Peter Janovsky
© 2007
GIFTS FROM A SPIRITUAL ANCESTOR
A day after September 11, 2001, I received a call from Thérèse Naffrechoux, a young woman from a small town in Southwestern France whom I’d met on a 1997 trip. She’d been trying to call since hearing the terrible news from the day before – She and her father André wanted to make sure my wife Fran and I were all right. Holding back tears, I assured her we were fine, and let her know how touched we were to hear from her.
I.
The story of the relationship between the Naffrechoux family and my own began some 60 years earlier in an even darker time, when an unusual family of three fled the town of Thiaucourt in Eastern France and began a several-hundred-mile journey west through occupied territory. My great uncle, Dr. Iliazar Israel Schaechter, 65, was a hero physician in the First World War, winning the Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honors. Elly, 44, his wife of just two years, was a German whose father had been a police chief in Alsace-Lorraine when it was under German control before the Great War. Charles Lang, 68, was Dr. Schaechter’s live-in patient for thirty years, a great bear of a man afflicted with autism or some other illness.
It
was one more in a lifetime of journeys for the doctor, who was the only
boy among the eight children of a Constantinople
rabbi. His seven sisters all emigrated
from Turkey to the United States, but Israel
made his way to France,
where he studied medicine at the University
of Nancy, and became a
small town doctor in Thiaucourt. I never
met my great-uncle -- He died in France, shortly after I was
born. But a few years ago I read a short
account of Uncle Israel’s
wartime experiences that changed my life for the next three years, as I spent
most of my spare time tracking down his story and following his footsteps
through France
on three trips with my wife Fran. As I learned more about his colorful life, it
struck me that he had no children -- no direct descendants to carry the light
of his memory. All of his sisters died by the 1970s, so as the grandnephew he never knew, I determined to become
his “spiritual” descendant and to uncover and preserve his rich past, which was
in danger of slipping quietly out of memory.
After
graduating from medical school in Nancy,
France in about
1900, Dr. Schaechter became the town doctor in a sleepy little village called
Thiaucourt. The town was just outside of
Alsace-Lorraine, the hotly contested region that changed hands from France to Germany just thirty years before. He married Marie Berthe Victorine Rapp from
nearby Metz,
and took in Charles in exchange for a monthly pension from his family. Charles stayed with the doctor for the rest
of his life.
The doctor’s peaceful
routine of making house calls on his bicycle was shattered by the beginning of
World War I. He enlisted and served all
four years of the war, earning him his French citizenship, and taking him to
all fronts, including the Dardenelles in his native country of Turkey. In September and October 1918, he was with a
motorized unit in Belgium
that came under heavy fire during one of the final allied offensives. His “great courage and sang-froid” treating wounded drivers under heavy bombardment earned
him the Croix de Guerre, and later the Legion d’Honneur.
Returning to Thiaucourt after the war,
Doctor Schaechter found his home reduced to rubble by wartime bombs. A postcard photograph to my Grandmother bears
witness to the post-war scene, showing the remains of the “Maison Shester”
(spelled phonetically), and identifying the town as the first French town
reconquered by the Americans. Rather
than rebuilding in Thiaucourt, the family moved to the once-again-French
Alsace-Lorraine, settling in the border town of St. Avold,
directly west of Germany
and right on what later became the Maginot Line. Doctor Schaechter rose to prominence in the
town as a respected physician, as well as a member of the Municipal Town
Council.
Israel’s
wife Marie died in the ‘20s, and sometime in the mid-1930’s, he hired Elly
Sukowski as a nurse and housekeeper.
Elly was a German whose father was a police chief in Metz when it was under
German control. Her ex-husband Charles lived in Germany with their teenage son
Hans, who was an active member of the Hitler Youth. In 1939, with German troops just steps away
over the Maginot Line, the doctor, Elly and Charles left Saint Avold for the
relative safety of Thiaucourt. On December 13, 1939, he
and Elly were married there.
A
remarkable letter written by Israel
in 1940 provides wrenching insight into his situation during that grim
period. The letter was given to me by
Bertrand Cerf, now a prominent member of the Jewish community of Saint Avold. Bertrand's parents and grandparents were very
close friends of Dr. Schaechter (he delivered Bertrand into the world in 1929),
and our visit kindled very warm memories of Uncle Israel and his own family from his
childhood. His father, a resistance
fighter, survived Auschwitz, and upon
liberation, returned to St. Avold, where he and Bertrand built a successful
real estate business. Bertrand found the
letter in his basement and read it aloud to us:
Thiaucourt, October 10, 1940
Chere Amie,If you know, far away, in occupied France, someone you can trust, who is Christian, send him what you think should be saved, and perhaps you’ll have a chance to recover them after the war. I myself have sent some linen, the only thing that I still possess of my valuables, far away in occupied France.They are making it difficult for me to exercise my profession . . Although I may be able to overcome these problems, I find I have no desire to continue practicing medicine now.The news from St. Avold is not happy. All are poorly housed. They sleep at home, but on the floor, without mattresses, and cover themselves with their clothes. . . . The Gestapo has not yet reached S. Avold and it is they who will sort out who will be allowed to stay and who will be expelled.Many good thoughts to your dear mother and Petit Bertrand.Have heart and hope!
