Memoirs of a child of the past century - 1. Chapter 1 : Prelude

I came to the world on June 10, 1929 in Geneva. But I come from far away. I am a mixture of German Jews and Russian Jews. The family of my mother has been established in the Rhineland for a long time (I believe since the 17th century) and the family of my father has been established in Ukraine and southern Poland since the 16th century.

The story starts long before my birth, with my grandparents.

My paternal grandfather, the son of a non commissioned officer in the tsarist army based in Dynaburg (Latvia), a musician, fled military conscription at the age of twenty years after marrying in a hurry with a girl from Katerinoslav in Ukraine. After a long journey across Europe, the couple settled in Paris. The family lived in the Jewish district, the Marais, which became years later, by chance, a gay district!

My grandfather was quickly acclimated. France suited him very well. Like all newcomers to the Jewish quarter of Paris, he was apprenticed to a tailor and learned to make hats. At night he worked as a musician in an orchestra.

In 1907, he obtained French nationality for himself, his wife, children and future children's children. I found in the archives of the city of Paris the complete file of the application, the official investigation into him and his family and the good information given by the police and neighbors.

The couple soon had three children. Edmund, the eldest, was a difficult child who ran away at age 15 to attend a circus. When he was 18 he was sent to join the army, spent the war of 14-18 in the trenches, was wounded several times but managed to survive, a proud veteran. I knew him well. He later had many adventures in other places in the United States and Panama, and became the black sheep of the family, putting himself in impossible situations and calling each time to my father for help. After the death of my father, in 1969, I inherited the same burden and was kept busy with my uncle until his death. But that is another story that I may tell later.

My father was the youngest of the family, the darling of his mother. My grandmother had kept longing for her native Ukraine. When my father was 4 years old, she left with him for several months returning to Katerinoslav and the big house of my great-grandfather, a wealthy horse dealer. My father taught Russian and long remembered a life without worries, with a house open to all, the samovar always ready to receive visitors with a cup of ‘Russian’ tea, with jam instead of sugar.

After some years in Paris, my grandparents came to live in Geneva and Zurich, in search of better paid work. After several unsuccessful attempts, my grandfather was finally able to practice his real profession and became until his death in 1924 the director of an amateur orchestra (I still have in my archives programs and invitations for his concerts).

My father was 13 when he arrived in Zurich. He learned German very quickly, attended a School of Commerce and after his graduation at 18, was hired by an import-export company and began traveling throughout Europe.

I remember two particularly striking episodes of his travels:

In October 1922, he was stuck in Rome by the general strike of Italian Railways; following the “Marcia su Roma” (The March on Rome was a march by which Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party came to power in the Kingdom of Italy). He went to the main station where all trains were stopped, except a locomotive ready to leave to go check the condition of the rails, because it was feared that the fascists had cut the tracks. The engineers on the locomotive took him as an assistant and he was the only civilian to arrive soon in Switzerland.

In November 1919, he was in the Ruhr, seeking to join a major client in the midst of troubled times. It was the "German Revolution," the civil war between the authorities of the Weimar Republic and the Spartacists, following the fall of the German Empire at the end of 1918. A group of German soldiers (I do not know which party) arrested him in the street and took him for a spy from the other side. Their intention was to shoot him within 24 hours but luckily he was able to warn the French occupation troops who came to his rescue.

But French citizens, even if they don’t live in France, have to perform military service. After the first few months of training, my father was incorporated into a regiment which was involved in the occupation of Germany and was stationed in a small town in Rhineland: Diez an der Lahn. With his knowledge of German, he was responsible for contacts between French troops and the German population (requisitions of housing for officers, civilian complaints of abuse cases, purchases of goods and supplies by the military, etc.) and was free to meet with German community leaders, at their offices or at home.

My maternal grandfather owned a tannery and a shoe business in Diez an der Lahn (!). His family has been established for generations and he was a good citizen proud to be German, and supporting till the end of WWI the war efforts of the Kaiser.

My mother was 17 at the end of the war. Like all young girls of good family, she attended college and often went out with her friends to meet boys and girls at one place or another or for an evening stroll in the gardens and streets of the small town.

Her parents were in mourning for the German defeat, but could not prevent their daughter from meeting with French soldiers on leave, in spite of the older Germans attempting to forbid the young girls from attending the same place, parks, promenades and ‘hip’ cafes, as the young soldiers.

