VISIT to a DOOMED OCEAN LINER
At the outset of WW II the world’s most beautiful and largest ocean liner, France’s Normandie, lay stranded in New York harbor. France had fallen to the Nazis in spring 1940. With war as justification the U.S confiscated her. One morning not long after that my mother’s younger sister Belle and I roamed that beauty stem to stern as she floated vacant in her Hudson River Berth. It was a privilege few would ever have.
Early in 1942, well after our visit, the Normandie became a U.S citizen; renamed Lafayette. Catastrophe struck as she was being re-outfitted to become a troopship. She burned and capsized in New York Harbor. Newspaper photographs of the wounded ship show her on her side, half submerged. The public soon identified the disaster as sabotage. But during our visit on a fine spring day in 1940 the Normandie was still gloriously pristine.
Belle was the family glamour girl, its only adventurer. Picture a flapper now grown up. She was five when my grandfather moved the family from South Africa to Scranton, Pennsylvania where she and my mother grew up. Educated at Radcliffe, a pert sophisticated redhead, she was the only family member, male or female, afforded a college education. By 1940 she had already seen more of the world than most of Americans. Through to old age she never discarded her South Africanized English accent. Nor her henna assisted hair coloring. They served her well throughout her life.
About a year before she took me to visit the Normandie Aunt Belle, who had been living, working (and loving) in Greece returned home and joined forces with my mother, my grandmother and me. It was soon after the outset of WW II. She had wisely fled Europe. At the time my long divorced mother and I were living in a tiny garret apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. My grandfather had just died. I was 14 and about to begin High School. It was the right time for my mother without a dime to her name, my newly widowed grandmother, and Belle on the run to consolidate under one roof. They did so in an apartment in Bensonhurst, another Brooklyn neighborhood. I tagged along.
For several years before she joined us, Aunt Belle had been living in Greece. She was working there with a Greek based German archaeologist, Gabriel Welter, employed by the Museum of Berlin. They had met by chance on a Mediterranean vacation cruise. Although she knew nothing then of archeology, he had asked her to come and work for him. She did so eagerly. They fell in love. He built her a home on Aegina near his own. The war arrived. As an American, and Jewish at that, she could not remain as the German war machine marched through Europe. The parting must have been wrenching. Although none of our family ever met Dr. Welter, the photo Belle kept with her was impressive - a handsome man with a full red beard. Serious. Wise. But the last time she saw him he was a diminished. Just after the European phase of WW II ended Belle learned that he was in interred in an American prison hospital in Greece. She returned to be with him. He lay there ill and emaciated. He was not only ill but accused of having been a German spy. She refused ever to believe this. He died in that bed. Although she remained adventuresome throughout a long and successful life she never found his equal; never married despite numerous suitors.
Our new family assembly in Brooklyn was an important new beginning for me and for her. It was a time of change for everybody. The world had grown smaller and more dangerous. Also at an end for my mother and me were years of gypsy-like moving from one location to another. Belle became seriously embroiled in the war effort. Her English accent and petite good looks were assets that brought her ultimately to a diplomatic career. Childless then and thereafter, she channeled her maternal instincts through me. She came to look upon me as a son. A notion that persisted well into my adulthood.
So, having returned on the run, she became my second mother until I joined the Army Air Corps in 1943. Her interest in my teen age conduct was sometimes irritating. More than my own mother, she focused on my looks and well being. My hair and eyesight became grave concerns. She always called me Bobby. I can still hear one of her pet obsessions. It would go “Bobby honey, you’ve got to get that hair out of your eyes. If you don’t you are sure to end up cross-eyed.” I remained fond of her despite her nagging. She involved me in many interesting, sometimes irritating, events during her life. The Normandie visit was the first.
Upon her return, penniless, to the United States Aunt Belle went to work for the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish organization assisting arriving refugees. Her job required her to meet refugee laden ships and deal with the unfortunate arrivals lucky enough to reach America. She developed waterfront connections. About a year after we set up our new household she proposed a daytime excursion. Wouldn't I like to see the Normandie? I had no idea of its particular appeal. But a trip to Manhattan in her tow and a day away from school were sufficient reasons.
I wasn't innocent of the conflagration around us. Young and old alike hungered for the daily front line reports. New Yorkers, and presumably the rest of the nation, were horrified by the attacks on London, the fall of France, the plight of the Jews. But my friends and I were still kids. School and street play were close, danger a distant anxiety. Despite the worrisome background noise I was not yet thinking of my own need to serve. A little later, after 1941, it became really serious. The older boys prepared to be drafted. The world was changing and would never be the same. At the time she proposed our Normandie trip the “great depression” remained the normal landscape. We were poor but comfortable. We went about our daily business.
