Hortense Hueber, my mother

^{Hortense, Mulhouse, 1954}

November 16, 2020 was the fiftieth anniversary of my mother's death. I sent a few photos of her to my friends and family members. They wanted to know more about her...

somebody you never knew...

She was born August 27, 1923, a country-girl in Habsheim, a village in the South of Alsace, in the Haut-Rhin département, 8 km from Mulhouse and 25 km from Basel, Switzerland. She left school at fourteen, became an apprentice as a factory worker, first at the "Tissage," a small local factory in Habsheim, making lace underwear, then moved up to one of the large factories in Mulhouse, where she could take evening-courses in typing an stenography to became an office worker.

She had a beautiful light soprano voice and earned a stipend to study singing at the Mulhouse conservatory. Her first end-of-year examen piece was a lied by Schumann. A little before the exam date, the Germans invaded Alsace and her exam piece was forbidden. The lied (which was in German)* was on a poem by Heinrich Heine, who was Jewish. She never set foot in the conservatory again and scrapped her stipend. There was then a synagogue in Habsheim. All the Jews of Habsheim were arrested one night and deported to concentration camps.

She, was sent to a labor camp in the North of Bavaria, in Franconia, at Floss bei Weiden, near the Czech border, adjoining the concentration camp of Flossenbürg.

Besides the fact that she was a slave-laborer and was strictly confined to the camp, conditions were relatively mild: several hundred girls, mostly from Alsace, were made to do laundry, to repair and clean uniforms. There was plenty of physical exercice in the meadows and chorus singing. Although she had pratically no contact with the outside world, word got through even to them about what was happening in the concentration camps, and that "all the Jews" were being killed "in the East." From my earliest years, she cautioned me: if ever a German tells you that he didn’t know, don’t believe him!

Her father managed to have her brought back, dodging allied bombings, to Habsheim. She went to work as a typist for the German electricity company AEG in Mulhouse. Her boss was a German from Saxony, by the name of Walter Topf. She took pleasure in missspelling his name to “alter Topf” (“old pot,” in German), protesting that it was her typewriter that wouldn’t print the “W.” But she could do no wrong by him, and he kept promising that one day, he would show her the beautiful Saxon-Lands. For her 20th birthday, August 27th, 1943, she was offered a pot with a huge white hortensia. It was planted in the garden at Habsheim and was still thriving when I was a little girl. Believe me, she said, I have never had anything to do with a "Schwob" (a German, in Alsatian).

The Allies, with the Free French Forces, helped by the partisans, invaded the Southern tip of Alsace in November 1944 and liberated Mulhouse on the 20th, and alter Topf and the others were sent packing, but the front-line got stuck for weeks a few kilometers North of Habsheim, and became the site of bloody battles. Colonel Fabien, a famous partisan Communist hero, and the formerly partisan French Forces of the Interior (FFI) invested Habsheim and Hortense could finally fall in love, with a Frenchman and a Jew, one of the soldiers close to Fabien, François Horovitz, who had immigrated to Paris from Szombathély, Hungary, as a little boy with his mother. Colonel Fabien was killed in Habsheim on December 27 when the town-hall of Habsheim blew up (see Her brush with history). After the war, she went to Paris, staying with an aunt and cousins, joining up with François. He lived rue des Amandiers, near the Père-Lachaise cemetery. He taught her to sing "Le Temps des Cerises" and contributed to the improvement of her French, including Parisian "argot."

She stayed in Paris for almost two years. Then came back to Mulhouse, applied for a job at Agence Havas and was seduced on the spot by the boss, a married man, soon to be my father, Jules-Xavier Halbwachs. She became an advertising agent. Thanks to her stay in Paris, she knew French far better than most people in Habsheim and boys who had made it into the technical schools in Mulhouse would come to her in the evening to correct their homework for French. My father died at 61, when I was thirteen, she died nine years later, at 47, of cancer.

* It was Du bist wie eine Blume (here by Kiri te Kanawa).

^{In Chatellaion, 1956. Me, with hands in the sand.}

^{Majorca, 1961}

Her brush with history

French friends have asked me if I knew more about the death, on December 27, 1944 of Colonel Fabien, who has to his name a metro-station and a square in Paris, the location of Oscar Niemeyer's landmark building of the headquarters of the Communist Party (a building which Al liked a lot...).

I know nothing more about Colonel Fabien, but I know this about Commandant Duval, who was also there, with his lady-friend Capitaine Maggie. Duval shot a hare in the Hardt Forest, which was then the front-line, and he brought it to my grandmother, who made it into a Hasenpfeffer. My grandparents' house was 800 meters away from the edge of the forest. They were all sitting there eating the hasenpfeffer - my grandfather, my grandmother, Duval, Maggie, my mother, François Horovitz - when the town-hall blew up (about 500m away) killing Colonel Fabien and six others and injuring dozens. Had it not been for the hasenpfeffer, Duval, Maggie and François might well have been at the town hall, where there was a canteen. (Never pass up a chance at Alsatian gastronomy...)