“Petit Bertrand,” now 68, finished
reading the letter with tears in his eyes.
Again, he felt the presence of his family’s dear friend, as well as his
own parents, in the fading yellowed pages.
He gave us the original letter, keeping only a copy for himself.
As
of August 1941, Jews no longer could practice medicine in France, forcing Israel to depend entirely on the
monthly pension sent by Charles' family.
On June 6, 1942, all
Jews in the occupied zone over the age of six were required to wear the star of
David on the left side of their outer garments. One of my cousins kept a striking photograph
of Israel
and his wife, Elly, during that time, smiling and holding a neighbor's
baby. At first glance it's an idyllic
scene, but then you notice that Israel
is wearing the star of David with Juif
written on it, and Elly is wearing a cross.
It’s a disturbing, layered tableau with jarring images -- the innocence
of the infant and the Schaechters' smiles, undermined by the sinister star. Elly's cross adds yet another level of
complexity, deepened by the knowledge that she was not only Christian, but
German, with a son fighting for the Nazis at the time. Around the same time as the picture, Elly’s
son was killed fighting on the Russian front.
Israel
feared the Germans might intercept the monthly pension checks sent to him
from Charles' family and a neighbor, Gaston Motillion arranged to receive them
for him. He also took a box of valuables
Israel
gave him and buried it under the garage at his country home outside of Couhé in
Bois-de-Messé. No one really knows what
was in the mysterious box, which Israel apparently retrieved after
the war -- family recollections range from stock certificates to a small statue
of Victor Hugo.
In January 1944, the mother of Israel’s neighbor Azenor François died
and the garagiste went to the Couhé City
Hall to report the death. While there, he overheard Germans asking for
Dr. Schaechter's address. He quickly
left the building and sent a young girl on a bicycle to warn the doctor.
The
girl warned Israel
in time, and by the time the Germans arrived at the door, he had escaped to the
countryside outside town. As people in
Couhe today recount, Elly answered the door that day with a picture of her son
in uniform prominently displayed.
Who’s that?” they asked, surprised at the photo.“My son, Lieutenant Sukowski,” she answered in German. “He was killed just a few months ago at Orel, on the Russian front.”“But you’re married to a Jew named Schaechter.”“I had my poor son with my ex-husband, Charles. They lived in Germany.”“And you’re German?”“Yes -- I was born in Metz when it was part of the Fatherland.”“How could you marry a Jew?”“Liebe kennt keine grenzen.” [Love has no boundaries.]“And where is your Jew-husband?”“He’s gone to the country for some supplies. What do you want him for?”“He’s been chosen to work in camps in the East.”“What use could he be to you? He’s almost seventy -- what kind of work can he do?”“He can sweep the camps, can’t he?”“Well, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
The
Germans hesitated, deciding whether to wait or perhaps to take Elly into
custody until Israel
returned. Then they looked again at the
picture of Elly’s dead son.
Dr.
Schaechter hid outside of town until nightfall, when M. François arranged for he and Elly to be driven to his in-laws’ farm in a remote town called Chevais. The farmers, François and Leontine Naffrechoux, took them in without
hesitation.
In 1997, my wife, Fran and I visited
the farmhouse, and spoke with their son, Andre (then 75), about his late
parents and the arrival of Uncle Israel. Just as we began the interview, it
began to rain hard -- not just a downpour, but a pounding, violent outburst that
hammered the roof of the ancient farmhouse.
The kitchen/dining room where we sat was dominated by a long table that
stretched the length of the room to the far wall, where an ancient grandfather
clock rose up and loomed over the crowded space like a benevolent icon
presiding over our journey to the past.
As we sat around the table, the sound of the driving rain enveloped us
like a cocoon, insulating us from the present and transporting us to occupied France
in 1944.
I
asked if it had been a difficult decision to accept the Schaechters into the household.
“They
arrived and there was never any doubt that we would take them in.”
This was quiet heroism, without flourish, debate, or argument -- just an act of
extraordinary kindness and bravery by simple French farmers. And the Naffrechouxs’ heroism went beyond just sheltering my great
uncle and his wife. In 1943, the Germans imposed the Service de Travail
Obligatoire (the “STO”), which
conscripted young Frenchmen for forced labor in Germany. Several hundred thousand men went to work in Germany, but
there was widespread evasion and protest against the measure. The Naffrechouxs
hid two young STO resisters, as
well as a German army deserter named Herbert Schmitt.