And so we come to what was to happen. My father, as the only French soldier in town who spoke fluently German was often invited for lunch or dinner by the ‘shoe business owner’, who wanted to make a deal with the military staff and get a contract for shoes repair. So, my father found the daughter of the house pretty and witty, (and another plus by chance: from a Jewish family) and in the beauty of her early twenties. It was love at first sight; and it became the beginning of a long, long romance

They met several times outside of the house, liked each other and talked for hours, until the end of my father’s military service. When they could not meet, they both wrote long love letters, which are still in my records.

After his military service, my father returned to Zurich, made numerous trips to Diez to see my mother and finally presented his proposal of marriage to his future stepfather. The father saw that he could not refuse from the outset, although the fact of seeing his daughter marry an enemy of his country made ​​it difficult to accept.

Despite differences in nationality, economic status and origin, it was clear that the two loved each other and wanted to be together for life. But before giving his consent, my grandfather requested that the newlyweds go to settle in a neutral country, which was easy since my father came from Switzerland.

It was certainly a great marriage. I still have at home the silver pen marked with their first names they used to sign the contract of marriage. However, many years later, during WWII, I realized that my father had been humiliated by the attitude of his wife’s family and that he could never forgive this humiliation.

Meanwhile, my father had found work in Geneva as a salesman in a new branch of a rapidly expanding activity, the film distribution. So the young couple settled in Geneva, in a comfortable apartment near the lake.

It’s easy to imagine their life, from what they told me years later:

My mother, an ‘innocent young girl’ coming from Germany with several cabinets full of clothes and with enough furniture to fill an apartment with 6 rooms, plus a young housemaid the same age to keep her company, speaking at the beginning not a word French !

My father, a young self-made man at the beginning of a promising career, traveling across Switzerland, meeting theatre owners as dynamic as him, having no fixed working hours and mixing negotiations for movie rentals with endless games of poker accompanied by rounds of drinks to the health of the winner!

At the weekend, they took long excursions on a high-powered motorcycle that my father had bought for fun. Wrapped in leather jackets and motorcycle’s helmets, they visited, at full speed, many nice places around Geneva, meeting new friends from the same sports fan club. Once, at one of these places, as my mother told me, my father was in such a hurry to leave that he didn’t check if my mother was ‘on board’ and forgot her. He discovered that he was alone after some kilometers and came back ‘the tail between the legs’, as we say in French.

Alone during the week, my mother met other young German couples like her; there were many in this international city, seat of the new League of Nations and enjoyed her new life in a period of economic boom and prosperity after the difficult years of war.

But neither my father nor my mother forgot the rest of their families.

In Ukraine, the lives of my paternal grandparents became more and more difficult. My grandparents suffered both from the latent anti-Semitism and the new policy of the Bolsheviks against the middle classed. Because of economic difficulties strengthened by the isolation of the USSR, they had lost most of their wealth. The Soviet famine of 1932–1933 killed many millions in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union; these areas included Ukraine. I still have many of their letters thanking my father for shipments of food, which allowed them to survive during the famine.

In Germany, the recession also hit my maternal grandparents. After the devaluation of the mark, my grandfather had increasing difficulties staying afloat. In addition, they underwent the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism. During one of my holidays in Diez (I was 6 or 7 years), I remember the insults (‘dirty Jew’) which accompanied me during my walks in the gardens along the river Lahn. But that is another chapter of my story.

3 years after my parents' marriage, the family had finally grown. I arrived on earth in June 1929 in a family happy to give birth to a boy All was well in Geneva for my parents. My father was happy in his work and my mother looked forward to pampering her new son.

My mother's friends were young intellectuals, close followers of the "Frei-Körper-Kultur" (Free-body-culture). I remember a great time in Ascona on Lake Maggiore, where my mother and me, we were invited by them for a whole summer. I was 3 or 4 years old and I have no accurate recollection. But I keep a series of pictures in which I play on the beach with my friends, all in the nude. And my subconscious must certainly remember my pleasure to run without clothes, to feel the wind and sun on the skin. Much later, I often had the opportunity, alone or with friends, to find the same pleasure and those memories are a fond part of my life.