Going to a Swiss International School, Part 1

 

[The account below, of my two years as an international-school student in Switzerland, is drawn from my memory.  Except for one trip I took in April 1965, during which I kept a journal, I had no help to recall the events, and there are gaps in places—which I regret but cannot remedy.

[Since this period is 56-58 years ago, many things have changed in the world, including the names of places and things.  I’m going to use the names as they were in the mid-1960s, though I’ll note the current name or word so that you who are too young to remember the ancient facts I toss around below won’t feel too lost. 

[Think of it as a black-and-white movie.  It’s a little odd, but that’s just the way things were in those days.  We lived with it; you can, too, for a short while.  The color will be back soon enough.]

My family lived in Europe from 1962 to 1967.  My father was a United States Foreign Service Officer, as readers of Rick On Theater will know by now.  He arrived in the small Rhineland city of Koblenz, Germany, his first post, in September 1962 and my mother joined him in October (see my post “Home Alone,” 12, 15, and 18 June 2015).  My brother and I came for our first visit to the Continent in December for the year-end school holidays (and my 16th birthday).

After I finished my sophomore year at boarding school in the states and my brother his eighth-grade year in the summer of 1963, we joined our parents in Koblenz for the beginning of what I came to see as a great adventure.  (I’ve recounted much of this experience in “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013.)  We went to high school in Switzerland starting in the fall of 1963.  Our parents had enrolled us in one of the several Swiss international schools that catered to foreigners, including Americans.

My brother stayed only for his first year and then returned to the States for the rest of his schooling, but I spent my last two years of high school in Switzerland.  I spent my junior year at the Collège du Léman, known as CDL.  (Lac Léman is the French name for Lake Geneva.)

The school, which had only opened its doors in 1960, was in Versoix, a tiny town of about 4,000 inhabitants at the time, 6½ miles north of Geneva along the western shore of the lake.  Versoix is less than a half hour from Geneva by car or train and has the distinction of being the birthplace of Josephine Boisdechêne (1827-75), the first bearded lady exhibited by P. T. Barnum—as Mme. Fortune Clofullia, “The Bearded Lady of Geneva.” 

The Collège du Léman’s name might be a little misleading for Americans because here a ‘college’ is usually a post-high school educational institution, an independent institution of higher learning that focuses on undergraduate education, such as Williams College or Vassar College, or a constituent part of a university, for example City College of New York (CCNY), part of the City University of New York (CUNY), or Harvard College, the undergraduate institution of Harvard University.

In Switzerland—and much of Europe—a college, or collège in the francophone world, is more like a U.S. prep school.  Also called an école de maturité (literally, ‘mature school’; it’s the same word as the Swiss leaving exam), it’s an educational institution for students leaving primary school at the end of compulsory education—11 years in Switzerland, the equivalent of 10th grade, or about 16 years of age—to prepare for the university entrance exam, the Maturité.  (In German-speaking cantons, a collège is often called a gymnasium, which is what they’re called in Germany.) 

I graduated from the International School of Geneva (École Internationale de Genève) the following year.  Known as Ecolint (or Écolint in French), the campus called La Grande Boissière (roughly, ‘The Great Wood’) is very near the up-scale residential suburb of Geneva called Chêne-Bougeries, a short tram ride from downtown Geneva (about 1½ miles to the west). 

Ecolint, the oldest of the world’s international schools, was founded in 1924 to serve the delegates and staff of the League of Nations (1920-46) and the other international organizations that orbited around it.  (Today it has three campuses—La Châtaigneraie [1971] in the Canton of Vaud, next of the Canton of Genève, and Campus des Nations [2005] in the Geneva suburb of Grand Saconnex—but they didn’t exist when I was a student at Ecolint.)

Let me back up a step.  I’ve been throwing around the term “international school” as if it were universally understood, that everyone knows what one is.  Obviously, that’s not so; unless you’ve had reason to deal with international education, you may not have encountered the term or the idea at all.  So let me try to define terms here, at least in the general way.

First of all, you might assume that international schools only exist abroad.  Well, of course that’s not true.  There are international schools here in the United States, including several in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, and in New York City, where I live now—as well as in other U.S. cities.  (Most international schools are located in large cities or their suburbs for reasons that will soon become obvious.)

Another assumption you might make is that all international schools are privately owned.  Most are, and the ones I’ll be talking about are.  There are types of international schools, however, that are run by countries and governments—though not usually by the host country, the country in which the school is located.

The United States maintains schools abroad for military families serving overseas, for example.  These schools are much like American public schools back in the states, except that they answer to the Department of Defense Education Activity rather than a state or county education department.  Their curriculum is entirely American, teaching all the same subjects you’d find in most stateside public schools—American history, American lit, American English, and so on.

France has a very centralized school system.  Every French school anywhere in the world teaches the same things on the same days from the same perspective, whether the school’s in Paris, Toulouse, or Guadeloupe.  All across the former French colonial empire, France maintains state-run schools for its expatriate citizens living overseas as well as local residents who want a French education (in preparation for attending university in France, for instance).  Instruction is in Standard (i.e., Parisian) French, rather than whatever dialect, such as Creole, is spoken in the host country.

Even among the private schools, however, there are distinctions.  Most of the better-known and more highly regarded international schools are not-for-profit institutions like private or independent schools and universities here in the States.  They aren’t administered by local, state, or national governments and are privately endowed, not supported by taxes.  (They are therefore also expensive.)  Ecolint is one of this type of international school.

Some international schools, though, are for-profit or proprietary institutions.  CDL is this kind of private school, founded and owned by Francis Clivaz, who held the post of headmaster, until he sold the school to Meritas, a group of for-profit prep schools headquartered in the United States, in 2008.  In 2015, CDL was resold to Nord Anglia Education, another for-profit corporation based in London.  When I was a student at CDL, Clivaz, who came from the village of Bluche in the Canton of Valais (Wallis), and his wife, Inge, ran the school as their income-producing business.