More
than fifty years later, André, with great relish, described the wartime seating
arrangement at the same table where we now were sitting. His father sat to his right, he said, at the
head of the table, and next to him were Dr. Schaechter and Elly. Israel’s place at the table made it
clear that, even though he came as a refugee fleeing in the night, André’s
father accorded him great respect. Continuing around the table, André pointed
to where Herbert Schmitt, the two STO
dodgers and the rest of the family sat.
Marie-Louise,
the Naffrechoux’s maid, kept watch periodically through the porthole
window. If she saw anyone suspicious
approach she rang a bell, and Israel
and Elly rushed out the back door to the woods about fifty yards away. Sometimes there wasn’t time and they had to stay frozen in their room, dreading the prospect of a
Gestapo search. On one tense occasion,
the Wehrmacht held all-day maneuvers right outside the front gate, while inside,
the Schaechters waited tensely until the exercises ended at dusk.
Just
a few days after the Schaechters arrived, Marie-Louise looked through the
porthole and saw a teenage girl on a bicycle pedaling toward the gate. When she went out to the gate, she saw that
the girl was carrying a bouquet of flowers.
“I
have a bouquet for Dr. Schaechter’s anniversaire
[birthday] from his friends in Couhé,” the girl said.
“You
must be mistaken. There’s no one here by
that name,” Marie-Louise said, and the girl rode back toward Couhé, still
holding the bouquet.
Marie-Louise
correctly suspected the girl was a collaborator, trying to find out for
the Gestapo or the milice (their
French allies) where the doctor was hiding.
Her intuition about the fille aux
fleurs, as André called her, saved Israel, the others who were in
hiding, and the whole Naffrechoux family. André, the gentlest of men, startled us by saying
that had he run into the girl in the late 1940s, he would have killed her on
the spot: a declaration that was convincing precisely because of its jarring
contrast with his gentle demeanor. Even
so, André later hired two of this woman's sons to work on the farm, never
mentioning their mother’s treachery.
She’s still living in Melle, about 30 miles away.
Toward
the end of the interview, an adorable five-year-old girl -- André’s
granddaughter -- walked in. She
proceeded to come up to each of us at the table, even complete strangers, and
kiss us on the cheek. Having made her
rounds, she said “au revoir” and
left -- a sweet break from André’s tense story.
Returning
to 1944, André told us that when the Schaechters first arrived at the farm,
only his parents knew that Israel
was Jewish and a physician. It was his
enthusiastic participation in a dinner table conversation one night that gave
away the secret. The group was
discussing religion and, in particular, the Catholic belief that a dying infant
must be baptized to avoid purgatory. Israel suddenly
pronounced: “Even though I am a Jewish doctor, I would baptize a dying child!”
The
group at the table was stunned.
Sheltering a Jew was a much greater risk than hiding an STO draftee or perhaps even a German deserter. Then one of the STO
men told Israel
that his wife, who just gave birth, was ill. She lived in Pers, about three kilometers
away, and had been unable to see a doctor, either because none was available,
or out of fear that her husband’s hiding place would be discovered. Would Israel go to see her? For him to venture out of the house was extremely dangerous, especially since, after the fille aux fleurs incident, he knew that he was a target. Yet he decided
to go. Walking the distance at night
without a flashlight, guided only by the moonlight, he found his way to Pers,
where he successfully treated the woman.
His courage was not news to us – we knew he’d won the Croix de Guerre for his “remarkable
conscience and devotion” and “sang-froid”
on perilous missions during the 1914-1918 war.
Now in his late sixties, he still had the same daring he had shown as a
young doctor during the Great War.
As
André finished this last story, the rain stopped and the day suddenly became
sunny and windy. He took us to the back
of the farmhouse and showed us the woods to which Israel and Elly would escape when a
stranger approached. A field of about
fifty yards separated the house from the small thicket of trees. It must have been a harrowing run across that
open space. We also saw the small room
in the back of the house in which Israel and Elly had stayed, now a
cluttered child’s room with pictures of rock stars on the walls.
The
allies liberated the area around Chevais in September 1944. On October 20, 1944,
Israel
sent a postcard to his sister Mina's family:
My
dear ones:
We are both healthy and
safe. We were saved from the Gestapo,
who came to arrest us. We fled at night
to a small village in Deux-Sèvres. The
mayor took us in and hid us on his farm for nine months. Now, everything is all right.
Kisses to you and all of the family. We may only write one letter now. More will follow later. Kisses also, from my wife Elly. Your very happy
Dr. Schaechter.
Israel’s
relief and happiness pours out of the card --
a stark and wonderful contrast to the somber letter to the Cerfs from
Thiaucourt exactly four years earlier, when he had struggled to maintain hope
amid the terrible signs of imminent disaster.
