The Violin Maker's Daughter, page 1
The Violin Maker's Daughter
Absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 historical fiction
Sharon Maas
Books by Sharon Maas
Of Marriageable Age
The Lost Daughter of India
The Orphan of India
The Soldier’s Girl
The Violin Maker’s Daughter
* * *
THE QUINT CHRONICLES
The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q
The Secret Life of Winnie Cox
The Sugar Planter’s Daughter
The Girl from the Sugar Plantation
Available in Audio
The Lost Daughter of India (UK Listeners | US Listeners)
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part Three
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Part Four
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Epilogue
The Soldier’s Girl
Here More from Sharon Maas
Books by Sharon Maas
A Letter from Sharon
Historial Notes
Of Marriageable Age
The Lost Daughter of India
The Orphan of India
The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q
The Secret Life of Winnie Cox
The Sugar Planter’s Daughter
The Girl from the Sugar Plantation
Acknowledgements
Part One
1943 Colmar
Chapter One
‘How can I fit my whole life into a suitcase?’ Sarah’s voice cracks; it is almost a wail. The tears she holds back sting her eyes and she closes them, tightly, to gather strength, and then opens them again and glares at her father, fierce and firm. ‘I can’t leave you, Papa.’
The other girls have gone to bed; she is alone with her parents in the small upstairs room they call the parlour, long and narrow, as is the house itself. Her mother, sitting next to her on the stiff-backed sofa, places a comforting hand on Sarah’s knee, and it is enough. Sarah throws her arms around her mother, and Leah holds the sobbing girl, pats her back, croons comforting words.
‘I won’t leave you! I can’t!
‘It’s all right, darling. It’s just a precaution. We will all be together again – soon.’
‘We should stick together now! Leave all together. We are a family.’
Now Josef himself speaks. He has finished adjusting the strings of the violin he holds and puts it carefully aside, laying it lovingly in its case on the dining table.
‘You must go, Sarah. We will follow when we can, in time. It is the only way.’
But his voice cracks too. He tries his best to hide it; he has to be brave, strong, for Sarah, for Leah. Only he knows that deep inside he is crumbling into pieces.
He closes the case, stands up, puts it away. He never brings work upstairs; he leaves his tools and instruments downstairs in his workroom – but this half-violin belongs to Sofie, his youngest. They keep their own instruments up here, in the parlour. A violin for each girl, five in all since Sofie has started to learn, his own precious violin, a cello for Leah. A string sextet, and Sofie. But they hardly ever play together now. Too loud; too dangerous. Who would ever have thought that a family playing music together of an evening could be dangerous? Surely it’s the most innocuous, the most pleasing of occupations? Surely even Germans should understand that?
But these are not ordinary Germans. Not real Germans. Since they marched into Colmar in 1940, Josef and his family have very quickly grasped the fact that, now, everything is different. Every little thing, down to the language they speak and the names they bear. They are lucky: their surname is Mayer, a quintessentially German name, and Josef, too, is German as well as Jewish. Sarah did not need to change her name: it is, fortunately, French, Jewish and German. But Amélie, Thérèse, Manon and Sofie: they were forced to change.
Now the four youngest girls are, officially, Amelia, Tanja, Inge and Sigrid. Josef still calls them all by their real names, deliberately. Leah rebukes him whenever he does; she uses the new German names. Always.
‘We might as well get used to it,’ she says, again and again. ‘For the duration. Just in case.’
‘Just in case of what, exactly?’ Josef always replies. ‘Do you think a gang of Boche are going to break down our door and ask the girls at gunpoint what their names are? What language they speak?’
The cheek of it, he’d raged at first. A person’s name is surely the most personal part of him or herself; how dare they take that away! But of late he has been forced to mitigate his rhetoric, and never speak of it outside the four walls of his home. For now, he knows – they all know – they could lose far more than their names. Losing your name is almost a joke, these days, when the secret grapevine brings news of what else Jews in Germany are losing.
Here in Alsace they had all cushioned themselves in a pad of complacence, at first. Hitler might have annexed their province, so that it was now Germany instead of France. But it had been German before, and then French, and then German again and then French again, like the baton in a relay race. Who cared, as long as life went on as ever? Now, German has been made the official language instead of French. Josef speaks both fluently, as does his wife; and the girls, who cannot remember the last time Germany was in charge, had, like all other Alsace children, simply had to learn and get used to the new language, the new words for everything. As children do, they learned swiftly. Now they are all fully bilingual.