(For those who aren’t familiar with Swiss political geography, the country’s divided into 26 cantons.  I’ve already mentioned three of them: Vaud, Genève, and Valais.  The official name of Switzerland is the Swiss Confederation and the cantons, once sovereign nations, are the constituent members of the confederation.  In a loose sense, a Swiss canton is like a U.S. state or a Canadian province.

(Each canton, like an American state, has a capital—which, unlike many U.S. states, is also its largest city.  The capital of the Canton of Genève is Geneva; Versoix is also located in Genève.  The capitals of Vaud and Valais, known as Wallis in German, are Lausanne and Sion, respectively. 

(Cars in Switzerland are registered by canton, so the license plate numbers begin with an abbreviation of the canton’s name: VD, GE, VS; the abbreviations are widely used elsewhere as well—and yes, we teenaged American boys did have a chuckle over the code for Vaud.  The country code for Switzerland used on automobile placards, by the way, is CH, for Conféderation Hélvétique—Helvetian Confederation; Helvetia was the ancient Roman name for the region.)

There are several more-or-less formal definitions for international schools, formulated by the various organizations that represent and/or accredit them.  I’ll just go with my own version.  An international school is a school that caters to students who aren’t natives of the host country and offers a curriculum that’s different from the standard or authorized program of study of the host country.

Most international schools offer plans to prepare students for several national leaving exams, such as the American SAT’s (Scholastic Aptitude Test when I took it; Scholastic Assessment Test today); the British General Certificate of Education (GCE) as it was known in my day, or General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), as it is today; or the world-renowned and notoriously terrifying French Baccalauréat. 

Some international schools will help students prepare for other national university entrance tests, including Germany’s Abitur or Switzerland’s Maturité (that’s its French name; it’s also known as Maturität in German or Maturità in Italian).

(I suppose most readers know that Switzerland is a multilingual country.  Most of you also probably know that Swiss speak German [62.6% of Swiss citizens are native speakers], French [22.9%], and Italian [8.2%] as official languages.  But how many Americans know that there’s actually a fourth official language in Switzerland: Romansh, spoken by a tiny 0.5% of Swiss. 

(A Romance language, Romansh is a descendant of the spoken Latin of the Romans.  It’s spoken only in the Canton of Grisons [or Graubünden] on the country’s eastern border; Grisons is the only canton that’s officially trilingual, with Romansh recognized alongside German and Italian. 

(I may have heard the language spoken once, on a train to Austria, but I have seen what I think was a Romansh-language newspaper someone left behind on that train. For a language geek like me, the very notion of a left-over Latin tongue still being spoken as a daily language is wildly intriguing!

(Most Swiss speak several languages, two or three of their own as well as any number of others in which people in the country do business in the 20th and 21st centuries.  The country, though, is roughly divided into three language districts—Romansh-speakers being relegated to a single canton. 

(Die Deutschschweiz or die deutsche Schweiz [German Switzerland] is largely in the east, north, and center of the country; la Suisse romande, la Romandie, or Romandy, the French area, in the west; and Svizzera italiana [Italian Switzerland], in the south.

(The three main Swiss languages are dialects, though Swiss Italian and Swiss French are pretty much the same as their Roman and Parisian mother versions.  I don’t know about the Italian spoken in Switzerland, but I had a lot of experience with Swiss French.  Geneva is only about 25 miles across the Rhone from France, so the languages spoken are nearly the same. 

(The only differences I found were slang and colloquialisms, and some standard vocabulary, most prominently in numerals.  While the French say soixante-dix [‘sixty-ten’] for ‘seventy,’ quatre-vingts [‘four twenties’] for ‘eighty,’ and quatre-vingt-dix [‘four-twenty-ten’] for ‘ninety,’ the Swiss count: septante, huitante, nonante.

(The language with the most difference with the mother tongue is Swiss German, or Schwyzer dütsch—there are varying spellings—which is largely a spoken dialect, though there are local newspapers printed in it.  It’s so different from Hochdeutsch that it’s a true Platt, not dissimilar to Austro-Bavarian dialect, which, after all, is spoken right next door in the Tyrolean Alps.  The differences between Hochdeutsch and Schwyzer dütsch makes them largely mutually unintelligible.

(The interesting thing about Schwyzer dütsch is that not only are there differences in vocabulary and pronunciation—where a German would say auf Wiedersehen for ‘goodbye,’ for instance, a Swiss German would say uf Wiederluege—but the whole speech pattern is different.  Schwyzer dütsch is spoken liltingly, almost sing-songy. 

(I took a train once with some of my CDL roommates over Whitsun weekend 1964, the middle of May.  We had a long weekend off from school and the three of us boys decided to go off on our own instead of going home to be with our parents.  So we went to Interlaken, in the Alps in the Canton of Bern, a 3¼-hour train trip.  The town’s called Interlaken because it’s nestled between two mountain lakes, Thunersee on the west and Brienzersee on the east.

(I won’t recount what mischief we got up to in Interlaken—we were three unchaperoned 16- and 17-year-old American boys in a country with no drinking age, so I’ll let you imagine—but on the train ride up, the conductor would come through the cars after each stop, chanting “nach Interlaken, nach Interlaken”—"to Interlaken”—except in Schwyzer dütsch it came out noch inter-LAAH-keh—and while Hochdeutsch is pronounced with guttural r’s, like gargling, Schwyzer dütsch is spoken with trilled r’s, like little birds tweeting!)

International schools are also at least bilingual.  I don’t mean the student bodies—they’re multilingual—but the instruction.  All the Swiss international schools that I know of teach in French and English; some also offer German instruction as well—principally the schools located in German Switzerland, such as Le Rosey in Gstaad (Canton of Bern).  At Ecolint, and I presume most other international schools, this division was semi-officially labeled “le côté français”/”the French side” and “le côté anglais”/“the English side.”

I don’t know if there were different curricula on the French side—say, a Swiss program or Belgian program alongside the French curriculum—but on the English side, we Americans, preparing for the SAT’s, had different classes in some subjects than our British schoolmates preparing for the GCE’s. 

