We stayed in Basle where the international refugee organisation had a body called JOINT and we went to see them. As our fortnight permit was nearly expired JOINT organised for us to cross the border into France by bribing the Guards to be away from their post between midnight and two o’clock. And a whole bunch of us just walked across the border at one o’clock in the morning and then over into France with another JOINT representative waiting for our arrival.

Kurti age 15 dressed to kill in Tours

We all boarded the train and were taken straight to Paris to the main headquarters of JOINT. We were given new papers and were told that we should go to Tours which is some 200 kilometres from Paris. And that’s where we stayed for about fourteen months. I went to school and learned French. When the war broke out, we had to leave because it was a military airport and we were enemy aliens.

Tours is a beautiful little city on the Loire amongst the chateaux and I was enrolled at the Berlitz school so that I could learn French properly because my school French was virtually useless. Three or four months later I emerged speaking a reasonable French and was apprenticed to a dental mechanic.

The boss was a very active, youngish married man, and he had lots of girlfriends who visited him at the surgery. There was a red light above the surgery door, and we had strict instructions not to come in when the light was on. What went on we never knew, we just heard the noises and then five minutes later when the light went out, we rushed to the window to have a look what she was like as she left.

For the first three weeks in the job I wasn’t allowed to do anything except scraping the excess plaster off the plaster casts that were taken. This of course produced immense blisters on my hands but a few weeks later I actually was allowed start shaping wax forms of crowns and fillings. Another month later I actually was allowed to do my first cast in gold, 18 carat would you believe.

To get the gold to run into the cast, we heated the gold until it was really molten, but to get it down into the tiny hole in the cast, we attached it to a chain and spun it around so that centrifugal force made the gold run to where the wax had been boiled off. One time, the chain broke on me, while the gold was still molten, and there was gold everywhere. It was the biggest cleanup ever, and we retrieved maybe sixty percent of the gold.

Kurti outside the Prefecture in Tours.
That was when I worked for the dental mechanic.

In the meantime war had broken out and the Germans came through Belgium but the French were quite convinced the Maginot line will stop them. But of course they didn’t bother going through the Maginot line; they went around it. And before they knew where they were they were on French soil.

Tours had a rather important military airport and us being enemy aliens, so to speak, were asked to leave Tours and were told to go to Perigueux where the truffles come from.

Soon after our arrival in Tours my father had made friends with somebody in the Prefecture and this man managed to get my father a working permit which was something almost unheard of. And my father was still representing the Swiss firm. He finished up travelling throughout France, with an interpreter mind you, because he didn’t speak a word of French, and he travelled throughout the width and breadth of France managing to make a reasonable living, still selling the embroidery on commission. He was very lucky to have a work permit and a travel permit. Most refugees couldn’t travel and were stuck in one of the suburbs of Paris.

After several months of this we realised that the guy who was doing the translating for him was making more money than my father was. So it was decided that I should take his place and I finished up travelling around with my father, interpreting for him.

Well that was great. There was only one problem: my father, not understanding a word of French, always thought that I said the wrong thing to the customer, and he kept on kicking me under the table. So by the time we came back from our trips, my shins were black and blue. But all this came to a sudden end when war broke out.

On to Perigueux. Soon after our arrival my father found a nice little cottage of which we had the top floor, facing a big park. And we settled down to a new life again. By that time my French was almost fluent, almost perfect, and I was enrolled in the local high school, where I finished more than a full term speaking only French. In the meantime the war wasn’t going so well for the French, so the French Government decided to intern all enemy aliens. And unfortunately my father was one of them. My parents had friends, also a Viennese couple called Blau, who had a son Eric. He was twenty six, an engineer, who was working up north for the French munitions. He was running a factory making shells for guns but they were of a different calibre and he tried to convince them they would not work. That didn’t make him the most popular boy in the world, since the factory made more money out of doing it wrong.

On the seventeenth of June 1940, Eric turned up, telling us that the Germans were 18 miles away from Perigueux. He was going to try the next morning to try to get down south to the Spanish border and see if he could get across into Spain. When my mother heard this she begged him to take me with him. The German army was only sixty miles away from us then. I never gave leaving my parents a thought at the time – if the house is burning you don’t think twice about it, you get out. So the next morning the two of us hopped on our bikes and pedaled away with our rucksacks on our backs. It didn’t take us long to realise that pedal power wasn’t fast enough so we ditched our bikes and started hitching rides. Short pieces by train, some pieces by trucks and we finished up in Bordeaux. And we spent the night waiting for more transport.

To cut a long story short, we finished up in Bayonne about 11 o’clock the next morning, and that was only 25 miles from the Spanish border. And, after all, that’s where we were trying to get to.

We decided to split up, each of us going to find out what the possibilities were of getting over the border into Spain. However, while I was sitting in the town square which was right on the harbour, I saw a ship, the Trzat, being loaded by sailors carrying sacks of potatoes. One of the sailors told me that it was a coal steamer going to Cardiff. Well, that was just what I was looking for. I grabbed a bag of potatoes, climbed up the gangplank and never came off again.

That was the last I saw Eric Blau, although my parents heard that he made it over the Pyrenees and ended up spending the war in Morocco. He came back to his parents, but he was a good looking boy and popular with the women, and he ended up getting stabbed to death by a jealous husband. A sad ending for someone who survived the war!