Getting Married

In today's excerpt Yvonne Salomon explains how she met her future husband while also remembering that first very long boat trip.
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(How did you meet your husband?)

My husband is from the same town, from Sarreguemines. He had left in 1928 to El Salvador, being employed by an acquaintance of his mother. The son of the shamas from the community (Enrique Weill) was already there, and he was one year younger. So my husband thought that if Enrique can make it, he will be able to do it, too. Because El Salvador was really an unknown place. Before plane traveling, for their vacations, they had to accumulate one month a year for four years in order to get four months. It took almost one month to travel one way, another month back. They had two months vacation every four years. My husband came back in ’34. I hadn’t known him before. He was a friend of my cousins. So I met him, but we met a little more seriously in ’38. Finally we decided to get married, and his mother was very sick with cancer. She as a matter of fact she passed away the day his telegram arrived that he had arrived safely in El Salvador.

He was not going to come back to France for the wedding. We were going to be married in El Salvador. So we wanted to make—my parents asked to make the engagement ceremony, and we made it. My cousin, who is a chazzan, made the prayers and the design on the floor. I don’t know if you know it. For the engagement, you make a big circle with two Hebrew letters with clay on the floor. The two people to be engaged stand on that. He says some prayers and declared that we were engaged to be married. We did that in George’s mother’s bedroom. She couldn’t get up any more. It was a very moving ceremony. Then we had a big luncheon at my parents’ place.

(What did they think of your husband-to-be? What did your parents think?)

They would have preferred maybe somebody —who was more in their crowd. But the political situation being what it was, they were almost happy to see me go. That was in ’38, the 30th of July, can you imagine? The war broke out on the 3rd of September, 1939.
Then Evelyn (Frenkel's) parents had decided that the situation was too bad to leave their daughter in Europe, and they wanted her to come back home. So their aunt got together with us, seeing when I was going to leave for El Salvador, and they booked the reservation for Evelyn on the same boat. Her aunt and my mother took us to the boat. I see them both, and the boat going slooowly away—that was something so nerve-wracking, you know? In the plane it’s fast. But in a boat, it’s so slow. It took about half an hour to be out of sight.

(And how old were you?)

Twenty-two. And Evelyn was seventeen. So we went on a nonstop trip for two weeks, three weeks, to Panama. In Panama we went aboard and did a lot of shopping, things like that. We stopped in Venezuela, one port, and there we were received by big shots from the city. Then going up, on the Pacific side—

(“Big shots from the city”? Who?)

Well, people from the town hall, things like that. I don’t remember who that was.

(It wasn’t people from the Jewish community?)

No, no, it had nothing to do with it. That was the Transat, the French Transatlantic Company, which goes from Le Havre through Panama and up all the way to Vancouver.
Then we stopped—we didn’t stop at other places until we reached the first one in Salvador, Cutuco. I was in the swimming pool, and Evelyn comes running! “Yvonne, Papa et Georges sont la— are here!” They had rented a car and they drove, it took them, I believe, twenty hours, something like that, from San Salvador to Cutuco. There were no roads in the republic at that time. They were in a small boat—because there were no ports in El Salvador. The boats could not come in all the way. People had to disembark into a small boat and be on the not-so-well-named “Pacific,” jumping from wave to wave.

So they arrived. OK. Now one more day on the sea and we arrived at La Libertad, the port of El Salvador. The boat people had put the staircase on the side of the boat, and there were two sailors taking one person at a time into a little boat, two people and three sailors at a time. Thank God we were no more than twenty aboard. They grabbed—when I arrived there, each sailor grabbed me on each side and they ran down! I never put my foot down. They carried me. They ran down, and then it was calculated: the big boat was going like that, and the small boat was going like that. And we had to be on the same level, to jump into the—I just closed my eyes. OK. We landed, and they ran up to get Evelyn. Same thing. Evelyn was screaming her head off. They put her in the same small boat. Then we bounced around, I don’t know, it must have taken about ten minutes. To me it was like ten hours.

(So they walked you off the—when you went down some stairs in another boat?)

In the little one, yes, they walked us—they carried us! Two big sailors. I didn’t put my foot down. I cannot run down a staircase, especially not when the boat goes like that all the time. It was the 14th of July, France’s national holiday. Waiting there at the port were my two cousins, Fred and André Joseph, who were also Evelyn’s cousins. They were there in their smoking, tuxedos. They were going to the Embassy to the reception for the 14th of July. It was very formal at that time. You went in the very best dresses. Men wore all their decorations and things like that. It was very formal. But that we didn’t know yet.

When we arrived at the port, we saw a wall, maybe four houses….that was the port. That’s all. Up there we saw something with string coming down. The boat got under that thing with the string. One of the sailors pulled it open, and the other one grabbed one of us, pushed us in. There were two little benches. The string, a bag made of cord. Evelyn sat on one, I sat on the other. They closed that thing, and they pulled us up by a machine, like a pail of sand.

(You were in a basket, it sounds like?)

That was the most awful thing! And that thing was—rr-rr-r-rrr! Going like mad! Evelyn was screaming. She didn't stopped screaming until we arrived in Salvador. And she said, “Never again I’ll set foot in that country!” OK. It was raining like mad. In July it rains very often. It was raining, pouring. We didn’t see in front of the car, driving up to San Salvador. It was the most horrendous thing!

Then my cousins had invited me to stay with them until the wedding day, because it was during the nine days between—I forget all the names--Tisha b’Av and—so we had to wait about two weeks. My parents said, “No, you’re not going to stay at your cousins’. There is no woman in the house.” Big deal. So Georges’ boss was there with his wife and their oldest daughter, and there was a baby. They invited me to stay with them.

(Who was that? What’s the last name?)

Simon. Luciano Simon. I stayed with them. Then there was no synagogue. My cousins and Georges had checked, looked around what they could find, and finally Mrs. Mugdan offered us to have the ceremony at her place.

(Paquita?)

Paquita Mugdan. I see you are aware of the people there. Your grandmother and she were good friends. So that was on the 14th of July, and on the 30th we are married. Then we left for Guatemala. Oh! Georges’ boss was a very headstrong man. He was against everything and everybody. Nobody was kosher enough. He didn’t know that much about kashrut or whatever, but he felt as if he was the Pope of the Jews. He said no, he is not going to that dinner, he doesn’t stay for the lunch at Mrs. Mugdan’s. “That’s not even kosher.” Mrs. Mugdan was strictly kosher. “We should make believe we are eating with them and then we should disappear and go home and have lunch.” His wife would have a special luncheon for us. I thought that was horrendous, after having prepared so much. And anyway, we had to do it.

(You had to do it?)

Yes, we had to do it. Georges said, “He’s the boss. I cannot say no.”

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.