Our classes such as English and history took an American approach—and often had American (or American-trained) teachers—while classes in the sciences, philosophy, or foreign languages had both American and British students.  (Students who weren’t either American or British but were studying in English would decide which track they wanted to follow.)

On the English side, we spoke mostly English in class (except, obviously, in foreign-language classes, which tended to be fairly immersive), but everything else—dorm life, the dining hall, interactions with the staff, going off campus into the little town of Versoix or to downtown Geneva—was in French.  (While Genevese speak multiple languages, Versoisiens weren’t as cosmopolitan.)

In social settings at school or in school groups, we all spoke a combination of French and English (sometimes with smatterings of other languages thrown in) among ourselves, with the French-speaking kids using more French than English and the English-speakers, vice versa.  This was the lingua franca of Swiss international-school students called Franglais.   (See my post on 1 July 2020 attempting to explain this phenomenon.)

There were exceptions to speaking French with the adults—at least for me.  (We didn’t speak Franglais with grown-ups.)  At CDL, for instance, the school secretary and the school nurse were both Swiss German.  Fräulein Ursula, the nurse, spoke French, of course, and Herr Peter spoke French and English, but I usually spoke German with them.  It was good practice for me, but, of course, I was also showing off a little.

The English the Continentals all spoke, by the way, was British English.  That was true all over Europe at that time.  The early and mid-’60s were still the era in which Europeans who learned English had British teachers (or teachers trained by Brits).  It was the transitional period to American English taking over as the dominant form of the language abroad. 

I not only became attuned to the British form of the language, I picked up some of the usages—otherwise a lot of people wouldn’t understand what I was saying.  Here’s an example: I grew up in Washington when we still had streetcars or trolleys.  I rode them regularly. 

Geneva had streetcars, too, and one ran in front of Ecolint along the Route de Chêne and was our transportation to downtown Geneva.  Except it was called the “tram.”  (The French word was also le tram, as it happens.  The system in those days was called Compagnie Genevoise des Tramways Électriques—the Geneva Electric Tramway Company.)  It took me years after I came home to stop calling streetcars “trams”!  

(Because most of us students were multilingual, Herr Peter’s name was the source of some ridicule.  The man was almost prototypically Swiss German: stiff, humorless, all-business, dressed in a very tailored suit, wearing rimless glasses.  Peter, of course, is merely the German name which is the same as the English one it looks like—only pronounced PAY-ter.  But in French, péter, pronounced PAY-tay, means ‘to fart’; ‘a fart’ is un pété, which sounds the same).  This we found to be hilariously appropriate.

(We also had a way of poking fun at M. Clivaz (pronounced CLEE-vah), the owner-headmaster of CDL, who was universally disliked among the students.  It was a little poem, a bit of doggerel of which there were two versions, one for the Americans and one for the Brits.  The American version went like this:

Cee-ell-eye

Vee-ay-zee

Looks like shit

And smells like pee.

(The Brits said:

Cee-ell-eye

Vee-ay-zed

Looks like a big turd

Lying on a bed.

(Clivaz’s wife, Inge, no more beloved than he was, was called ‘Al’ behind her back.  That stood for ‘assless’ because she was skinny and boney.  Yes, we were cruel, and I’m sure the Clivazs knew what we were saying, but my year at CDL was not a pleasant one.  My brother disliked it so much, he went back to the States after that one year.)

At both CDL and Ecolint, I had schoolmates from all over the world: much of Western Europe, Guinea, India, the PRC, Japan, Turkey, Kuwait, Iran.  (I even had one classmate at Ecolint who was an Iranian Jew, an unusual background even before the Islamic Revolution there [1978-79].  Henry Hay and I were friends, and I knew his family’s life in Tehran was difficult, but I never really understood why they stayed.)  There were also a bunch of kids with mixed national backgrounds.  

(Since the Swiss public education system was excellent, there were only a very small number of Swiss citizens among the student bodies of either school—and Swiss international schools overall.  Also, the international schools are expensive—among the costliest schools in the world—and Swiss state education is free, so why bear the additional financial burden?  Dominique Lindt, scion of the Swiss family that founded the chocolate company, was an obvious exception, but I didn’t know him well enough to know why.)

There were also many students who spoke not just two languages, but three and even four.  I was getting pretty fluent in French and German, but I had schoolmates who far outstripped my paltry efforts!

My schoolmates not only came from an assortment of countries, as you can see, but they also came for a variety of reasons.  The most common were kids like me: from families sent abroad and wanting to continue their children’s education in the same curriculum they left at home and/or to prepare them to attend a university in the homeland. 

Even within this group, there were differences.  I was the son of a diplomat stationed in Europe, so Switzerland was just “in the neighborhood” (no farther away from Germany, really, than the prep school I had attended in New Jersey was from Washington), but among my schoolmates were diplomats posted elsewhere in the world—one of my friends at Ecolint, for example, was the son of the Indian ambassador to Ghana. 

There were similar situations with students whose families were abroad for private business or non-official reasons.  Caterpiller, the heavy-machinery firm, had a large office in Geneva, for instance, and many of its expatriate employees sent their kids to international schools, including Ecolint. 

Aramco, the Arabian-American Oil Company that operated the oil concessions in Saudi Arabia (until it was nationalized by the Saudi government in 1988), had U.S. executives in Riyadh who also sent their children to school in Switzerland; one of my roommates at CDL, Gridley Strong, was the son of an Aramco executive. 

Gridley and I were particularly good friends at school.  He was funny—often inadvertently so—a real goer; he’d try anything—and sometimes paid a penalty for it.  After one trip home, Gridley brought me back a set of Bedouin robes, which I still have. (Later, they got some use as a stage costume at least once.) 

Ultimately, some escapade—I don’t remember what it was, but it was certainly innocent since Gridley never did anything malicious—got him banished to “Siberia,” what we called the school the Clivazs ran in the mountains of Valais, the École des Roches in the Clivaz hometown of Bluche, where “bad influences” were sent as punishment.  (Now an international hotel training school, Les Roches has an ironic name because in French it means ‘The Rocks’!) 

