They'll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist's Coming of Age in the Third Reich

Nine

N i n e IREGISTERED AT THE ACADEMY as a German national, my profession a maid.While tuition for aliens was double that for Belgian citizens , I had passed the entrance exam with high marks and an exception was made for me, perhaps because I was the first domestic on the royal list of art students. One evening I entered Monsieur van Halen’s fourth-year class of portraiture and life-size drawing from the nude. Unlike Germany, the students had no concept of either “Jewish refugees” or “dirty Jews.” I was simply German, a “sale Boche” as Belgians used to sneer — Germany had conquered the country during the First World War. My new teacher addressed me solely in Flemish, though he spoke French as I did. He seemed unable to grasp the fact that I hardly spoke Flemish. If I was resigned to the fact I would never really belong anywhere, by now I was toughened enough to not let such trivialities bother me. Most importantly, I had a new teacher, models and many classmates to compete with, though regretfully I could only participate in three of the five weekly classes. Madame Rosiner was reluctant to let me attend more often. Every maid’s lot was to be exploited, or so I believed, and in my family those lowly creatures had not licked honey either. However, what really bothered me was something else, that for a few free hours in the evening Madame Rosiner reduced my pitiful monthly salary of three hundred francs by fifty. With my father’s consent , I gave notice. How ungrateful, she said, squinting at me with the same beady eyes like her goateed father when he chased me around the kitchen table. Madame Gomez, however, was not too fond of her own daughter and gave me a twinkle of encouragement. I would not be swayed from my intentions. At the beginning of December, I moved into still another attic room, a tiny one near my father’s in the same row house of the Rue de la Chaumière where Uncle David lived. It was the end of 1939, mid-winter of the “drôle de guerre” and the calm before the storm that followed the French and English declarations of war against Germany. France was entrenched behind the Maginot line; England believed herself safe on the other side of the Channel; Belgium and Holland lay cradled under the blanket of their neutrality. Germany was crouched,waiting for the signal to pounce on its prey. It was an eerie state of war — all seemed quiet, yet everyone was on edge. Life in that attic room with the small petrol stove discharging more reeking smoke than heat remains in memory as the winter of my cold feet. Of the half dozen or so destitute immigrant families, each dwelling in one room of the house in the Rue de la Chaumière, Papa and I, high up under the roof, were the poorest. Nevertheless we lived quite well, thanks to Aunt Johanna Spicker. She stretched the little money my father still received from the German Social Security into the hot meals she prepared each day. Before dawn, on icy winter mornings, Uncle David went to the market looking for bargains: fallen fruit, slightly rotten potatoes and soup bones, which Aunt Johanna orchestrated into a meal of broth with marrow dumplings followed by fried potatoes with jellied meat and fruit compote. Uncle David prayed three times a day and wore an old dressing gown and visor cap. Strangely perhaps, he seemed more at ease in his furnished room with its faded curtains and frayed bedside rug than in the magnificent villa in Friedenau, where as a child I had climbed on golden chairs. Living once more in the midst of a much smaller and impoverished family, I was still with family; I now began to take courses at the academy as a regular daytime student. A Boche, one having registered as a house maid and who, believe it or not, could draw — what kind of a bizarre creature was this? The only one among my classmates who 134 I r e n e Aw r e t approached me, though she was quite patronizing, was a Belgian officer ’s spinster daughter. Of enormous dimensions and nicknamed “The Tank,”she too was an outsider. She also had strong opinions,for example , anyone who would contrast green...