Hitler Made Me a Jew (10 page)

When I had heard that a drink made with bourdaine would help start a miscarriage, I drank gallons of it even though I found it disgusting—I had hated it ever since I was a child and was given it as a laxative. It didn't work for a miscarriage.

I confided in my mother's friend, Jeannette, who told me about her experience: “I went to an abortionist who left me to bleed an entire day, and if it had not been for my sister coming to see me, I would be dead. Now, I can't have children. Think about it!”

Hearing this story, I realized I couldn't take the risk of having an abortion. I wanted to be able to have a baby, eventually.

Meanwhile Philip had promised to find out about getting an abortion at the American Hospital. Conveniently, he had a problem with is foot, which he wanted to get checked out. The doctor who saw him was about his age. They discussed the foot and then Philip, nonchalantly, mentioned that his girlfriend was pregnant. “Do you think you might help with an abortion?” The young doctor looked alarmed. “It's illegal!” He said. “Do you love her?” When Philip nodded, the doctor said, “Marry her!” We decided we would get married.

First, we had to get our papers processed. France protects its citizens, and Philip had to show proof that he was neither a felon nor already married in the United States. We also had to publish an official notice of our approaching marriage so that, if anyone had reason to object, they could. Philip tried to push up our wedding date, telling the woman in the notary office. “She is pregnant.” “Is the baby due before the wedding date?” she asked. “No.” “Then you have plenty time!”

On our wedding day I noticed that the woman getting married after us looked as if she was going to deliver at any moment, my three months pregnancy was still invisible.

A friend recommended a doctor. I quickly bought a small copper curtain ring to serve as a wedding band. I was nervous and kept turning it around. It was only while we were speaking to the doctor that I noticed the copper had turned my finger all black. Meanwhile the doctor was writing down our history. “How long have you been married?” he asked. I couldn't think of what to say, but Philip immediately replied, “February 4th,” the date of our coming wedding. I thought he was a genius. The doctor assumed it was all very normal, that we had been married almost two years.

Philip found an apartment with a mansard roof on the top floor of a private house in the Chateau de Vincennes section. It was on a street called The White Lady—
Avenue de la Dame Blanche
—whose sides were lined with tall trees. Vincennes has a castle with a famous fifteenth century tower and many remains of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even though Vincennes was in Paris, it had a country atmosphere.

Our floor had been used as an attic and never really lived in although there was a big game room with a professional-looking billiard table that took up almost the entire large space. Philip had a shower built in the room we turned into a kitchen by putting in a sink with a water heater and a cooking stove.

The landlords, former grocers who had made a fortune during the war and many enemies in the neighborhood, lived on the second floor, and their distant relatives on the ground floor. People often passed in front of our gates and spit. Even the landlord's children hated them, and we often heard them fight when they came to visit on Sunday, after they had been to mass. The landlords were elderly but spry and alert. Adversity had sharpened their wits the old lady liked to say, but they were always complaining. They were rich but they lived meagerly, and constantly compared today's prices with those before the First World War. But when it came to rent, they knew how to get a high price. We paid ten times the legal price. They were happy with “Les Americains” because we made so many improvements on their property.

While Philip was working on the renovations, he ate breakfast in a local cafe. The first morning he ordered what everyone also was having with their coffee—Calvados—and as they did, he drank it all in one gulp and then coughed so hard the regulars in the cafe immediately took to such a delicate foreigner! Later he learned that our landlords were considered Fascists by everybody in town, and that they had made their fortune on the black market.

Philip spent days removing ancient layers of antiquated wallpaper until he finally reached the original wall. He painted the rooms with a light yellow and turned our apartment into a sunny place. We moved in several weeks before we were married. One day I was late for school and I took a taxi to the Sorbonne. As I arrived, I met a friend who took me by the arm and said, “Come, we are demonstrating against the fare hikes.” As I was screaming with my friends in the middle of the street, “Down with the increases!” a truck was coming toward me. Suddenly I was alone in the middle of the street. My friends had disappeared and left me. Before I knew what was happening, I was lifted up and put in the police wagon. The police were angry and rough. I learned then that they had iron weights sewn at the border of their capes to subdue the crowds. They took me by the collar of my sheepskin fur coat—which was common enough in New York, but very chic in Paris—saying, “Go ahead you rats of St. Germain, go back to your caves!” Bewildered I followed the rest. One man said he had just been standing there and he didn't even know what the demonstrations were about. The rest of the prisoners were student activists. They tried to talk to the policemen as fellow human beings, but the policemen called them “spoiled rich brats,” “Good for nothings,” “lazy bastards.” Then they had us present our identification papers. I began to worry as I was explaining my situation, “I am getting married next week. My name is Nadia Balter but the landlady knows me by my future husband's name—we've just moved there.” The French police are very careful and follow all leads. I had to wait until they confirmed my address. I was worried that the neighbors wouldn't know what to say, or not even be able to say I lived there. I worried about the landlords learning that I was in trouble with the police; and, of course I worried about Philip, who didn't know where I was. And there I was no way to let him know. I was arrested at nine in the morning and I was released at nine that night. The police had gone to the house, and our neighbor had said, “someone just moved in,” but they didn't know the name. Philip had been out all afternoon. When he saw I was not home, he began to worry and was just about to call the police when I walked in.

