‘Somehow we made it.’

Regine Nozice Archer knew the Nazi occupation of her homeland was over when she saw a Jeep with a German officer strapped spread eagle on the hood.

“Oh, it’s the Americans,” she remembered saying. “The joy we felt when the Americans came,” the now-94-year-old recalled.

Archer was only 15 when the Jewish girl, her sister and their parents fled their home in Liege, Belgium, in 1940 to escape the approaching Nazis.

The two sisters took refuge in a Catholic convent under fake names. Only the Mother Superior, her assistant and the priest knew their true identities. After two years of living with the nuns in Wavre, the girls were finally able to return home. The war was still going on.

Archer, who lives in Salem, told her story to two packed audiences at the Salem Museum last week. The first scheduled talk was so popular that more people than seating came, and she agreed to speak again the next night on March 19.

She said she and her family first fled their home against her mother’s protests after three days of “seeing people streaming down the street, on foot, on carts, older people in wheelbarrows.” They got on the last train leaving for Brussels, with German planes strafing the trains.

After the trains, the family walked, “hitting the ditches when planes would come. One day my sister landed next to a dead soldier,” she said.

Their goal was to make it to the sea in France and perhaps get a boat to escape. They stayed in Dunkirk in a nursing home until all the British were gone and the Germans came. “There were huge trucks with the names of a city on each. They wanted all the people from those cities and would take them home,” she said.

When the family got back to their house, it was still standing and the chicken her mother had been cooking when they left three weeks before was still in the pot. Her mother had not wanted to leave, she explained. “Sometimes you just have to listen to your mother.”

The Germans were in their town, though, and rationing was in effect. “If you didn’t have an ID card you didn’t get any stamps. There was little coffee, butter, very little potatoes. We had rutabagas. I won’t even look at a rutabaga today,” she confided, to the amusement of her audience Tuesday night.

If citizens showed any sign of resistance, they were put against a wall and shot. Curfews were in place between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Jewish people had to wear yellow stars stitched on their clothing. By 1942 Jewish children were not allowed to attend high school, when Regine was in her last year of preparatory. “I couldn’t get my diploma,” she explained.

“When the Germans started sending notices to people 16 and older to go to work in Germany, they were starting to pack up people to exterminate them,” she said.

A Catholic neighbor offered to go to the Mother Superior to ask if she would take Regine and her sister as students. The mayor of the town produced identity cards with false names for her and her sister, so the two went to the convent and their parents left for a friend’s hunting lodge and chalet in the woods.

In the convent school, the two Jewish sisters went to Mass every morning, she said. “I loved the Mass in Latin.” Archer learned how to type and took home economics which taught her to iron men’s shirts, starch the collars and starch linens.

At Easter and Christmas holidays when the convent school closed, the 16 and 17-year-old had to follow the rules of everyone else, “so we had to ‘go home’ to the woods with our parents.”

“The Germans would raid the trains we were riding, looking for people carrying extra food. We had to keep our cool while the German officers were standing there. I can assure you we were scared,” Archer said.

Later the Mother Superior told her the Americans had landed and she should go to be with her parents. She arranged for Archer to ride a supply truck to Huy, then ride her own bicycle to where her parents were hiding.

“I rode for seven hours,” Archer said, “to get to where my parents were.” It was September before the Americans got there, two months later. “German soldiers were in front of the farmhouse. They were in disarray, trying to get away.”

Archer and her family returned home, even though the Germans were “throwing buzz bombs.”

Although the sisters and their parents survived the bombs and the German occupation, many of her parents’ brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces did not, she said.

Archer had an offer to work as an interpreter to work at a depot which handled supplies for 100 companies. She became head of the typist pool, in during that job she met her future husband, James M. Archer Jr. They moved to the United States in 1947 and to the Roanoke Valley in 1959. They purchased Blue Ridge Beverage, a beer distribution company located in the Glenvar area.

They raised six children, all of whom work at Blue Ridge Beverage – and so does Regine Archer. She is chairman.

“The day I became an American citizen was the highlight of my life. I could vote. You all vote,” she told her listeners to do.

When one of the audience members asked her advice to young people, Archer said they should know, “Unfortunately, what I have been through is still going on all over the world.” And she added, “There are good and bad people everywhere.”

Because of the popularity of Archer’s talks, the local Facebook community group Salem 215 live-streamed her talk on March 19. “We had people in Florida, Greensboro and Virginia Beach watching it in addition to people in the Salem area,” said Salem 215’s Laura Tucker.

Archer did an oral history interview in 2006 about her German occupation experiences which is filed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Here is the link: https://collections. ushmm.org/search/catalog.