I never saw Gridley again after that, but he did write us a letter—I had three roommates at CDL and we had the largest room in the dorm, so it became the gathering place—and he said he was actually enjoying life at Les Roches.  Ever after his departure, whenever anyone got caught doing something daring but stupid, it was called “pulling a Gridley.”

Other schoolmates included my CDL roommate Stan Thom, whose dad was a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu and my Ecolint roomie, Mark Dyen, the son of Isidore Dyen (1913-2008), a Yale professor on sabatical in Asia.  (Among Mark’s distinctions was his father’s full title: Professor of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics.  Now, there’s a mouthful.  Mark also used to make a punny joke on his father’s name: “Isidore Dyen?”  “I don’t know.  Does it have a pulse?”) 

Many of the students at international schools in Switzerland were children from wealthy or prominent families.  I mentioned my Ecolint classmate Dominique Lindt earlier, for instance.  Remember the Singing Nun (Jeannine Deckers, 1933-85) from around that time?  In French, she was known as Soeur Sourire—Sister Smile—and she had a pop song out called . . . “Dominique” (1963).  Don’t you know that whenever Lindt, who was something of a nerd, showed up in the dorm, someone burst out with that tune: Dominique-nique-nique . . . .

There was a pair of brothers, as different from each other as you could imagine.  They came from Ardmore, Oklahoma, and were from an oil-and-cattle family.  The older brother Charley, was a hick country boy; all he really cared about was ranching and running cattle.  He wore pretty much only blue jeans, cowboy boots, and plaid shirts.  His younger brother, Keats, styled himself after (early 1960s) Elvis, with a bit of Roy Orbison mixed in: a black pompadour hair-do, black pants and shirt and black boots.  He also played an electric guitar—he had the whole hook-up in his dorm room—all the time!

Their family name was French—like the mustard.  The Lindts had sold off the chocolate company long before Dominique came along; these Frenches lost the mustard business when another branch of the family—it may have been a brother of the original developer, I just don’t remember the tale—cut them out of the firm. 

(I’ll come to this story later, but over spring vacation in my senior year, Ecolint organized a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  Keats French went on it with a couple of dozen of my other schoolmates.  He took his whole guitar rig, including portable amps, and set it all up in the train compartments—the trip took three trains—between Geneva and Warsaw.  We had live rock ’n’ roll music playing all through the voyage, including out the open compartment windows whenever we pulled into a station.)

Also at Ecolint were the sons of Melvin Frank (1913-88), Hollywood screenwriter, producer, and director (A Touch of Class, 1973), and Robert Ardrey (1908-80), a playwright (Thunder Rock, 1939; ), screenwriter (They Knew What They Wanted, 1939; The Three Musketeers, 1948; Khartoum, 1966), and science writer (African Genesis, 1961; The Territorial Imperative, 1967).  Dan Ardrey was something of a pre-hippie or a late beatnik—but more intellectual.

A schoolmate at CDL was “Winny” Rockefeller (actually Winthrop Paul Rockefeller [1948-2006], later known as “Win”), the son of Winthrop Aldrich Rockefeller (1912-73; son of John D., Jr.; brother of John III, Nelson, and Laurance; and future governor of Arkansas [1967-71]).  Winny’s mother, with whom he was living at the time, was “Bobo” (Jievute Paulekiute Rockefeller, 1916-2008), daddy’s ex., who was partial to gold lamé outfits.  Winny was a real rich-kid jerk; he was so unpopular at CDL that we heard later his mother bought a school in England where he transferred.

[This is the first installment of “Going to a Swiss International School.”  There will be six parts in all, posted at three-day intervals.  I’ll be picking up in Part 2 where I left off above on Sunday, 2 May.  I hope you’ll come back to read the rest of my memoir on my two-year experience as an international-school student in Switzerland.]

Latter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees

 

[Thursday, 8 April, was Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah.  Officially known in Israel, where it’s a national holiday, as Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah (Hebrew: יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה‎, literally ’Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day’), it’s traditionally observed on the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, usually corresponding to the Gregorian calendar date of sundown on 7 April to sundown on 8 April. 

[Elsewhere, especially in Jewish communities, Yom HaShoah is recognized as a day of commemoration for the Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust and for the Jewish resistance who fought against Nazi oppression during World War II.  Both religious and civil ceremonies are conducted in observance of Yom HaShoah, both to honor and mourn those lost in the holocaust and to celebrate those who struggled against Nazi tyranny.  (Shoah, pronounced show-uh, is the Hebrew word for ‘catastrophe’ and haShoah is the word used for ‘the [Nazi] Holocaust.’)

[Coincidentally, March is recognized as Women’s History Month in the United States.  8 March is celebrated as International Women’s Day. 

[Over the last month-and-a-half, several news outlets have published articles on Jewish women who took up the fight for freedom from the Nazi occupation of Europe, risking their own lives and even eschewing escape for themselves, to help save others.  NY1, the proprietary news channel of Charter Spectrum cable system in New York City, reported on a New York University film professor, Enid Zentelis, who researched her grandmother.  The grandmother, Isabelle Vital-Tihanyi (1916-88), known as Bella,  was a Hungarian Jew who spied for the British against the Nazi occupiers of Hungary. 

[The New York Times and then PBS NewsHour ran stories on Judy Batalion’s book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, the result of a research project that developed somewhat by happenstance.  Looking for material on strong Jewish women, the multi-hyphenate whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post, came across a record in Yiddish (she speaks English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew) of women who fought with the resistance in German-occupied Europe.

[It occurred to me that now is a perfect moment to republish these remarkable stories—not least because we are besieged with efforts by forces, across the globe and right here at home, taking malicious aim at people because of their skin color, national heritage, gender, religious belief, or choice of romantic partner.  One wonders what the women whose stories are recounted here might have elected to do in the face of this current enemy.  I think they’d shout out “Never again!” and take up arms once more.]

