Читать книгу Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa...and Me - Tony Cointreau - Страница 11

ESCAPE

At the same time that my mother was fighting to get out of Europe with Richard and Lucy, my father, who had rejoined his battalion, had been captured by the invading army and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. The Germans marched his company all day and then stopped for the night in a cathedral, where one of the priests recognized him. The priest woke him in the middle of the night and offered to help him escape, disguised in clerical garb. My father later told us that the stupidest thing he ever did was to refuse, and say, “I cannot abandon my comrades.”

Conditions in the German prisoner-of-war camp in France were so inhumane that for most of my father’s life he found it impossible to speak about them. Years later, upon his death, I discovered a package filled with drawings he had made after his life as a prisoner-of-war—the only way he could express the horror of his existence during that time. Through winter, summer, spring, and fall, all that the prisoners-of-war had to protect them from the elements was a tent over their heads. There were no walls to keep out the cold, the snow, the rain, or the heat of summer.

Once the German officers began to trust him, they sent him to buy supplies in the nearest town. With each trip he gradually made friends with the shopkeepers. These simple people were the real heroes, who, at peril of their lives, offered to give him shelter and helped him to procure the papers he would need for a successful escape.

The time came when he knew if he didn’t escape that very day while he was in town, he might never find another opportunity. Instead of returning to camp as his captors expected, he put his plan into action and fled. The brave people he had befriended hid him on their farms before taking him to a safe place where he could board a train back to his family.

Obviously the trip home to Angers would be dangerous—very dangerous. German officers were on the train and exposure was a constant fear. At every station along the way, his false identification papers would be examined and German officers would scrutinize each passenger. When he first boarded the train, he held his breath while a German officer inspected his papers for an inordinately long time. He then gave my father a long hard look, and without comment handed the papers back to him and moved on to the next passenger. My father told me that this was the worst moment of his escape.

When he finally reached his family, they sent a coded telegram to my mother in New York informing her that not only was my father alive, he had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp. However, he was not content with having escaped German captivity—he now intended to find a way to rejoin his family in America.

After the initial shock wore off, Mother knew that even if my father were able to get to America, he would need permission to enter the country—an exceedingly difficult task for a French citizen in wartime. Mother told me later that it was all she thought about, twenty-four hours a day, no matter where she was or what she was doing. Even in a movie theater, when a new idea occurred to her of someone who could help them, she would run out to the nearest phone. Mother deluged every influential contact she had in Washington with letters and phone calls to get permission for my father to enter the country. She was determined that the same perseverance that had brought her and her child to the safety of America would also bring her husband home.

Her relentless efforts finally paid off, and she anxiously awaited the coded telegram from Angers, signed “Newman,” a curiously Jewish name they had chosen, to let her know when and how he would arrive.

My father, who had only traveled on the great ocean liners of that era, made this voyage to America on a vessel that was not much more than a Spanish fishing boat; the trip took twenty-two days. Upon his arrival in New York, Mother dismissed everyone in the house so they could be alone when she introduced him to his new son.

My father had had no idea that my mother was expecting another child when he was captured by the German army, but on the day I was born, he turned to a comrade in the prisoner-of-war camp and inexplicably announced, “Today I have another son.”

After his experiences in the prisoner-of-war camp, for the rest of his life Father had a fear of being in a large space, such as a church or a theater. Mother watched him carefully and never forced him to do anything he was uncomfortable with. I remember as a child seeing him break out into a cold sweat when he accompanied us to church on a religious holiday. Mother saw it too, and insisted that it was all right for him to stand in the back of the church near the exit, where she knew he would be more comfortable.

Many days, especially in the beginning, he could not even leave the house. It would sometimes take him hours to get up the courage to go out into the street. This complicated his life and made it difficult to go back to work.

Since World War II was still on when my father arrived in New York, his family in France suggested that he build a Cointreau factory in America. He soon found a site in Pennington, New Jersey, and built a plant there in 1942, the same year that he became an American citizen.

He spent the next twenty-four years as the president of Cointreau in America, manufacturing and promoting the liqueur in the United States, a country that he had always loved. This is why I had the good fortune to be brought up in New York City, in a country that I too have always loved.