Closely Watched Trains

Whenever Victor Brombert looks at Monet’s painting of the Saint-Lazare station in Paris, he sees himself climbing onto a train, tennis racket in hand, elated by the prospect of a trip to the seaside, the dreaded school examinations over. Years later, he stayed awake all night on the sleeper between Pisa and Paris, perhaps to perpetuate the child in him who did not want to miss one instant of the joy of traveling.

“At the beginning was the train,” is how Brombert opens his striking memoir, “Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth.” From the outset, the reader learns that Brombert has always been on one or another of them. He even wishes he had been born on one. His memory leads continuously toward trains; he views his life as a shuttle between past and present.

He sees himself as a boy in Nice, running on the Promenade des Anglais, pretending to be a locomotive, imitating its sounds, moving his forearms to imitate the driving rods of the wheels. And then he recalls that he was not at school that day because of the death of his little sister. On another occasion, he remembers traveling with his father when their train made a stopover in Cologne. In search of a glass of beer, his father went to the station buffet, and Brombert went with him. They suddenly felt uncomfortable as they became aware of the hostile Germanic faces and uniforms that surrounded them. His father downed his glass, and they hurried back to their train. It was at this moment that he became aware of the oppressive atmosphere of the early 1930s. As a child, he loved looking at old photographs of World War I and envied the French soldiers, crowded into their trains, enthusiastically waving their flags as they left for the trenches. The Jewish child could not then know, nor could his parents, who disapproved of such a young boy looking at the photographs, that there would be other trains that would take people to the terminal stations of Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz.

Proust, too, saw the idea of travel as a way to unlock memory, as a voyage in reverse, going over the routes that have been covered before. Like Proust, Brombert takes imaginary journeys. He watches a train leave a station and reads the signs that spell out its destinations. He tells us that, even now, as he is trying to sleep, he hears a sinister locomotive whistle. This is the whistle that is dimly heard through the Shanghai fog by the wounded prisoners in Andre Malraux’s novel “Man’s Fate.” They know that they are about to be thrown alive into the boiler of the locomotive. Malraux’s whistle has a resonance for Brombert, as he reflects on all that has happened and on all from which he has been spared.

For salvation, too, came on trains: There was the night train from Leipzig into Switzerland where Nazi agents were looking for Jews, and the conductor played dumb as Brombert and his parents made their way to France. Or there was the train that took him and his parents from the Spanish frontier to Madrid on their way to America. His parents had left Moscow after the revolution of 1917 and settled in Germany. They left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 and settled in Paris. In July 1941, they escaped from Vichy France to Spain, from where a banana boat, overcrowded with refugees, took them to the United States.

Brombert was 9 when his family settled in Paris. His language became French, although his parents and other relatives made sure that he did not forget his Russian. His memoirs describing his life in France tell the stories that one expects: days at the lycee, early sentimental attachments, sexual initiations, literary appreciations, the songs of Maurice Chevalier, Astaire and Rogers at the cinema. But they also tell us much more.

We get to discover Paris through the eyes of a boy. We ride enthusiastically on the Metro and learn the names of stations that are laden with history. There is Dupleix (the French colonial administrator in India), there is the scientist Pasteur and the historian Edgar Quinet.

This is a beautifully written book. It has an elegance and is never a mere recording of what happened in France between 1933 and 1941. The Brombert family was wealthy and somehow remained wealthy even as the years darkened. As the war began, they left Paris for a house in Deauville and a chateau in the neighboring Normandy countryside. They had money with which to bribe officials so that they could escape to America. They were also cultured and interesting. Brombert’s mother, a champion bridge player who relished parallels between life and art, compared Mussolini’s declaration of war on a defeated France to the La Fontaine fable in which the donkey appears at the last moment to insult and kick the dying lion. His father, the tough businessman who loves Russian poetry and songs, explains to his son, who insists that he is French and wants to stay in France, how the complexities of life in Vichy France have to be understood in terms of the upheavals of the Revolution and the Terror.

It is less in the tone of reminiscence and more in that of a history that Brombert tells of June 8, 1944, two days after D-day, when as a 21-year-old member of the U.S. Army intelligence team assigned to an armored division, he landed on Omaha beach in Normandy. Brombert took part in the battles of Saint-Lo and the so-called “Falaise pocket,” the fighting in the Hurtgen Forest, the resistance to the German attack in Alsace. American losses were enormous; whole units were decimated.

The intensity of the experience is such that Brombert’s memories lack in continuity. But he tells his story neatly and directly. After the devastation of the fighting, there were the horrors of discovering the camps, the frustrations of trying to help the refugees and the German people. As an intelligence officer, he tried to find out everything that he could about the Nazis. Although he didn’t realize it at the time, as he took note of his discoveries, he was embarking on the occupation that would win him fame as an authority on French literature and as a distinguished university professor.

But first there had to be another beginning. In January 1946, the ex-soldier was on the train from Boston to New York when it stopped for a long time at New Haven, Conn. Brombert thought there was a university there. He got off the train as it was about to pull out of the station, became a student at Yale and stayed there for 25 years. It was because he had gotten off the train on impulse. It was something he had never done before.