“NYU FILM PROFESSOR LEARNS HER GRANDMOTHER

WAS A SPY FIGHTING THE NAZIS DURING WWII”

by Stephanie Simon 

[The following report was aired on Spectrum News NY1 on Thursday morning, 25 March 2021.  In re: the reference to Spyscape, the espionage museum, reporter Stephanie Simon makes just below, see my republication of “A Place to Come In From the Cold” by William L. Hamilton in my post “Spy vs. Spy” on Rick On Theatre on 9 August 2019.]

Walking through Spyscape, the museum of espionage in Midtown, filmmaker Enid Zentelis is intrigued by the collection of spy artifacts, but she’s on her own mission to learn the truth about her late grandmother, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor – and a spy.

“I was going through her things and found myself staring at a letter that I had seen in childhood and I didn’t really understand. It had to do with some sort of covert work she had done for the British,” said Zentelis.

And so Zentelis spent four years unraveling the secret life of her grandmother Isabelle, which unfolds like a classic spy thriller in a new six-part podcast called “How My Grandmother Won World War II” [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-my-grandmother-won-wwii/id1550511220].

Zentelis determined that her grandmother was in fact a covert operative working in Hungary for the British, during World War II.

“It was her brother Zoltan that got her involved in covert work,” said Zentelis.

Zoltan was a telegraph operator at the post office – a  position that gave him access to crucial information like Nazi troop movements, which he then passed on to his sister. Exploring the artifacts at Spyscape, the famous enigma code breaking machines hold special significance to Zentelis.

“When my great uncle started working at the post office, they decided to use their childhood code and maybe further develop it to encrypt the information that they intercepted at the post office so that when my grandmother carried it to the British legation in Budapest -- if she were to be discovered, it would be in code,” said Zentelis.

Isabelle was arrested later, not for espionage, but for being Jewish. Using her guile once again, she escaped. After the war she was a refugee with young children who lost her husband.

She eventually settled in Corsica. She died in 1988. Her daughter – Enid’s Mom, came to America and lived in Queens.

Zentelis, an NYU film professor, pieced together her grandmother’s story by tracking down distant relatives and sifting through declassified records in Britain’s national archives.

“And I did find proof that she absolutely contributed to helping the Red [i.e., Soviet] Army prevail in Hungary [March 1945], which was a critical, critical point to winning World War II. It’s one of the proudest moments of my life finding this,” said Zentelis.

Enid is passionate about sharing her grandmother’s story but also raising awareness that so many women like her have been lost to history.

She also hopes that sharing her grandmother’s story will change the stereotype of female spies using their sexuality, rather than like her grandmother – their bravery, guile and intelligence.

“My grandmother like her brother, and like many other women, you will never hear about was willing to risk their lives to do what was right, to make this a better world,” said Zentelis.

It’s a story that’s now being told thanks to an intriguing old letter, and a very determined granddaughter.

[Stephanie Simon, Spectrum News arts reporter, covers art and culture in all its many forms across the five boroughs of New York City, including the visual arts, jazz, the New York Philharmonic, New York history, and everything in between.  Beginning as a television and radio reporter in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, Simon began at NY1 as a features producer in 1998.] 

*  *  *  *

“THE NAZI-FIGHTING WOMEN OF THE JEWISH RESISTANCE”

by Judy Batalion 

[The following opinion article appeared in the New York Times of 21 March 2021 in section SR (“Sunday Review”).  The title above was used on the front page of the section, which was a full-page promotional preview of Judy Batalion’s essay; the inside headline read: “The Women of the Jewish Resistance.”

[Dr. Batalion is the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors; her mother was born on the way back to Poland in 1945 in the aftermath of wartime displacement.  Batalion was born and grew up in Montreal and earned her bachelor’s degree in the history of science at Harvard and a Ph.D. in contemporary art from the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art.  Suffering from what she calls “career promiscuity,” she’s worked as a museum curator, researcher, editor, university lecturer, MC, script-reader, dramaturg, performer, actor, producer, translator, muffin-server, and office temp.  Dr. Batalion also does stand-up comedy.]

They flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines and flirted with Nazis, then killed them. Why hadn’t I heard their stories?

In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair.

She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied. She found a physician’s coat, entered the hospital where the injured man was being treated, and killed both the Nazi and the police officer who had been guarding him.

“Little Wanda With the Braids,” as she was nicknamed on every Gestapo most-wanted list, was one of many young Jewish women who, with supreme cunning and daring, fought the Nazis in Poland. And yet, as I discovered over several years of research on these resisters, their stories have largely been overlooked in the broader history of Jewish resistance in World War II.

In 2007, when I was living in London and grappling with my Jewish identity, I decided to write about strong Jewish women. Hannah Senesh [anglicized from Szenes; 1921-44] jumped immediately to mind. As I’d learned in fifth grade, Hannah was a young World War II resistance paratrooper. She left her native Hungary for Palestine in 1939, but later returned to Europe to fight for the Allied cause; she was caught and was said to have looked her killers directly in their eyes as they shot her.

That tale of audacity was exhilarating to me. I was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who had escaped from Poland; in my family, flight meant life. I had grown up to be a runner in relationships, careers and countries. But Hannah had returned to fight. I wanted to grasp what had motivated her boldness.

I went to the British Library, looked her up in the catalog and ordered the few books listed under her name. One, I noticed, was unusual, bound in worn blue fabric with gold lettering and yellowing edges — “Freuen in di Ghettos” [Pioneer Women’s Organization, 1946], Yiddish for “Women in the Ghettos.” I opened it and found 180 sheets of tiny script, all in Yiddish, a language I was fluent in. To my surprise, only a few pages mentioned Hannah Senesh; the rest relayed tales of dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, many of whom had the chance to leave Nazi-occupied Poland but didn’t; some even voluntarily returned.

All this was a revelation to me. Where I had expected mourning and gloom, I found guns, grenades and espionage. This was a Yiddish thriller, telling the stories of Polish-Jewish “ghetto girls” who paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis and then killed them. They distributed underground bulletins, flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines, organized soup kitchens, and bore the truth about what was happening to the Jews.

I was stunned. I was raised in a community of Holocaust survivors and had earned a doctorate in women’s history. Why had I never heard these stories?

