Shattered Crystals, Mia Amalia Kanner [cat reading book txt] 📗

“They made a gift of their bread to their loved ones.”

The first day after the girls left, I wondered if I had done the right thing to send them so far away. I missed them and thought about them constantly, trying to imagine what was happening to them. While I cooked the milky breakfast soup, I thought of them. Watching girls stack the dirty plates, I wondered what my two were doing.

Both girls had promised to write when they arrived in Marseilles, the first stop of the journey. A week after their departure, I had their first letter. It was a year after the French surrender, and train service in the Unoccupied Zone governed by French collaborationists was no longer normal. It took two days for the group to reach their destination. Marseilles is southeast of Limoges, and though both were major rail terminals, there was no longer a direct link between the two cities. The train took the children to Toulouse, nearly two hundred miles south of Limoges. They arrived in the evening, after eight o’clock.

In the Toulouse terminal, the children were taken to the station restaurant. Eva described the meal in detail. “We had bread and butter, half a tomato, a plate of soup, an egg, a piece of cheese, a plum, a bonbon, and a glass of lemonade.” I thought it normal for a child to write about bonbons and lemonade, if not to itemize every item of the food on the menu. But Eva’s next sentence revealed what the war was doing to children. What she wanted us to know was: “We could have as much bread as we wanted.”

The stop over in Toulouse was to last three hours, so it was close to midnight when the children finally boarded the train for Marseilles. They scrambled for places and Ruth managed to secure a seat for herself and Eva who “slept well the whole night.” Ruth was already watching over her sister. Ruth herself hardly slept at all. There were not enough seats for all the children, but youngsters are inventive. They simply climbed up into the luggage racks overhanging the seats, and slept there. The train “crawled like a snail,” and they did not pull into Marseilles until mid-morning.

In Marseilles, their first stop was with representatives of the Quakers. They interviewed each child, confirming date and place of birth, nationality, parents’ names and whereabouts. Then the children were taken to the OSE reception building for refugees. They remained in the reception center for two weeks waiting for their ship. Even before Ruth wrote again to tell about the delay, I learned from Madame Krakowski that the children had not left Marseilles as scheduled.

Ruth called the building where they stayed a “barrack.” Children from other OSE homes traveling to America joined our group and the cots were moved closer and closer together. Eva added a line about boys and girls sleeping in one room with blankets hung in the middle to form a room divider. “I don’t like it here, too much,” she wrote. “It is not very clean.” In her next letter, the child elaborated, revealing there were bedbugs and lice. I shuddered when I read it, but I was glad she told us. They were my children. If they had difficulties, I wanted to know about them.

The children were given still another medical examination and visited the American Consulate for a review of their documents. Everything was in order for my daughters and all our group from Montintin and La Chevrette, but six children were returned to an OSE home near Vichy. Consular officials discovered that other members of their families already had affidavits approving entry to America. That made them ineligible to travel on the affidavit the United States had issued for the group. “We have no problem, so don’t worry about us,” Ruth said.

There were only a few adults to supervise, so the children formed small groups and teenagers took responsibility for the younger ones. Aside from a walk to the harbor, there was little to occupy them. Then a diphtheria epidemic broke out in Marseilles, and children were confined to a small courtyard for play and exercise. They were bored and restless.

“We can’t go to the stores,” Ruth wrote, and immediately added, “Don’t worry about us. There is nothing to worry about.” Sensitive and grown-up in her concern about our reactions, she was still also a child who closed every letter with thousands of kisses.

Of course, I worried. What mother wouldn’t? But then came good news. After two weeks, the children left Marseilles, though not by ship. Word came to us from Limoges that the route on the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar had become too dangerous. The children would have to travel by train to their new embarkation point in Portugal.

Ten days later, I received a detailed letter from Ruth describing their train journey through France, Spain and Portugal. At the end of their stay in Marseilles, Madame Salomon, the woman in charge of the OSE children in Marseilles, made a souvenir album. She wrote the story of each chateau, and pasted photos of all the children in the book. This little detail reassured me. She must have been a caring woman to go to the trouble of creating a scrapbook. I was sure she was doing her best for our children while they were in her charge.

At six o’clock on a Wednesday morning, they boarded the train and rode back to Toulouse. This time the train did not travel at a snail’s pace; nor was there time for a meal in the station restaurant. Instead, each child received a brown bag filled with food. The children found this peculiar. None of them had ever been given a meal in a paper bag, but they soon became accustomed to it. Paper bag meals were the norm for the rest of the journey.

From Toulouse, they traveled to Pau near the Franco-Spanish border. The trip should have taken just several hours, but the trains were plagued with delays. The group spent a night on benches in a railroad terminal. The atmosphere was oppressive, and they did not need to be told to be quiet and orderly. They were relieved to climb back on the train.

When they reached Pau, they were less than forty miles from the border. There, they spent a night, sleeping two to a bed.

They made one more unexpected stop in France. It was at the railroad siding of the concentration camp of Gurs, where relatives of some of the children were confined. Waiting for these children on the platform were inmates. Mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles of Gurs had come to the train to see their children with whom they had had no contact for months.

No one explained when or how these children knew their train would make this extra stop. Maybe someone told them. They were not permitted to get off the train, and the inmates were not allowed on. But when the train pulled into the camp, the children were jammed together in front of the windows. Even before the train came to a complete stop, the children reached their arms out of the windows. Each little hand held a brown paper bag. They had not consumed the bread they had been given for their breakfast, but saved it. Now they made a gift of their bread, handing it out of the windows to their loved ones.

Who had arranged this unscheduled stop that made it possible for mothers and children to say goodbye to each other? Who was it? I wondered for a long time.

At the Franco-Spanish border, all the passengers had to disembark and walk across the border to Canfranc in Spain. They were held up for several hours before they were finally allowed on the Spanish trains. The wooden seats were hard and uncomfortable. Traveling through the mountains, Ruth found a compensation. “The Pyrenees were so beautiful,” she wrote. “I have never seen anything like it. There was snow on some of the mountains.”

When the train pulled into Madrid, it was close to midnight. Two buses were waiting for the children and took them to a convent for the night. Although it was their first chance to wash since Marseilles, the Spanish capital left them with bad memories. Madrid had been ravaged by bombs. Ruth wrote, “All we saw driving back to the station were bombed out buildings.”

They confronted a new problem before they could cross the border into Portugal to reach Lisbon. “We had to ride on Shabbos,” my daughter confessed. “But we couldn’t help it.” All the children understood the extraordinary circumstances and that they had to get out of Spain.

When they reached Lisbon in August, the children felt they were in paradise. School was out for summer vacation, and they were put up in a boys’ boarding school where each child had his own room with a sink for washing. The greatest wonder was in the dining room where they could help themselves to an abundance of marvelous, mouth-watering food, “as much good bread and butter as we could eat!” and meat, cheese, fruits, so many items that they had not eaten in a long time. Eva discovered pineapple, filled herself on the sweet new fruit, and was sick.

Our children had survived two years of wartime shortages. Their bodies were no longer accustomed to quantities of rich food, and many became sick during the first days in Lisbon. But they recovered. The weather was warm and sunny, and they walked joyfully along the beach. They stayed in Lisbon for two weeks before boarding their ship.

Ruth’s last message from Lisbon was, “Many million kisses.”

Her next letter came with an American stamp and was postmarked New York. None of us had imagined that it would take six weeks from the time our children left La Chevrette until they would land in New York on Labor Day of 1941. Whatever the delays and difficulties of the long journey, at last they were safe in America.