Duval and Maggie came to visit us after the war, when I was a little girl. I remember them well, the occasion was very cheerful. Duval was wearing a brown suit, Maggie a "tailleur" with a fitted waist. She had beautiful curly hair, which she had let my grandfather manually de-lice during the war - how could he ever forget! I also remember my grandfather telling me that whenever Commandant Duval was at the house, there would be two Senegalese bodyguards with machine guns standing guard before the door. When you wanted to go out, they crossed their weapons to bar the way. There was also a Senegalese with a machine-gun guarding the outhouse. This is what has come down to me.

Until yesterday morning, when I did some research on the Net trying to find something on Commandant Duval, which at first did not look promising. But I got him. He was the sector chief for the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur FFI (partisans) for Briey, in Meurthe- et-Moselle, in Lorraine, north of Metz, and I found a whole chapter about their activities in a book by Pierre Préval, quickly downloaded from amazon, aptly named Sabotage et Guérilla. After France had been liberated, except for Alsace, he joined up with Colonel Fabien and came to Habsheim. Duval was his combat name, his real name, I discovered, was Jean Cosson and he was a judge in Briey. He ended up a counsellor at the Cour de Cassation in Paris, the highest judiciary instance in France. (8.3.1916-3.12.1993). His picture, below, is from his book Les Industriels de la Fraude Fiscale.

At the same time, also in Meurthe-et-Moselle, a little bit south of Cosson-Duval's home turf, at Hériménil, near Lunéville, south of Nancy, was staying Al (my husband, Alfred de Grazia). He was there when, four days after the townhall in Habsheim blew up, December 31, he and some tens of thousands of others were rudely put on the road in the middle of the night in a snowstorm by the German attack Nordwind, in the aftermath of the Offensive des Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge).

^{In the Résistance, "Commandant Duval"}

^{(8 mars 1916-3 décembre 1993)}

answer to a friend

Dear G.,

You know, after fifty years, the pain is gone, and the sadness - almost. I was grasping at this straw to have a pretext for "outing" her to my friends and loved ones, who never knew her... She raised me alone. In a way, we lived together as a "couple..." Strange to say, by her character and temperament, she resembled Al. I married my mother. (And he, with me, married his father, as he told me...)

I love the picture from Spain. It was taken by a photographer with an old wooden camera, who had set up folding screens in a village square in Majorca. I am absolutely certain that Al would have rushed to have his picture taken as a toreador, exactly like she did... For those who expressed interest, I made a little bio. But there is so much more to say about her...

By the way, her Jewish Hungarian-French lover’s name was François Horovitz and James Salter’s “real” name was James Horowitz... get it?

I am sorry to hear of your friend. She died of breast cancer. She told nobody about her cancer. I was the only one to know, for five years, between ages 17 and 22. She died on the eve of my 22nd birthday. Not that her death struck me down. Before I was 24, my first novel was published by one of the big French publishers, and I got a prize from the Académie Française and the medal of honor of my birth city of Mulhouse - of which I shall always be proud. But I always resented the burden that her cancer and her silence put onto me. The terrible thing with degenerative diseases, like cancer, and Alzheimer, and Parkinson’s etc. is that they spoil one’s memory of the deceased... it takes about fifty years to get over it, and few live long enough...

She died on the eve of my 22nd birthday. Believe it or not, she told me then: “Go, you are a child of luck...” meaning, that I was lucky to be so free at such a young age... She had read a lot of psychoanalytic literature. She did not have her "Certificat d'Etudes" but through me, as years passed, she read Dostoïevski, and Proust, and Joyce... Ulysses was familiar territory for her: she had had the same job in Mulhouse as Leopold Bloom had in Dublin: canevassing the city for advertisements. When she died, she was reading Günther Grass' Tin Drum. She didn't get to the end of it.

Today, I am turning 72. Here’s a picture of my breakfast. With champagne. She always, even as a little child, celebrated my birthday with champagne. And of course, I continued with Al. Marco once told me that champagne is the only wine you can drink for breakfast because it's not destroyed by coffee. I poured four flutes, for me, Al, Vladimir and her. And I drank for all four of them. You think that I am crazy? Of course I am! And a bit drunk, too... At every meal, I am facing the portrait of Anna Maria, Marco’s mother...

At 12:15, Florence brought me a little cake... so sweet of her...

I ate almost all of it. I didn’t blow out the candle, I let it go out by itself, feeding it with my breath... it seemed to go on forever, but then it went up in smoke, and that was it...

Guess what my blood pressure was this morning, doc? 124/66 with 80 ticks... Looks like I am not quite done yet...

Love, as always,

^{Basel, 1965}