The
Schaechters stayed in Couhé until the final German surrender in May 1945, when
André Naffrechoux drove them back to Saint Avold. His postwar letters from there show the toll
the war took -- many friends lost, savings gone and long hours of work, even as
he reached his seventies. In November
1945, he wrote to Jacqueline's Bernard’s parents:
We don’t go out much, first
because we’re so busy putting our house back in order, but also because our old
friends and acquaintances have disappeared in the tourmente, sent away by the Boches
as political deportees or for other excuses, never to return.
In a letter
dated April 23, 1947, Israel
wrote that, at the age of seventy-one, he was still putting in long days as a
doctor:
An eight-hour day is unknown in my profession. I get up at six, begin work at seven, and work until nine at night. I barely have time to eat at noon and kiss my wife.
Later that year, in November, he
wrote poignantly:
I’m beginning to get old. After a time your machine begins to run
down --- pains here, sickness there, you
begin to stoop over. If not for the war,
I could have “hung up my apron.” But
with things so expensive, this is impossible and I must stay “in harness” to
the end. To the grace of God!
Two
years later, on December 13, 1949,
Israel
died in Saint-Avold. In 1997, we visited
his grave in the Jewish cemetery there.
About thirty feet away from Dr. Schaechter’s grave, on the eastern wall
of the cemetery, is a striking monument to the Jews of St. Avold not lucky
enough to escape deportation.
Granite steps lead up to a wall on four short pillars, inscribed in
raised letters with a list of the names and ages of all of the victims of the
Holocaust from St. Avold. The list ends
with the words Martyrs morts pour la France et pour leur foi [Martyrs who died for France and for their faith]. Below that in larger letters is a quote from
the Torah in French and Hebrew: “I am the
only one; there is no other God than me.
It is I who take away life and I who give life; It is I who wound and I
who cure.” Finally, at the foot of
the monument is a small rectangular box with the brass inscription Cendres de déportés d’Auschwitz [Ashes of the deported to Auschwitz].
Seeing
the memorial so close to Israel’s
grave brought new and deeper meaning to the story of his rescue -- if not
for chance and the heroism of people like the Naffrechouxs, his name would be
on that wall. Israel died at 73, five years after
his rescue. But what about Maurice
Libbman (50) and Blanche Libbman (42), now just names chiseled on the wall,
robbed of many more years of life; and what about Monique Lion, only five years
old, who barely tasted life at all? What
must it have been like for Israel
to return to a town where so many friends had suffered and perished?
Just
a few steps from the Jewish cemetery in Saint Avold there's an American military
cemetery where 10,000 G.I.’s are buried, the largest number in any Second World
War cemetery. It's dominated by a stark
white monument rising about 250 feet into the sky, with several levels of long
steps below, leading finally to rows and rows of thousands of graves arrayed in
neat sections, stretching to the edge of the woods. Like other huge military cemeteries in Europe, it’s the most beautiful and the
saddest sight you can imagine.
We
happened to be in Saint Avold on American Memorial Day. Until a few years ago, there was just a
small commemoration of American Memorial Day at the St. Avold cemetery,
attended mostly by the American staff.
But through the efforts of Bertrand Cerf and others, it has come to be a
major Franco-American event, with equal participation by the French military,
clergy and elected officials. Bertrand
invited us as guests of honor at the ceremony, which included color guards of
French and American troops and veterans, and a flyover by four American jets.
The
most impressive speech was by the American consul general from Strasbourg. That day was also the Fête des Mères in France
(two weeks after our Mother’s Day) and he spoke of the pain of the mothers and
families whose children lay at the cemetery.
It was also election day in France, and the consul-general pointed out
that those honored in the ceremony died to protect the rights symbolized by
voting: “Americans do not vote in the
French elections,” he said, “but we see here before us the evidence that
Americans did vote for France to have
elections.” The ceremony ended with a
presentation of wreaths by French veterans to the children of American
soldiers. Afterward, we walked briefly
through the cemetery’s sea of crosses, interspersed with occasional Stars of
David, each with a small American and French flag posted in front. I looked closely at one star that read
"Arthur Summerfield, d. May 4, 1945." Arthur died just four days before
the end of the war. Like Paul, the hero
of All Quiet on the Western Front,
his life was cut short just at the brink of peace.
That
afternoon, I returned alone to the Jewish cemetery to take photographs and
videos. It was a gorgeous day, with the
sun glancing brilliantly off the graves and the Holocaust monument. As I walked around the somber yet brightly
illuminated grounds, I wondered if it had been a good idea to return, or
whether the day was too steeped in death and memory. Yet the link was clear: Without the deaths of
the Americans buried at St. Avold, there would have been many more names on
that terribly sad wall of Martyrs morts
pour la France
et pour leur foi. Without
the sacrifices of those Americans, the cemetery and monument might not have been
there at all, and Uncle Israel
may not have survived.
***