The street name has been changed, of course, the old sign torn down and a new one nailed on: now it is Gerechtigkeitsgasse, Justice Lane, instead of the much more fitting rue des Géraniums. Their own little house, just one in the row of lopsided timber-framed traditional Alsace buildings lining the lane, is one of many whose windows in summer carry boxes of geraniums flaring out and over, spilling down in cascades of brilliant red blossoms lovingly tended by Leah. Other wives place flowerpots overflowing with flowers in front of their homes, around their doorsteps, fixed to the walls. In these days of swastika banners and posters all over the town this backstreet has somehow escaped the regulation defacement; the Nazis haven’t found it – not yet – and flowers still reign supreme.
One of the first things the Nazis did after marching in on 1 November 1940 was to deport all the Jews. They were packed onto trains and transported down to Vichy to await an uncertain fate. At least, people said, at least not to Germany. They had been allowed to take one suitcase of personal items and 100 francs each.
But Josef Mayer refused to go, taking refuge in his very German-sounding name and the fact that he was not a practising Jew, never attended the synagogue, hobnobbed with very few Jewish people and was, basically, simply a violin-maker of Colmar, happy to make violins, maintain his home, pay his bills, love his wife and raise his daughters. What more could a man want, and why should the Nazis notice him, and care? He scoffed when his friends advised him to leave. He refused to run away. Where would he go to? His life was here. His workshop, filled with the most exquisite instruments, each one unique, handmade, irreplaceable.
It was true that even in the years before the war demand for expertly made instruments had declined drastically, but they managed. His reputation was good, and reached right up to Strasbourg in the north and Freiburg in the east, in Germany. There was no way he could start again from scratch in a faraway country, no way he could take all his precision tools with him and no way he would leave it all behind.
And so he had simply gathered his family more tightly than ever around him, advised them to keep a bland presence in the town, stay at home as much as possible, keep their heads down, and life would continue as ever. They weren’t really Jews. What was a Jew anyway, but a human, like everyone else? He simply couldn’t believe that life would get worse in Colmar, worse than swastika banners and posters and Boche everywhere and everything in German. He had changed his own sign in his shop window, from Violin-maker Mayer to Geigenbauer Mayer. Surely that was compliance enough?
They, the Germans, couldn’t demand more.
Chapter Two
But they did. A year later everything had changed. The reports coming out of Germany – they made his blood run cold. That Reichskristallnacht – could it be true, that t
‘Keep your heads down. Don’t discuss politics, not with anyone. Fade into the background,’ he told them all, and that had worked, for a while. Officially, now, Colmar was Judenrein, free of Jews. Nobody knew.
But then…
Early one recent morning Josef woke to the sound of smashing glass, followed by footsteps running away. Hastening down to the street, he cried out: ‘Merde!’
Glass shards and splinters all over the cobbles before the shop, a huge hole in the shop window, the rest of the glass splintered and cracked. His own soul splintered at the sight. And he knew at once: the respite was over, they were no longer safe.
Leah appeared at his side.
‘Josef, j’ai peur!’ she whispered. And he too, for the first time since the war had started, knew fear: real fear, for his family, for their lives.
What were the most precious violins worth in comparison? Nothing at all. His instruments, his livelihood, they were all nothing. The fear was a visceral, living thing, coiled through his being like a venomous snake poisoning him from within. It was over, this silenced life they’d been living.
Who had done it? They would never know. Who knew they were Jewish? Who would harbour such hatred? A few close friends knew, but he couldn’t imagine any of them doing this. But people are only human; they talk, they gossip, and sometimes an ill-advised word or two could spread in the wrong direction. It didn’t matter, their time was up.
He and Sarah cleaned up as best they could. A few neighbours came out to help: Yves Girard, his friend the cobbler from two doors down, and the haberdasher and his wife, the Petits. They all whispered among themselves, expressing shock and disbelief and hatred of the Nazis, of what had become of their charming town. Other neighbours, those who didn’t come out, watched from behind twitching curtains. Had they approved of the attack? Had they known? Had one of them, perhaps…? The sense of trust and bonhomie that had made this little cobbled lane with its picturesque timber-framed houses and flower-boxes a haven in the Nazi stronghold that Colmar had become had been shattered along with that glass.