Before we moved to Vincennes, I had liked going to the public baths near the Sorbonne, I didn't want to use Jeannette's electricity. Most French people didn't have bathtubs and went to bathhouses. I usually went with a friend from school. It was cheaper to go in a double-tub bathroom. As she entered her bath, she said, “Look, I'm pregnant.”

“I am pregnant too,” I said, and we became close friends. Her husband worked for Le Corbusier and later became a famous sculptor. She, I heard, became a painter, and they would eventually divorce.

Even though I was going to the Sorbonne lectures and enjoyed all my classes, I had a sudden urge to paint—almost a need. I think it was my pregnancy that made me think I should devote myself to something that would require solitude. I began to paint and Philip helped me. He was very good because he never criticized me until a week later and never on the spot. After a week, I could tolerate criticism.

Laurent de Brunhoff, the creator of Babar, was not famous when we knew him. He was just a struggling painter. Philip had met him by accident in the restaurant Wadja. They began a conversation and discovered that they had shared a lover, at different times. The girl had dropped them both, so they had a lot of analyzing and comparing notes to do, and it infuriated me.

When Laurent came to visit us, he saw my first painting. He said to me, “Why did you make the shoe orange?” I had no idea why. It is the first time I had been challenged like this. I said, “I did it because it worked.”

Jeannette and Philibert were our witnesses at our wedding. They were trying hard to be civil to one another, even though their relationship was more and more strained. In Vicennes, Philip had pushed me out of bed that morning saying, “We are getting married.” I was nauseated and had to force myself out of bed. I dressed in a velvet medieval-looking dress with a standing up collar that my mother had made me two years before, and I my short mouton coat. I had said I didn't want anyone to come to the wedding, but my friend from the bath came with another classmate. They said they wanted to see us married.

Luckily a photographer was at City Hall, taking pictures of people getting married. He took our pictures for a small fee. Not expecting to ever receive the pictures, we gave him money in advance. He sent them to us, and now we can show them to our children. We are posing in the City Hall of the Sixth
arrondissement
under a baroque statue of nude figures strangling one another. We both have big smiles.

The Mayor, who married us, was a disabled veteran from the First World War with an arm missing. He wore a French flag draped across his chest. It was a short ceremony. We answered, “Yes” to his questions, and he congratulated us. I don't remember kissing the groom. We went immediately with Jeannette and Philibert to a cozy restaurant where they were roasting aromatic herbs on chickens in a blazing fireplace. I was still feeling nauseated. After dinner we saw a live variety show at the Bobino. I think it was one of the first appearances of George Brassens—I knew instantly he was a genius.

After three months, the nausea was gone. I gave birth to a handsome fat baby with a black tuft of hair on his head. The doctor thought he looked like an orchestra conductor. We called him Gregory Stephan.

Conclusion

My first thirteen years in France were eminently happy ones. I felt I was in the best country in the world. I loved being French, I loved French writers and French philosophers—passions one can never really let go of.

Philip and I sent our children to a French school in New York so they would learn to speak French. We returned to France several times for long periods of time during Philip's sabbatical leaves from his teaching job. We saw to it that our children attended schools in France during those years and French summer camps in the United States and France.

Going to France was always a source of great pleasure because we could visit all our friends at the Cité; Maimaine, my best friend from when I was seven; and Huguette, my best friend at the Sorbonne; Jean-Philippe; Laura and many more. French friendships it has been my experience remain for life. But France is another story. I have a novelty coffee cup that says: “To err is human, to forgive is out of the question.” I feel that way about France because she has never yet acknowledged that she betrayed her Jewish citizens and Jewish inhabitants during the war.

Editor's Note and Four Paintings

Nadia Gould became a painter in 1950. These four pictures are barely a representation of her prodigious output.

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