The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler
Bruce Henderson
The story of young German Jews who escaped the Nazis, most often without their families, only to return a few years later to war-torn Europe as members of an elite secret U.S. Army unit.The young men who would become known as “The Ritchie Boys” arrived in America as “enemy aliens,” and although they were allowed to enlist in the U.S. military, they were distrusted by everyone. So, in effect, they became outsiders all over again. Until one day in 1942, when the Pentagon woke up to the incredible asset they had on their hands. These men knew the language, culture and psychology of the enemy better than any Americans and had the greatest motivation to fight Hitler’s anti-Semitic regime. The Pentagon came up with a top-secret plan to harness their expertise by training them in the art of prisoner interrogation. And so off they were sent, back into the belly of the beast, Jews returning to Nazi Germany to occupy the very front lines of battlefields across Europe. Many of them re-entered Europe on D-Day. Their mission, to extract vital intel from freshly-captured POWs about troop movements and command structures and so on, was hugely successful and provided key information that led to victory by the Allied forces.Meanwhile, few of these men knew what had happened to the families they left behind in Germany, families who had sacrificed to send them on to the safety of America. As the intelligence they gathered revealed increasingly horrific details about the Holocaust (most of which was only then beginning to come to light), they came to fear – and, in many cases, discovered – that the worst had befallen their own fathers and mothers and siblings.
Copyright (#ulink_2fd4dc54-97cf-5ab0-bfd7-f6e7a0f0bd25)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Previously published as Sons and Soldiers
First published in the United States by William Morrow in 2017
Copyright © Bruce Henderson 2017
Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey
Bruce Henderson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008180478
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008180492
Version: 2018-04-20
For them all
Contents
Cover (#uf58be796-f585-5c31-8a88-526bdcd349ab)
Title Page (#ud27d8bad-1e3d-59e5-a8b9-8e974d0e8ca0)
Copyright (#ulink_8cdb2736-a748-5e4c-90d6-361a307643f2)
Dedication (#u008ee3dc-fa5c-50e4-b1b0-144f7aa9df32)
Introduction (#ulink_b659ccae-e114-5257-8ecb-d1db7a050c3a)
Prologue: Germany 1938 (#ulink_1b38acd0-97af-579d-aa5a-2e84f576331c)
PART ONE (#ulink_738ee7de-7d42-5bb2-bf7d-ac3d06537252)
1. Saving the Children (#ulink_95c4490b-cc1e-5d6a-b1ec-58c065896b9b)
2. Escaping the Nazis (#ulink_9ec4d6ef-3398-5df6-9029-dd456bdf78d6)
3. A Place to Call Home (#ulink_08782b69-4f4c-5899-a4be-f1e2484e2902)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
4. Camp Ritchie (#litres_trial_promo)
5. Going Back (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Normandy (#litres_trial_promo)
7. The Breakout (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Holland (#litres_trial_promo)
9. The Forests (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Return to Deutschland (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
11. The Camps (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Denazification (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Going Home (#litres_trial_promo)
Dramatis Personae (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix: The Ritchie Boys (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Bruce Henderson (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
Introduction (#ulink_0be02ad5-57fe-568d-aff6-57ad46ce117d)
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he declared war on his country’s half million Jewish citizens. They were stripped of their most basic rights. Judaism was defined as a race, not a religion, and Jews were excluded from German citizenship. Restrictive edicts put in place by the Nazis affected Jews of all ages and in all walks of life, and even Jewish children were forced out of public schools. A harsh reality for German Jews was the growing realization that neither they nor their children had a future in the country. This fear culminated in November 1938 with Kristallnacht, known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were ransacked by Nazis. Nearly a hundred Jews were killed that night, and up to thirty thousand were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them died within weeks of their arrival. Though by then tens of thousands of German Jews had already immigrated to the United States, this was the final confirmation anyone required that Germany was no longer safe for Jews.
But departing meant leaving behind their ancestral home, relatives, friends, and life savings, and there was no guarantee they would be able to get past restrictive U.S. immigration quotas, and those in other countries, which made it difficult for more Jews to immigrate.
It was often impossible for an entire family to get out of Germany, and many faced an excruciating decision of splitting up, perhaps forever, when parents discovered they could get only one child, under age sixteen, to safety through the efforts of Jewish relief organizations in America and England. Who went and who stayed often meant the difference between life and death. By the time Germany went to war with the United States in 1941, the Nazis’ determination to create an Aryan Germany had switched from a policy of forced Jewish emigration to one of mass annihilation of those Jews still in the country and the millions of other Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied territories, solving what Hitler called the “Jewish problem.”
Many parents chose to send away their eldest sons so they might carry on the family name. Throughout Germany, there were heartbreaking farewells at railway stations and seaports where mothers and fathers said good-bye to their sons. Those German Jewish boys who arrived in America in the 1930s without their parents or siblings had to adapt to life in a new land on their own. Placed in the homes of distant relatives or foster families, they enrolled in public schools and immersed themselves in a language, culture, and world unfamiliar to them. But with the help of dedicated teachers and new friends, they quickly became Americanized, although still carrying the telltale accents from their homelands.
