let him deny her that blessing? She lay for days with her knees curled up to her chest and allowed Alice to believe seasickness had paralyzed her, while Trudi attempted to lure her on deck. But Janine would not move. She lay there and wept, consoling herself with promises of love she engraved in her heart:

We share a love that is strong enough to triumph over all obstacles.… You are now my fiancée; remember that when you see me again, it will be to become my wife, never to leave me again. Already I am entirely yours.…

One night, as she lay in the dark and gave in to her tears, she jumped in alarm as the curtained partition, stretched across the width of the hold, suddenly opened next to her head. She found herself staring into the shining eyes and ebony face of a Senegalese soldier whose bunk was behind hers. His gleaming teeth flashed a friendly smile in the night, and she was mortified that her noisy misery had been disturbing his rest. Gently, he reached an arm past the curtain and placed an apple next to her cheek. “
Ne pleurez plus
,” he urged her. Don’t cry anymore. “You must eat and get up. Things will work out.” Before the end of the week, the chivalrous soldier would give her a thin metal ring wrapped inside a note asking her to become his wife.

The
Lipari
traveled along the coasts of France and Spain and past Barcelona before turning south to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Without incident, it reached North Africa and stopped in Algiers, but the refugees were not permitted to disembark. “
We had to stay for two days on board the ship in the harbor, seeing the town not far away, and the crew coming and going
,” Janine later wrote of the journey. “
I thought that Moses must have had the same feelings as we had, when he could see but not enter the Promised Land, and when we arrived three days later at Oran, the same thing occurred. It was inhuman
.

“
From Oran to Casablanca, our ship was accompanied by five little warships, which had to protect us
,” she added. They studied the waves for signs of U-boats lurking under the water, and minesweepers scoured the oceans before them. “
We practiced safety drills several times in case our ship should be attacked. I had waited to see the famous Straits of Gibraltar, but the sea was very rough, and long before we reached that place, I felt more sick than ever and could not leave my bed
.”

Another night, asleep in the lower berth of the bunk beside Janine’s, Alice woke up and shrieked, as a set of false teeth fell from above, landing square on her face.

“
Mes dents, mes dents! Qui a volé mes dents?
” Who stole my teeth? their owner demanded, scrambling down to search Alice’s berth for the teeth she had dropped. The woman’s voice was indignant, no theft beyond imagining now.

“
Gott im Himmel!
” Alice exclaimed, her heart racing, after her bunk mate had climbed back to bed. “Those teeth landed right on my nose! That scared me to death!”

“Why? Did they bite you?” Janine inquired, her anger inspiring a joke that surprised even her by making her giggle. It was the first spark of life to enter her voice since she’d boarded the ship. Yet as silence descended again in the hold, Janine lay awake in the groaning darkness and wished she could take back the words that now seemed unkind. She was acutely aware of the rustle and sighs, the breathing and snores of all the people, her mother among them, trying their best to escape into the illusion of dreams as they maneuvered through the fears of the night.

The following morning, Janine ventured on deck and started to meet a few fellow passengers, but still she spent most of her time staring at two tiny pictures of Roland pasted inside a three-inch, blue spiral notebook that substituted as a new autograph book. The first was a formal portrait, Roland in a suit, white shirt, and striped tie, with his glossy, thick hair slicked back from his forehead and a very solemn look on his face. The handwritten entry on the opposing page was undated:

The next page offered an informal snapshot of him, grinning shyly and wearing his coat, standing along the banks of the Rhône in Lyon, a bridge in the background. Roland had written the message accompanying this picture just the day before she sailed from Marseille, when she objected to his having termed her a
sister
and
friend
in his earlier entry. She needed far more romance than that to take away with her, and he complied:

Roland’s first entry in Janine’s little blue autograph book

Roland’s second entry, written the day before Janine’s departure, pledges lifelong love
.

To erase that which I told you one day when I did not yet dare pledge my love, I ask you here to preserve our love intact until the happy day when you will be able to become my companion for life.