“Freuen” was compiled for Yiddish-speaking American Jews in 1946 in an attempt to share this stunning history as widely as possible. But in the years that followed, these resistance narratives, like many historical contributions made by women, were sidelined or ignored for a variety of political and personal reasons.

Many women who told their stories in their own communities after the war were met with disbelief; others were accused by relatives of abandoning their families to fight; still others were charged with sleeping their way to safety. Sometimes, family members feared that opening old wounds would tear them apart. And many fighters suffered from survivors’ guilt — they’d “had it easy,” they felt, compared with others — and so in later years they remained mostly silent about their experiences.

Several other factors in postwar decades may have contributed to the relative obscurity of this history. In the 1950s, some say, many Jews had trauma fatigue; in the 1960s, the emerging horrors of Auschwitz and other camps became the predominant subject; in the “hippyish” 1970s, stories of violent rebellion were out of fashion; and in the 1980s, a flood of Holocaust books in the United States overshadowed many earlier tales.

My quest to learn more about these women turned into a dozen years of research across Poland, Israel and North America; in archives and living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos. I learned of the scope of Jewish rebellion: More than 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units. Approximately 30,000 European Jews joined the partisans. Rescue networks supported about 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. All this alongside daily acts of resilience — smuggling food, writing diaries, telling jokes to relieve fear, hugging a barrack mate to keep her warm. Women, aged 16 to 25, were at the helm of many of these efforts. I learned their names: Tosia Altman, Gusta Davidson, Frumka Plotnicka. Hundreds of others[.]

At the center of “Freuen” was a striking testimonial by a woman identified only as Renia K.; it was composed at the end of the war, when she was just 20 years old. Her writing was descriptive, even witty. “For them,” she wrote of the Nazi officers, “killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.” I found her file at the Israel State Archives and used the book she published in 1945 and additional testimonies to fill out her story.

Her full name was Renia Kukielka, and she was brought up in Poland in the 1930s in a world of sophisticated Yiddish theater and literature, and some 180 Jewish newspapers. After Hitler invaded Renia’s town, Jedrzejow, and locked her family in a ghetto, Renia escaped and fled through fields. She leapt off a moving train when she was recognized, bargained with the police and pretended to be Catholic. She got a job as a housemaid, nervously genuflecting at weekly church services. “I hadn’t even known that I was such a good actor,” Renia reflected in her memoir, “able to impersonate and imitate.”

Helped by a paid Polish smuggler, she joined her older sister in the town of Bedzin. Before the war, Bedzin had been a largely middle-class Jewish community and a hub for Jewish political parties, which had proliferated in response to the question of modern Jewish identity. A vast network of Jewish youth groups was affiliated with these parties. These groups had trained young Jewish men — and women — to feel pride, live collectively, be physically active and question, critique and plan. They trained them in the skills necessary for “staying.”

After Hitler’s conquest of Poland, the youth groups formed militias. When Renia arrived, Bedzin hosted a burgeoning cell of rebellion organized by secular, socialist-leaning Jewish teenagers and young adults. Those who were forced to labor in Nazi uniform factories slipped notes into the boots urging soldiers at the front to drop their weapons. They constructed workshops where they experimented with homemade explosives and designed elaborate underground bunkers. “Haganah!” was their rallying cry: Defense!

Women who were selected for undercover missions were required to look “good,” or passably “Aryan” or Catholic, with light hair, blue or green eyes, good posture and an assured gait. Renia was one of those chosen. Fueled by rage and a deep sense of justice, 18-year-old Renia became an underground operative, “a courier girl.”

I learned that “courier girls” connected the locked ghettos where Jews were imprisoned. Being caught on the Aryan side meant certain death; despite that, these young women dyed their hair blond, took off their Jewish-identifying armbands, put on fake smiles and secretly slipped in and out of ghettos, bringing Jews information and hope, bulletins and false identification papers, and linking youth resistance groups across the country. They smuggled pistols, bullets and grenades, hiding them in marmalade jars, sacks of potatoes and designer handbags.

As women, they were well positioned to do this work: Their brothers were circumcised and risked being found out in a “pants drop” test. Before the war, Jewish girls were more likely than Jewish boys to have studied at Polish public schools (many boys attended Jewish schools and yeshivas). They were, over all, more assimilated than Jewish boys and spoke Polish without the Yiddish accent, making them excellent spies.

They also took enormous risks. Bela Hazan got a job working as a translator and receptionist for the Gestapo; she stole their documents and delivered them to Jewish forgers. Vladka Meed smuggled dynamite into the Warsaw ghetto by passing bits of gunpowder through a hole in the wall of a basement that lined the ghetto border. She later supported Jews in hiding, secretly bringing them money, medical help and trusted photographers to take their pictures for fake IDs.

Hela Schupper, a beauty who’d studied commerce, dressed up as an affluent Polish woman attending an afternoon of theater, wearing clothes she’d borrowed from a non-Jewish friend’s mother. In 1942 she met a “Mr. X” from the Polish underground on a Warsaw street corner, followed him onto a train and into a safe house, stuffed her fashionable jute handbag, and brought five guns and clips of cartridges to Krakow’s “Fighting Pioneers,” who then bombed a Christmas week gathering at an upscale cafe frequented by Nazi officers, killing at least seven Germans and wounding more.

These women were so unlike me — they were the fight to my flight — and I was becoming increasingly obsessed with them.

Renia ran missions between Bedzin and Warsaw. She moved grenades, false passports and cash strapped to her body and hidden in her undergarments and shoes. She transported Jews from ghettos to hiding spots. She wore a red flower in her hair to identify her to underground contacts, met up with a black-market arms dealer in a cemetery, and slept in a cellar, wandering the city by day to gather information. She smiled coyly during searches on the train, and befriended one border guard to whom she “confessed” about smuggling food to distract him from the real contraband that was fastened to her torso with belts. “You had to be strong in your comportment, firm,” she wrote in her memoir. “You had to have an iron will.”