I believe my future failures and successes were foretold by my performance in our innocent street games. Stickball. I was terrible. Hit a ball with a broomstick bat, run the bases consisting of chalk squares and round iron sewer caps. Almost never able to strike the rubber ball I ran few bases. I was a stickball failure. I was somewhat better at distance throwing. Players faced each other in empty lots on opposing sides of the street. The object: Force the opponent back by throwing a football as far as possible behind him. He must throw in turn from the landing spot. Persistence and stubbornness were big plusses. Accuracy not required. I was one of the more successful combatants. Another, the great spotting game. Several of us, any sex, gather in front of the corner liquor store window. A player describes a label on one of the hundreds of displayed bottles. The person finding the correct bottle wins. My eyes did not follow a moving ball well but they excelled here. I was often first to locate the right bottle.
Luxuries were unexpected; unusual; our yearnings and aspirations limited. Most of us were all in the same boat.
The Normandie, however, was boat of a different color. When my aunt and I arrived at its pier I was unprepared for the spectacular view of a world unknown to me. Recently I looked up some data about the Normandie. Huge, it was more than 1000 feet long and 18 stories high. After coming aboard it loomed even larger in its ghostlike immensity. Instead of a crew of 1300 and the more than 1900 passengers it was virtually empty. That day, not even the custodians and workmen were visible. I was used to bustling New York neighborhood. The empty silence in this huge beached whale was awesome. And it was beautiful.
As we moved from salon to dining room, along the corridors, down the sprawling stairs, our steps echoed behind us. Each new area seemed larger than the enormous auditorium at my school. The spaces were all quieter than the schoolroom run by Miss Costa, my fearsome Spanish teacher who hated extraneous noise so much she forbade even the snap of a loose-leaf binder in her presence. The opulent public rooms were massive and high ceilinged, the main dining room towered four stories to its top.
It wasn’t only the massive dimensions or the eerie silence. The ship’s furnishings and wall coverings were breathtakingly splendid; more vibrant than any spring garden. Though I didn’t know it then, France, a nation of masterful high style, had built this ship to be a design show place. As I wondered about with my aunt, gawking at the grand interiors, I was overwhelmed by the beautiful decorations, at the massively applied scenes and colors jumping at us. It was my first museum, my indoctrination into graphic art.
We spent more than an hour roaming the ship, totally alone. I will never forget the special treat bestowed by a loving aunt. I will never forget the overpowering beauty of that vessel. I did not know how privileged I was to visit a thing of beauty soon to be filled with harbor mud.
As we walked mid-town from the Normandie, Belle led me to the Times Square station. I was to take myself home alone. She needed to go to work. Simple enough. Walk down the stairs and take the BMT West End back to 86th Street in Brooklyn. She hugged me and left. But she hadn't checked whether I had the necessary five cents fare. I didn’t. My panic subsided quickly. Suppressing my fear of authority, I approached a policeman. He wasn't much taller than I. But beneath the bulk of his buttoned to the neck blue coat he seemed twice my size. Huge and totally dependable. I understood then why the police were known as “New York’s Finest”. I expected a grilling. Instead he took a nickel from his pocket. His words must have been something like: “You’re in luck son; I just happened to rob my son’s piggy bank this morning. This will get you there. Take care.” I certainly didn’t believe the bank yarn but I've never forgotten it. Perhaps he was thinking Robin Hood.
Fire and capsizing destroyed the Normandie about a year after our visit. It was clearly suspicious. The House of Representatives Naval Affairs Committee conducted an investigation. Anticipating an ultimate finding of treachery, the committee issued an interim statement indicating that they thought it would have been “comparatively simple to have sabotaged her.” However, a month later the final report attributed the burning and capsizing to “gross negligence”. A workman’s accident resulted, fortunately, in only one death, but to total loss of the Normandie. So the reality was different. It was not an act of war.
Despite the facts, the symbolic implications of the Normandie’s demise were inescapable. The committee continued to identify the sinking with Germany’s war effort even as it acknowledged it wasn’t. According to a later New York Times article, the committee report observed that the Normandie would have ultimately been sabotaged because the ship was vulnerable, and that “the saboteurs perhaps had not acted only because they had felt the time was not yet ‘ripe’”. Indeed, as I remember it, my family and friends ignored the report. We all saw it as sabotage. The report never intruded on my own conviction that it was a sneak act of war. I did not discard that view until I looked back to write this so many years later. It was a useful error at the time.
Here's a link to a YouTube item on the Normandie.
No comments:
Post a Comment