Helene Salomon: Part I

Helene sat down with me late one night in San Salvador and told me about her childhood, her French background, her desire to one day permanently return to El Salvador.

In this first excerpt, Helene discusses her grandparents and parents.

All questions in parentheses are mine.
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My father was born in a place called St. Avold, a town ten minutes away from my mother’s place of birth in Sarreguemines. It was on the French/German border in Lorraine, not in Alsace. It was in the Lorraine which was part of Alsace-Lorraine. Enrique Weill was also from there. My mother grew up being close to Andre Joseph (husband to Soeurette Joseph and fellow member of the Comunidad Israelita de El Salvador), her first cousin…in fact, his sister Alice, who was very close to my mother, actually lived some time with my grandparents, Claire and Camille Joseph.

(How did they meet?)

My grandparents lived in Sarreguemines. My father had come to El Salvador in 1928. Then in ’34, when I guess he was starting to think of settling down, was in Europe with his good friend who happened to be Andres Joseph, my mother’s cousin. Andres Joseph always went to say hello to my grandparents when he came from Salvador. My grandfather was his uncle. My grandfather Camille Joseph was the brother of Paul Joseph, Andres’s father.

So I guess he must have just decided to go and say hello to his uncle and aunt and took my father with him.

(So that’s how they met. What year was that?)

1934. Six years after he had left for the first time in 1928. But then my father went again in 1938,

(They were in Europe in 1938?)

1938. He went to see his mother, who died shortly thereafter. My grandmother’s name was Mathilde Weil, with one “l”, though no relation the Weill’s from Salvador, with 2 L’s, who happened to also come from Sarreguemines. My grandmother had come from Strasbourg, had six children and was a widow. My grandfather Samuel Salomon died on the Russian front in 1916, when my father was only 8. This sort of marked his life. I understand they really struggled without a breadwinner.

(So they were in France in 1938. Did he propose to her right then, or it took a while?)

I don’t know whether they became engaged right away. You’ll have to check that with my mother. But if my memory serves me, they wrote each other and became engaged, then got married on July 30th of 1939.

(So they were married in France or here?)

No. By that time things were getting rough in France, and he asked my mother to come down to El Salvador where they got married. . She came on the boat at the time with Evelyn (Frenkel) Sanders. I always thought that was very admirable: my mother came by herself to this strange land, not married yet. And she lived at the place of Luciano Simon and Lenny Simon. Luciano Simon was the man that my father had come to work for. He had a textile business. And he had hired both my father and Enrique Weill to work for him.. So my mother stayed there. There was a wedding to which the whole Jewish community was invited. The wedding took place in Mrs. Mugdan’s house, which may have been serving as a synagogue at the time.

(What happened to her family?)

My grandparents made several attempts to leave Sarreguemines. They would hear that the Germans were coming and would decide to leave…once even told my mother to leave with her very close friend Rene Meyer to a place near Grenoble in France. Then it turned out not to be so serious, and she ended coming back to Sarreguemines. Ultimately, after my mother had gone to Salvador, they did leave and went to a place in the Limousin in France. My grandmother who didn’t look particularly Jewish and also their last name (Joseph) could pass for “not necessarily” Jewish. They apparently rented a room at a house where my grandfather appeared to be the gardener and she was supposed to be the cook. They made a deal with a local priest to hide their identity and stayed there the entire war. Meanwhile, as of 1939 my mother really was out of touch with them for the entire period of the war. She had all her three children without ever being able to visit her parents. Sometimes they didn’t know about each other for several months at a time.

There’s a story about the way they communicated; there was this man from Sarreguemines, Salomon Mueller, who used to do business in Switzerland. He would ask my grandparents to write post cards to him, then he would cut out the addressee’s name and the postmark along with my grandmother’s signature. Then he would send the pieces of postcards as though they were meant for a stamp collection to Switzerland and mail them to Andres Joseph. Thus when Andres got the stamps, then my mother (and others) could see that their relatives had written on such and such a date and would know that they were still alive. It’s quite a story… I think. They both survived the war, and my grandfather who was a butcher went back to Sarreguemines where his house and business place had been occupied by neighbors, Christians-the Schmitts. Mr. Schmitt was a butcher and had moved into my grandfather’s place of business, and when they came back to Sarreguemines, he said, “You know, we’ve been using your things and your house for this amount of time, now please come and take it back. My grandfather didn’t want to work anymore. Mr. Schmitt however even offered to pay rent retroactively for the time he had occupied the house during the war. Another non-Jew who was very kind to them. So my grandparents stayed in Sarreguemines, moved up to the third floor.
They both died there.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.