Angers: First 2 Days

I’m currently staying in Angers, in Maine-et-Loire, not far west of Tours.  It’s Erev-Quatorze-Juillet right now, and raining very, very hard outside.  There is supposed to be a fireworks show tonight, to celebrate July 14th (Bastille Day), but I'm not certain how much attendance there will be (I'm not planning on standing outside -- not when it's like this).

Yesterday, I took the noon train from Paris, and, predictably, fell asleep (perhaps I need to start sleeping more at night?).  When I occasionally did open my eyes, and they weren't glued to my Kindle, I saw a very grey, cloudy sky outside, and I was all braced for storms.  It was drizzling when I arrived, and I checked into a hotel -- that's right, a real two-star hotel, not a youth hostel -- dropped my bags off, and walked to the departmental archives of Maine-et-Loire, and only was lost about 30 minutes on the one-kilometer walk (which isn't bad, for me).  I registered, and found that the archives are much larger, more extensive, cleaner, higher-tech, better-staffed, and more comfortable than those at Tours.  I also have free Wi-Fi in the reading room.

Why am I here?  There are two reasons.  The first is that I hope that by studying a neighboring region in France to Indre-et-Loire, I will better be able to evaluate what was typical (when talking about the Holocaust, "typical" is a better word than "normal") in central France, 1940-1945.  This is easy: a local historian has already published a book on the Jews of Maine-et-Loire in this time period, L’eradication tranquille : Le destin des Juifs en Anjou (1940-1944), or in English, Calm Eradication: the Fate of the Jews in Anjou (1940-1944).  There seem to be many similarities, already, between Indre-et-Loire and Maine-et-Loire.  People resisted a lot less than I had expected, in both instances.

But before I begin to wax morbid, I'll get to the second reason why I'm in Angers, instead of, say, Orleans, studying the prefecture of Loiret, which in some ways would have made a better comparative study.  Do you remember the letter from the German soldier to the French woman from the Fourth of July?  The woman's address was in this prefecture, and I had an appointment today at 2:30 pm today at the City Hall, with an archivist whose name I will not disclose, because I received information to which I have no legal access.

I thought that that would get your attention: only parts of the marital registers are fully free and open to the public: others are only released 75 years after the events occur.

The archivist and I opened the register to "Paillard," and found that a woman named Christiane Paillard had indeed been married on August 8th, 1946.  This sounded promising.  

The man she married, however, was named Edward Ciclek.

The first thing I noticed about this name was that it was not "Fritz."  The second think I noticed was that it was not French, either: the French spelling of Edward is "Edouard."  So my initial thought, that the German soldier had died or disappeared, and that Christiane had immediately married a local man, was not necessarily true.

Then the archivist opened the tome of the registers which I'm legally not allowed to see, because the marriage occurred only 66 years ago, as of a month from now.  It included details about the couple.  The archivist thought that my French was a lot worse than it is, and opened the volume widely enough for me to see that Edward Ciclek was of Polish nationality, 26 years old, and a builder.  There was more information, but I didn't see it before the archivist closed the book.

The archivist then told me that when the French refer to the Germans generically, they sometimes call them les Fritz, or "The Fritzes," kind of the way Brits, Canadians, and southerners all call New Yorkers and New Englanders as "Yanks."  The name "Fritz," then, could have been a nickname, or an assumed name.  The marriage occurred in Segré, which is a village just to the west of Angers, in Maine-et-Loire.  I thanked the archivist in the City Hall, promised to send e-mails if I learned anything, and walked back to the departmental archives.

All the way there, in the pouring, miserable rain, I thought about possible solutions to this puzzle.  Was Fritz the same as Edward Ciclek?  The age is right, but the nationality is, seemingly, wrong, even assuming that Fritz was not the soldier's real name.  Here are three possibilities:

1) Fritz and Edward are different people.  Fritz never came back, or Christiane never loved him in the first place (remember, I only found a letter in which he described his love to her, but no corresponding response from her), and she therefore married another man, perhaps a Polish war refugee who wound up in France (there were a lot of them).

2) Edward Ciclek was a German born in Poland, or a Pole who was employed somehow in the Germany (more likely, because his name is not very German), and one way or another found himself in the German military in World War II, although not necessarily as a combatant.  When stationed in France, for some reason, he believed that he would be more sexually appealing to French women if they thought he was German, and thus pretended to be German, using "Fritz" as an assumed name.  To the French, he was just another soldier with an accent, and didn't notice that it was Polish, rather than German.  He didn't tell his future wife that he was really Polish until after the war was over, when he returned to France, in order to marry her.

3) Similar to above, but, lest the German officers find his letters, and court-martial him for playing around with French women, he used a code-name in his love letters.  The name "Fritz" was generic and bland and German enough that nobody would suspect him, but the Paillards would know exactly who had sent them the letter.  This would eliminate the otherwise silly and illogical element of deceit on the part of "Fritz."

Well, I'll try to figure things out next week.  In the meantime, I plan to explore Angers, which has a castle, a cathedral, and various gardens and monuments!

Hey, wait a minute, the sun is out, now!

Shabbat Shalom!

~JD

"'He bores the hell out of me!' Rumfoord replied boomingly.  'All he does in his sleep is quite and surrender and apologize and ask to be left alone.'  Rumfoord was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, the official Air Force Historian, a full professor, the author of twenty-six books, and multimillionaire since birth, and one of the great competitive sailors of all time.  His most popular book was about sex and strenuous athletics for men over sixty-five.  Now he quoted Theodore Roosevelt, whom he resembled a lot: 'I could carve a better man out of a banana'" (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, ch. 9).