In Vilna, Ruzka Korczak found a Finnish pamphlet in a library on how to make bombs — it became the underground’s recipe book. Her comrade Vitka Kempner put a rudimentary explosive under her coat, slipped out of the ghetto, and blew up a German supply train in 1942. The Vilna resistance fled the ghetto to fight in the forests, where both women commanded units. Their comrade Zelda Treger completed 17 trips transporting hundreds of Jews out of ghettos and slave labor camps to the woods. In a different forest, a 19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated in combat missions and performed surgery — she was once forced to amputate a soldier’s wounded finger with her teeth. “When it was time to hug a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle,” Faye said of her wartime adolescence in a documentary film.

Renia, through cunning and luck, managed to fend off prying Nazis and Poles who attempted to turn her in for a reward — until one border guard noticed her fabricated passport stamp. Imprisoned in Gestapo lockups that prided themselves on their medieval torture strategies, Renia was brutally beaten alongside Polish political prisoners. She masterminded an escape, helped by other courier girls who plied the guards with cigarettes and whiskey. Renia was able to slip away, change her clothes and run. Using an underground railroad set up by Jews, she crossed the Tatra Mountains by foot, then reached Hungary hidden in the locomotive of a freight train. The engineer expelled an extra puff of smoke to hide her departure from the engine.

Renia finally arrived in Palestine, where she was invited to lecture about her experience, and she published her memoir in Hebrew in 1945 — one of the first full-length accounts of the Holocaust. But in her life after the war, she remained mostly silent about it. For many female survivors, silence was a means of coping. They felt it was their duty to create a new generation of Jews. Women kept their pasts secret in a desperate desire to create a normal life for their children, and, for themselves. Renia’s family home after the war was not filled with stories of the resistance, but with music, art and tango nights; she was known for her fashionable tastes, and for her sharp sense of humor. Like so many refugees, the resisters wanted to start afresh, to blend into their new worlds.

Some 70 years after the war, I went to speak with Vitka Kempner’s son, Michael Kovner, on the outdoor terrace of a Jerusalem cafe. “She was someone who went toward danger,” he told me. “She didn’t care about the rules. She had true chutzpah.”

Researching these women, I’ve learned that my family’s narrative is not the sole option for confronting large and small dangers in the world. Running is sometimes necessary, but at other times I can stop and fight, or, at least, pause and discuss. Renia and her comrades were brave and powerful and paved the way for the generations that followed — not just the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, but also women like me and my daughters. My children should know that their legacy includes not just fleeing, but also staying, and even running toward danger.

When I left the cafe, I found myself on a quiet side road. I looked up and saw the street sign with a name I would have never recognized a few years before: Haviva Reik Street. With Hannah Senesh, Haviva had joined the British Army as a paratrooper, helping thousands of Slovak Jews and rescuing Allied servicemen. Strong female legacies were all around us; if only we noticed, if only we knew their stories.

[Dr. Batalion is the author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow, 2020), from which this essay is adapted.  The book is also available as an e-book, as an audiobook, in a large-print edition, and in a young readers’ edition.

[A New York Times review of The Light of Days, “The ‘Ghetto Girls’ Who Fought the Nazis With Weapons and Wiles” by Sonia Purnell, was posted on the Times’ website at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/books/review/light-of-days-judy-batalion.html on 6 April.

[Deadline, the online entertainment-industry news site, announced that Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment is developing a film adaptation of The Light of Days, and Batalion along with playwright and screenwriter Michael Mitnick are writing the screenplay.] 

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“NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE HEROIC 

WOMEN-RUN RESISTANCE INSIDE NAZI DEATH CAMPS”

by Malcolm Brabant

 

[The interview below was broadcast on PBS NewsHour on Holocaust Remembrance Day, 8 April 2021.  It covers the same new book the New York Times essay above discusses.]

Judy Batalion’s new book, “The Light of Days,” details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of eastern Europe - and even within the death camps. She documents how female couriers hand-carried crucial messages, weapons, and ammunition as part of the resistance in besieged Jewish ghettos. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant presents the report for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Judy Woodruff: Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, now 76 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe.

A new book out this week, “The Light of Days” by Judy Batalion, details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, and even within the death camps, who risked their lives to challenge the Nazis.

She concentrates on female couriers who hand-carried crucial messages, weapons, and ammunition as part of the resistance in besieged Jewish ghettos.

Here’s special correspondent Malcolm Brabant.

Malcolm Brabant: Seventy-six years since the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated and its railhead of industrial slaughter neutralized, ghosts of the Holocaust are coming to life in new uplifting stories.

One of the wartime heroines portrayed in this book is Bela Hazan, seen here with her son Yoel on the right. Yoel, a brain scientist in Jerusalem, wants the world to know what his mother did in the war to compensate for the torrid reception she received in Israel after surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Yoel Yaari: They used to say, you are sheep who went to the slaughter. And she was treated as such.

Why didn’t you resist? I mean, this was a question. What did you do you were not killed? Did you collaborate with the Nazis? Were you bartering sex for food? Were you a prostitute? I mean, these were questions that were put to her.

Malcolm Brabant: How angry does that make you that your mother’s first period in Israel was so awful?

Yoel Yaari: I’m extremely angry. And this is, of course, one of the reasons why I’m trying to tell her story.

Malcolm Brabant: This picture testifies to Bela Hazan’s courage. She’s between two other Jewish underground couriers.

What makes the photograph extraordinary is that it was taken by a Nazi at a Gestapo Christmas party. Bela worked as an interpreter for the Gestapo. The job gave her a great cover story, which enabled her to travel to cities like Vilnius in Lithuania, where the Jewish resistance operated.

Aged just 19 and masquerading as a Polish Catholic, she became a brilliant spy. Her luck ran out at this railway station in Poland. Despite being arrested, tortured and sent to Auschwitz, she never confessed her true identity.

Yoel Yaari: She interacted with the Gestapo people. What she did was to steal official papers, to put stamps, official stamps on these papers, and she delivered these materials together with information that she gathered when she was in that place. She delivered it all to the headquarters of the underground.