‘I warned you,’ Yves told Josef. Yves was his closest friend, a widower in his seventies, who Sarah and her sisters all called ‘Uncle’; he had fought in and survived the last war. And yes, Yves had told him to get out right from the start, to go with the other Jews. But now it wasn’t a smug ‘I told you so’. Now, while brushing up the last tiny splinters from between the cobbles, Yves said, ‘I can help. We’ll talk tonight.’
That night Yves had come round with a bottle of Riesling, given to him by ‘a friend’, and while emptying the bottle – which was necessary after the morning’s shock – Yves told him how, exactly, he could help.
‘You must go,’ he said, ‘you must all go, one by one. But first, tell me – you once spoke of a brother in America, do you think he would help? Take you in if you came to him?’
Josef nodded. ‘He would, Karl would help. But how can I go? There are seven of us, five of them children! How could we ever escape?’
‘There is a way – I have friends who can help. There is a woman near Ribeauvillé who hides Jews. She knows the right people. They are taken over the Vosges Mountains and into the Zone Interdite and then from safe house to safe house through France to Spain or Switzerland to safety. You must go as soon as possible. This is only the beginning. Trust me. I’ll send Jacques to you.’
A few days later, Jacques came with more information and advice. Jacques, it turned out, was a Resistance leader from further north, doing what he could to defy and defeat the Nazis. He spoke little of himself, but later, Yves told Josef more.
Like all men of Alsace under the age of thirty-five, Jacques had been conscripted into the German forces, the Wehrmacht. He would have been forced to fight for the Third Reich, and against France. There was no right of refusal; men who refused were sent to camps and even, perhaps, executed. If they ran away, their families were persecuted. Jacques was an exception because his father was one of the best and most prominent winemakers of the region, and good wine was Alsace’s treasure, the very reason why France and Germany had played tug-o-war with the province throughout history.
Jacques had not minced his words. ‘You all have to go, but you can’t go together. It has to be carefully planned. Give me two weeks, then you must send your eldest daughter – the seventeen-year-old. What is her name?’
‘She is Sarah.’
‘Sarah must go first. Then two more, the next two daughters. How old are they?’
‘Thérèse is fourteen. Amélie is twelve.’
‘They must go as soon as possible after Sarah. Sarah must go first, with an escort. I already know of a possibility. Then we will find someone for the next two girls.’
‘Can’t all three go together?’
‘No. Again, a group of four is almost impossible. Too much responsibility for the escort, who will also be a Jew needing to flee; her safety is also at stake.’
‘How can I send young girls out into the world? They are still children, they must stay with their parents!’
‘There is not space in safe houses for a family of seven. It is just too dangerous and too difficult. Yes, your daughters are young but we will provide reliable escorts for them, women of middle age, like mothers. The youngest girls, how old are they?’
‘Manon is seven, Sofie is only five.’
‘These two youngest can go with you and your wife. You must understand, it is very difficult to arrange for a whole family to escape. Difficult and dangerous. We will do it, but we must reduce the family as far as possible.’
‘How can I send young girls away? My daughters? How can I send them on a perilous journey without us? They have always been so protected, so safe…’
‘You cannot protect them, and they are no longer safe. Not one of you is safe. The longer you stay here, the more dangerous it will become. You should have left in the early days.’
‘I know that now.’
‘Very well. Now I must go. Prepare Sarah, and I will come back and take her away.’
‘You will take her yourself?’
Jacques shrugs. ‘I will do my best to come myself. I cannot promise.’
‘I can’t send my daughter away with perfect strangers! She would be terrified, so would we! You understand, she has lived a very protected life. She is very close to us and hardly ever leaves the house.’
‘I don’t expect you to give your daughter into the hands of a stranger – I will arrange it. If I cannot come myself, I will send someone you can trust absolutely. More I cannot promise.’
‘But where will she go? How…?’
So many questions, so many uncertainties. Danger everywhere – how could he do it?
‘She will be taken first to the safe house in Ribeauvillé. The woman there is very brave and good. I will escort her myself, if possible. If I send someone, they will have a password.’
