We huddled outside as her body was buried and put to rest, half expecting her to get up and correct some of the speakers, still argue that is the Jewish secret of youthfulness. Afterwards, we walked through the wintery Parisian park with its mourning trees. We all went back to the warmth of her apartment, to feel and spend a few more hours in her presence. I remembered I had sat in her recessed settee talking with her as I grew up and visited Paris. If anything, she was more present than ever that afternoon, sharing her life, interrupting our conversations, with her memories and opinions. In the alcove of her settee were her family books of their family tree and history. I sat there and read them. Eva’s daughter Toutik sat down with me, and we started talking about family stories for the first time. Toutik has these large, infinite blue eyes, which can look at you like the sky. She told me the story of how her blue eyes had saved herself, her mother and father from the Nazis when they were escaping. Toutik had been caught in Paris as the Nazis invaded, with her mother Eva and father Salomon Rosenblum. Salomon had carried on his work as a physicist. He had worked with Marie Curie and with the Institut du Radium. He couldn’t get out to England, and part of him also wanted to stay to continue his important work, the life he was dedicated to. Salomon continued his daily routine, as conditions deteriorated and got more and more difficult in 1940. Eva’s family had grown up in Munich, as part of the Blauer Reiter, and had advised my grandmother on paintings, buying Kandinskys, Kokoschkas and Klees. She thought she knew Germany, its art, its psychology, and its people. What was happening could not be happening, like a lifelong friend whose character had changed.
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She continued living, half believing Nazism would pass, and Eva became pregnant with their second child. Even as the Nazi occupation hardened, Salomon wanted to stay. Luckily due to his work, the France Libre, the resistance, saw him as too important a physicist to be left and lost. They planned to bring him to the United States, to work with Einstein, on special projects during the war. They secretly kept an eye on the dangers for the family. One day on the streets of Paris Louis Rapkin, who was a bio logist and knew Salomon, approached Eva. He said in an agitated but clear manner: “You have to leave before tomorrow, there will be searches, and they will take away Jews like yourselves.” That night France Libre came to their house and organised their escape. Together with other scientists, they would be smuggled across the border to Free France, and then to Spain, Portugal and onto a boat to New York. They left everything behind, could not take any suitcases only hand luggage, and were taken to the Loire valley, to a town called Moulin. There, they were introduced to a “passeuse”, a woman who risked her life daily for the Jews, and would take them across the border for money. These worldly women, like diplomats who broke the rules, were the everyday saints of the war. The next day, as the sun rose across the river, Salomon and his pregnant wife Eva were put in the boot of the car. They hugged onto each other, his hand falling on the bulge in her stomach of their unborn child, three hearts beating fast. Toutik, their young child, was placed in the front seat of the car and given some chocolate, so that she would not speak if questioned. She was charming, only two years old, Jewish but with big blue eyes, she may soften the guards at the border.
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As the car drove across the bridge in the early morning, it was stopped at the frontier by two soldiers in Nazi uniform. The sun caught the current of the river below, as the soldiers’ eyes looked the “passeuse” and her baby up and down, and then flashed to the empty seats and the boot of the car. “Do you have anything or anybody to declare?” they asked, questioning, challenging, looking for any sign of hesitation or Jewishness in their faces. The passeuse shook her head without a word. After a long pause, minutes which seemed like lives, the soldiers look fell on the Jewish child Toutik in the front seat, chewing on her chocolate. They moved away from the boot of the car, and something in them did seem to melt. Apparently, they said: “What a beautiful little Jesus, with your big, blue, eyes.” And they smiled and waved the car on, and into Free France. The threads of escape were getting more tenuous by the day, the arks more difficult to build. There is danger and a small detail can lead to death at each stage, the look or indiscreet words of a child. The “passeuse” died doing a similar crossing within two weeks, an unexpected sound, an irritable guard, brown rather than blue eyes, the details which distinguish life from death. The family was smuggled across the border into Spain, then to Portugal and Lisbon. The chances of escape are divided at each crossing, like throwing a dice several times. Each time, with the parents in the boot, the lucky blue eyes of Toutik seemed to get them through. In Lisbon they met a friend called Manuel Valladares, who had worked with Salomon and Marie Curie in the Institut de Radium. The family was taken to the boat SS Excalibur, which was full of scientists, including Jean Perrin, and academics. They would
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