Before leaving the ship, another young man, having noticed her devoted attention to her little blue book, asked to inscribe a message himself: “
For the day when your sad blues have been drowned, I dedicate to you this little word
.” At the top of his page, he had pasted half a French postage stamp that showed the face of a girl gazing into the distance, with a single word over her head: “
Espoir
.” Hope.

“
We would have liked to stay at least a week at Casablanca and see this town so famous in France for its beauty
,” Janine would later write of her trip, practicing English as a student in Cuba. “
Instead of this, we had to leave our ship at four-o’clock, just cross the wharf and go on board the
San Thomé,
which had arrived the same day from Portugal
.”

The Joint’s Lisbon office had chartered the
San Thomé
, like others before it, in neutral Portugal, the only country that still had available ships. The agency had to guarantee payment for filling each berth and was contractually obliged to pay for the trip in full before the ship left Morocco. It paid half when the
San Thomé
set out on the voyage with some 110 refugees embarking in Lisbon, and the balance before it left Casablanca, where 448 passengers boarded. There, in addition to the
Lipari
travelers, it had taken on passengers from the
Ville d’Oran
, a cramped freighter for animals that had carried refugees, along with more than one hundred sheep, across the Mediterranean from Marseille eight days ahead of the
Lipari
’s sailing.

Some of the
Ville d’Oran
group, interned in Casablanca while they waited for the
San Thomé
to arrive, powerlessly watched their visas expire and were separated from family members with still-valid papers who had to continue the journey without them. Those left behind could not renew their visas in Morocco, and as they stood on the docks tearfully waving farewell, no one could say what would happen to them. It seemed all too likely that they would be sent back to France with almost no chance of escaping again.

Jewish relief agencies paid the Portuguese approximately $400 per adult passenger and half fare for children, a total for the ship as a whole of $192,607 (the equivalent of well over $2.6 million today). At the HICEM office atop the rue de Paradis in Marseille, a staff of seventy-eight people had helped secure visas and fix travel arrangements. By the end of that month, the Joint would report that together with HICEM, from January 1941 to May 1942, they had helped almost eight thousand refugees get out of France. That November, after the Germans invaded Marseille, the Nazis would transform HICEM’s villa, turning a haven of hope into a house of torture for hundreds of Jews and Resistance fighters whose only escape would be death.

The refugees who managed to board the
San Thomé
constituted Babel afloat—Germans, Austrians, French, Poles, Dutch, Belgians, Czechoslovaks, Russians, Latvians, Luxembourgers, Bolivians, Romanians, Yugoslavs, Spaniards, and Swiss—though records would list many others as “stateless,” aliens officially stripped of citizenship. Most were Jews who had been targeted for deportation and all that implied, but there were also those who had volunteered with the French Foreign Legion during the war, only to be denied permission to reenter France after it fell.

There were non-Jewish German political refugees fleeing the Reich, as well as a contingent of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Volunteers from dozens of countries, they had joined the International Brigades on the Republican side six years before, unsuccessfully battling the Fascists in Spain. Many of them were scheduled to leave the ship in Veracruz, the
San Thomé
’s next port of call on the way to Havana.

Also on board, among a coterie of artists and intellectuals, was a forceful woman reputed to be the daughter of the late Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (author of
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
). There was a Russian sculptor who came close to sparking a fistfight with Sigmar, a most unlikely brawler, when he suggested that Janine might agree to pass the time modeling in the nude for him because his wife had watched her undress in the hold and reported she had a very fine figure. There was a Viennese actress who taught Janine about the transformative magic of makeup and light, a Spanish aesthetics professor and poet with a nobleman’s profile, and a firebrand German Jewish communist who would return to Germany after the war with lofty ideals for rebuilding the nation.

In short, it was an unlikely assortment of careworn souls who met traversing the oceans of war, all cut adrift from their past social circles and thus free to interact with each other in a circumscribed time and place that cast them as equals. Money alone was no passport to safety, nor was its absence a bar to making the voyage. As far as the Jews were concerned, the Joint Distribution Committee and HICEM raised funds through philanthropy and from refugees’ families abroad to ensure that no one who held appropriate visas would be denied rescue solely because he or she could not pay for a ticket.