November 01, 2013
By Jacqueline Mendels Birn
My Dutch grandparents, Emanuel and Thekla Mendels, were from Almelo, the Netherlands. They moved to Amsterdam and then to Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1920s, because their import-export business in wheat from the United States was not doing well. Their clients in Germany could not pay their debts because of huge inflation in Germany. Therefore the Mendels brothers, Emanuel and Maurits, and their families settled down in Hamburg in the hope that they could recuperate the money that was owed them.
Their children, including young Frits, moved to Hamburg as well. At first, Frits worked in a bank. Then he started working in an import-export business in leather. The owner, Mr. Ben Elzas, told him that there was no future for him in his business because he had three sons who would inherit his business. Frits had been corresponding with a former schoolmate of his from the Netherlands who told him that there was an opening in his import-export business in food products in Paris. Frits, who was 21, said to himself, “Why not?” He had planned to go to England where there was a possibility for a job through an acquaintance of his father, but could not go there because of a dockworker general strike. Frits accepted the offer to go to Paris instead. As a young Dutch man, 21 years old, he settled down in Paris, moved into a top-floor maid’s room because the rent was cheap, and went to work.
Before he went to Paris, Frits had gotten acquainted with a young woman, Ellen Hess, the accountant in the office where he was working. Frits and Ellen became good friends and shared their lunch every day; Frits ate a kosher sandwich, but Ellen had ham on hers. That was strange to Frits at first because his mother kept a kosher home. After Frits moved to Paris in 1926, he corresponded with Ellen. Their friendship grew into love and Frits proposed to Ellen four years later. Whether or not to accept was a difficult decision for Ellen. She was an only child and very close to her mother, who had lost her first husband and divorced her second husband.
Ellen accepted the offer. Upon their engagement, Ellen offered Frits a beautiful gold pocket watch with a Swiss mechanism, made in Germany. She had it engraved on the back with Frits Mendels’ initials. Frits and Ellen were married in Hamburg on August 28, 1930. They took the train to Paris and settled down in that beautiful city.
Frits and Ellen were my parents. My sister Manuela was born in 1933 and I was born two years later. The events that followed changed the life of our little family forever. After Hitler took power, he quickly imposed laws against Jews, at first in Germany and later on, in all the countries that he conquered.
After France was invaded, an armistice was signed between Hitler and Marshal Henri Pétain, which divided France into a northern occupied zone and a southern so-called free zone. At first, my parents stayed in Paris, obeyed the laws against Jews, and hoped for the best. I remember wearing the yellow Jewish star on my chest and remarking to my mother how pretty it was, yellow on my green outfit.
After my father’s business was “Aryanized” in May 1941, he didn’t have an income. His business associate was very kind and shared some of the income from the business with him. Of course, that was illegal. Then came the infamous roundup at the Vélodrome d’Hiver on July 16–17, 1942. We were still in Paris and the police forgot to ring our bell. We were able to flee Paris on July 30. My father had secured the help of two young smugglers who helped us to cross the demarcation line on August 1, 1942. A wonderful neighbor upstairs from us kept some of my parents’ valuables—silver objects and family heirlooms. My father was wearing the pocket watch my mother had given him when we crossed the line in the middle of the night.
My parents were arrested in the hotel where we stayed. They were interrogated at the police station, in Ribérac, Dordogne. We were under temporary watch, but not imprisoned. My parents had to report daily to the police station. They were declared illegal refugees of the “Jewish race.” They were fined a large sum of money. After one month, we were allowed to go to a minuscule village, less than 100 kilometers from the main town, and under constant surveillance. My father had his watch with him, and my mother was able to keep some rings. My parents found a tin box and put their precious objects in it. They asked a farmer who owned the land where my father became a farm hand to bury the tin box in the ground. My father told the farmer that if we were caught by the Gestapo or the militia, and sent to a concentration camp, the contents of the tin box would be his forever.
When France was liberated, my father retrieved the tin box and along with all the other miracles that saved our lives, the watch was not mildewed or rotten. It still worked. Today, and every day since my father’s death, his watch hangs from a hook on the wall in my bedroom. I wind it once in a while and it works perfectly. The watch is now 80 years old.
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