Judy Batalion: They were walking around with cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear.

Malcolm Brabant: The bravery of women in Hitler’s ghettos was buried in an old Yiddish book that author Judy Batalion stumbled upon in the British Library in London.

She has spent 14 years researching women whose exploits have been neglected by history and who she believes should be revered.

Judy Batalion: When I first began this project, I too had a kind of subconscious understanding what they call of the myth of passivity and which is why, when I first found this material by accident, I was blown away.

And now I cannot look at the story of the Holocaust without seeing it as one of a constant battle of resistance and resilience.

Malcolm Brabant: Batalion’s book concentrates on couriers like Chasia Bielicka, eulogized by her granddaughter Hadas in Israel.

Hadas Yahav: You could see it in the Holocaust, of course, the way she wanted to save people and help people and help children. And she didn’t just want to survive. That wasn’t her mission. She wanted to do much more than that.

Malcolm Brabant: Chasia Bielicka’s ability to evade Nazi patrols and checkpoints made her a key player in the Jewish insurgency in Bialystok, these days an ultra-conservative town in Northeast Poland renowned for its hostility to gays.

Eighty years ago under the Nazis, it had a ghetto where Jews were corralled before being dispatched to death camps.

Hadas Yahav: The courier missions was to bring ammunition to the partisans. The partisans were fighting in the forest. They needed ammunition.

The women that she was with tried to find always places where they could steal ammunition, bring it to the forest or to the ghetto sometimes.

Judy Batalion: These women showed bravery and courage and cleverness and bravado, against all odds.

Malcolm Brabant: As long as they appeared sufficiently Aryan, women could move more freely around occupied Poland than men, who were supposed to be working during daylight hours. The couriers exploited a naive German belief that women were incapable of sabotage and subterfuge.

Judy Batalion: The biggest militaries in the world couldn’t defeat the German army, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the fight for justice and liberty.

Malcolm Brabant: Zivia Lubetkin left Poland when Germany invaded. She could have stayed outside the country, but came back

Judy Batalion: Zivia Lubetkin was ultimately a leader in the Warsaw ghetto. She helps get young Jews out of slave labor. She helps them find food. And she fought in two ghetto uprisings. She fought in the Warsaw uprising alongside the Polish resistance.

Malcolm Brabant: The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising lasted almost a month, as heavily outnumbered Jewish fighters kept crack German forces at bay. Ultimately, they were overwhelmed, and some partisans died by suicide, rather than surrendering.

Today, only a small portion of the ghetto wall remains, but Zivia Lubetkin’s deeds live on.

Judy Batalion: She escaped through sewers, sewage water up to her neck. And even after the ghetto was razed and she was in hiding, she helped administer rescue organizations that helped thousands of Jews in hiding in Warsaw.

Malcolm Brabant: Although most of the characters in Batalion’s book are couriers, she couldn’t resist telling the story of Anna Heilman, a member of the Auschwitz resistance.

How on earth do you resist in Auschwitz?

Judy Batalion: This is such an incredible story, again, one of those: How did I not know about this?

Malcolm Brabant: Only one crematorium remains at Auschwitz-Birkenau. All but one were destroyed by the Nazis as they fled from the advancing Soviet Red Army.

The other one was blown up by Anna Heilman’s co-conspirators in October 1944. She helped to steal gunpowder from a munitions factory two miles from Birkenau and smuggle it back in the hems of her clothes.

Judy Batalion: It was this very elaborate system, where the people that worked in the room where they packed the powder would take little bits and put it in a waste — the wastebasket on the side. Another round of women would collect that waste, go to the bathroom, take out the gunpowder and hide it in fabric.

Malcolm Brabant: And here is Anna Heilman, in her own words, in Canada in 1996.

Anna Heilman: They used this gunpowder and manufactured little hand grenades made out of metal around boxes of shoe polish with a wick and filled with gunpowder. And when you lit it, it exploded.

Malcolm Brabant: The crematorium was destroyed during a brief rebellion by so-called Sonderkommandos [‘special units’], Jews forced by the Nazis to dispose of bodies from the gas chambers.

Anna Heilman: All the Sonderkommando people were killed. But the crematorium was destroyed as well.

Malcolm Brabant: In retribution, Anna Heilman’s sister was executed.

Anna Heilman: I heard this collective groan, and I knew what happened. I didn’t witness it with my eyes, but I was there.

Malcolm Brabant: In Jerusalem, Bela Hazan’s son Yoel Yaari, is grateful that light is now being shone on this aspect of the Holocaust.

Yoel Yaari: I think it is extremely important, because the story of the couriers is almost unknown worldwide and also in Israel.

Malcolm Brabant: The new book may help elevate these women to their rightful place in history, especially as the author is now working on a screenplay for Steven Spielberg, Oscar-winning director of that legendary Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List.”

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Malcolm Brabant.

[Malcolm Brabant is a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.]

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[I have a personal motivation for republishing the reports above: my mother.

[Mom died at 92 in 2015—just about six years ago now.  She’s been on my mind prominently these days.  Most significantly, I’ve been working on a very long project based on the letters she and my future father exchanged for almost a year in 1945, from just after they first met on 1 January to my father’s return from the army and the end of World War II and his release from the military in December.

[In addition, 7 April would have been Mother’s 98th birthday and next month, on the 8th, is Mother’s Day, and I always used to try to spend one of those dates—or some time in between—with her either here in New York City or at her home in Washington, D.C.

[These stories, though, have made the absence of my mother just now particularly notable.  In particular, the account of Enid Zentelis’s grandmother, the Hungarian spy, because Mother’s family was a teensy bit Hungarian.  Her father’s family had come from Austria-Hungary in the mid- or early 19th century, and Mom used to point to the tip of her little finger and say she was “that much Hungarian”!

[Further, Judy Batalion’s history is compiled in a book.  Mom (whose name was also Judy, coincidentally) loved reading and would have delighted in stories of Jewish and female heroism, and I thought, what a wonderful birthday or Mother’s Day gift The Light of Days would’ve made for her.