Eva Bluestein
The traffic jam started in Belgium and apparently ended somewhere around Marseille. Cars, donkeys and knapsack-wearing families carting all their worldly possessions stretched as far as the eye could see. If one were so inclined, he could easily have leapt from rooftop to rooftop of the idling, overheating automobiles.
The French called it l'Exode —Exodus — and the reference was not missed on Eva Bluestein and her family of German Jews, fleeing Paris in 1940, one step ahead of the din of jackboots marching in lockstep.
"People who had a bicycle did much better. They could get through — it was so jammed," recalls Bluestein, an elfin El Cerrito woman with large blue eyes and a ready giggle reminiscent of Dr. Ruth's.
After several days of driving at a crawling pace, the family ended up in Niort, a small town not far from Brittany in the west of France. With luck, the group landed a spot in a local inn and slept, exhaustedly, in the one room. But when they opened the windows in the morning, they were greeted by the sight of German soldiers peering back at them.
They drove back to Paris and an uncertain fate.
Bluestein was born in Germany 83 years ago next week. As an only child in an upper-middle class family, her early childhood memories elicit smiles and her infectious giggle. After Hitler came to power in 1933, her family still had ice cream at her ninth birthday party — an extravagance in April. But even a child could tell things were going to be different. For one, her father was home, having been fired from his job at German engineering giant AEG along with all the other Jews. And all of Bluestein's playmates began attending Hitler Youth rallies — when they returned, they'd step on her feet.
Bluestein's parents, unlike so many German Jews, decided to get out while the getting was good, and relocated to France. Along with some of the suddenly very available Jewish engineers in his family, her father opened up a small plant making electrical resistors for radios in Paris' dicey suburbs.
When the war broke out, the vast majority of Bluestein's family was placed in camps for "enemy aliens" by the French government. As a youth, Bluestein was spared, but government officials entered her home and documented every last item on the walls and in the shelves.
"They came and they inventoried every little item. Then they came back two months later and the guy said, 'Where's the little glass mustard jar? It's missing!' I said, 'Oh, well, we broke it.' And he said if that happened again I won't be allowed to live at home," she recalls.
When the Germans quickly conquered the north of France, the German citizens were released from the camps. The French business partners the government required the family to have at its factory were soon replaced by German partners. The family, like most Jews, began to struggle mightily. In Bluestein's predominantly Jewish neighborhood, one prosperous former judge was reduced to selling his wife's cookies on the street.
The German partner at the factory decided he'd like to have the place all for himself, and began to sic the police on Bluestein's family. He knew the fleeing family would be burdened with Bluestein's blind grandmother, so the German told the police to hunt down a family of Jews with a blind woman.
Just before Paris' Jews were required to wear the yellow star, the family obtained false identification papers and headed south to Lyon in Vichy France. The blind grandmother, running across a rickety bridge, had to be told to take big steps, small steps, medium steps.
Once in Lyon, France's second largest city, the family began to live as fugitives. They moved from hovel to hovel and would not even leave the house during air raids: Allied ordinance was less of a worry than being eyed by suspicious neighbors in the bomb shelter.
Soon the Nazis took over France in its entirety, and the family's situation grew dire. Bluestein's grandfather received a note in the mail demanding he appear before the regional Nazi commander.
Eva escorted the septuagenarian, never letting on to the Nazis that she understood every word of their German conversations or that she was the man's granddaughter.
The Nazis eyed her grandfather's papers and exclaimed that, with a name like Gingold, he must be either Flemish or Jewish.
They asked Bluestein to tell them a bit about her "elderly neighbor" and she replied in feigned halting German that he was old, sickly, had no family — and received occasional letters from Belgium.
"Oh!" the Nazis exclaimed. "Flemish!" That concluded the interview.
"You have to adjust quickly in these situations," says Bluestein, her laughter echoing around her single-story home in the El Cerrito hills.
Bluestein's ability to speak accentless French literally kept her family alive. The young teenager was the one who would deliver packages or scrounge for food. On one occasion, she was out at night when she heard German soldiers walking on the next street. Bluestein's shoes were wooden-soled and loud, and she was unable to hide. So she stomped her feet and walked loudly, like a confident soldier would in his heavy boots, and the Germans paid her no mind.
The family moved as little as possible, except when an ally in the local police department told them a raid was imminent. Then they would clear out and spend the night wherever they could find.
Once, for an extended period, a friend's father found space for the family in a convent. Later, Bluestein discovered that the friend's father was a high commander in the French Resistance. And it didn't take long to discover that this was a most unusual convent — the priest was married to the Mother Superior and their daughter was a nun. Years later, Bluestein returned to the convent with her husband. It had been converted into an old-age home.
The family lived in constant fear of the knock at the door, and some days it came without warning. The entire family figured the game was up one day when the French police came around, but a senile woman who lived next door and raised rabbits walked into the hall and told the police that the flat had been empty for weeks.
"So, as deranged as she was, she really saved us."
Finally, the day came that hundreds of bedraggled Jews and resistance fighters ran into the streets — they'd caught the BBC report on their clandestine radios that the Allies had taken Lyon. But when the Allies quickly abandoned Lyon, the Germans swept through, took prisoners and executed many resisters on the streets.
The Nazis then blew up a dozen bridges (Lyon straddles both the Rh?ne and Sa?ne Rivers) and left town — but not before they dealt Bluestein's family a crippling blow. In a random raid, the Germans herded all the Frenchmen they could find into a pissoir, and forced the men to pull down their pants. All the circumcised males were put on, literally, the last train to Auschwitz. Bluestein's uncle, Ephim Chapiro, was one of those men. He missed surviving the war by a matter of hours.
"So much of it was a matter of luck. One time I went to see this man who could forge signatures and he told me if I had come 10 minutes earlier ... everyone in the apartment was taken away," recalls Bluestein.
"All my life, everything I do, even small things you know, simple things, I do not give up. I try again and next time it will be better. So when people say 'Never again,' I say 'Never give up.'"