Yet they were served well by the Old World values instilled in them by their parents, emphasizing education and hard work. By the time the United States entered the war, these beloved sons who had been sent to America by their desperate families were stalwart young men who loved everything about U.S. democracy and freedom. They were also eager to return to Europe with the U.S. military to fight Hitler, not only out of patriotism for their new country, but their own personal vendetta as well. Unlike many other victims of the Nazis, the German Jewish refugees who became American soldiers had a means to help destroy the regime that had persecuted them and their families.
But there was a snag. When Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, German citizens residing in America were automatically declared “enemy aliens.” Even after Congress passed legislation allowing enemy aliens to be inducted into the army, some found themselves assigned to U.S. bases where they were mistrusted and their accents ridiculed by other GIs.
War planners in the Pentagon soon realized that the German Jews already in uniform knew the language, culture, and psychology of the enemy best and had the greatest motivation to defeat Hitler. By mid-1942, the army began molding them into a top secret, decisive force to help win the war in Europe. Over the next three years, thirty-one eight-week sessions were held at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, consisting of extensive classroom work and field training. The largest group of graduates was 1,985 German-born Jews trained to interrogate German POWs. They were fast-tracked for U.S. citizenship and sent overseas with all the frontline units fighting the Germans. The Ritchie Boys, as they came to be known, had no idea what they would find when they returned to Europe. Many still did not know what had happened to their families that had sent them away to safety in America.
The Ritchie Boys follows a group of Ritchie Boys from their boyhoods in Germany, to their escapes to America, to their return to Europe as U.S. soldiers to fight in a war that for them was intensely personal. They parachuted with the airborne forces on D-Day, landed at Omaha Beach, raced with Patton’s tanks across occupied France, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last desperate gamble to win the war. They then crossed into Germany with the Allied armies and were with the forces that entered the Nazi concentration camps, where they saw with their own eyes the horrors of the Holocaust. When the shooting finally ended, it was time for these sons to look for the families they had left behind.
To this day, the exploits and strategic importance of the Ritchie Boys are little known. They took part in every major battle and campaign of the war in Europe, collecting valuable tactical intelligence about enemy strength, troop movements, and defensive positions as well as enemy morale. In the course of the war, tens of thousands of newly captured Third Reich soldiers were interrogated by teams of these German Jewish soldiers. A classified postwar report by the army found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from Ritchie Boys. Yet there has been no publication of their operations or a complete roster of these men made public. As members of Military Intelligence, they were warned not to reveal their branch of the service or their training or duties during the war, and similar restrictions applied postwar to any documents, reports, or notes they may have retained. They held no reunions and were disinclined to join veterans’ organizations, as their German accents made them unwelcome in the usual circles of U.S. veterans. Their story is one of the last great untold sagas of World War II.
I am honored to tell the true story of these little-known heroes.
Bruce Henderson
Menlo Park, California
Prologue (#ulink_58986639-0a78-5e4a-878d-303931e09aa8)
GERMANY 1938 (#ulink_58986639-0a78-5e4a-878d-303931e09aa8)
Loud banging at the front door jolted Martin Selling out of a sound sleep. It was shortly before sunrise, November 10, 1938.
Martin lived in Lehrberg, in southeast Germany; he and his relatives were the only Jews living among the thousand other residents of this tranquil agricultural village. Over the course of the previous day, the Nazis had carried out a series of brutal, coordinated attacks against Jews across Germany. But Martin wasn’t aware of that yet.
This widespread campaign of malevolence would forever become known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” so called because of the mounds of glass shards from broken windows that littered the streets after thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and hospitals were looted and destroyed. The violence began after a teenage boy in Paris fatally shot a German embassy official—an act of retaliation, as his parents had been expelled from Germany, along with thousands of other Polish Jewish immigrants. Using the shooting in Paris as a pretext for a long-planned roundup of Jews, Nazi storm troopers took to the streets on the night of November 9.
Twenty-year-old Martin had recently returned to Lehrberg, his childhood home, from Munich, where he had been working as a tailor. Munich was the city in which Hitler rose to power and the national headquarters of the Nazi Party. Martin had seen Hitler numerous times; when his motorcade sped through the streets, everyone on the sidewalks was expected to stand at attention and snap a stiff right arm in a “Heil Hitler” salute. If Martin heard the Führer’s motorcade approaching, or even saw groups of marchers waving Nazi flags, he tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, slipping away or ducking into a side alley.
Earlier that year, Hitler had become aware that his motorcade regularly passed a large synagogue on its way to party headquarters. On the Führer’s orders, the congregation was given less than a day to remove its books and valuables; a few days later, the site was a newly paved parking lot. Martin’s boss, an older Jew, had finally seen enough. He fled to Italy, leaving Martin jobless and with no choice but to return home to Lehrberg.
The pounding on the front door did not stop but became louder and more menacing. By the time Martin reached the door it was in danger of being kicked in. He opened it to four storm troopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA), in matching brown shirts with red and black swastika armbands, who pushed him aside and rushed in, though at six foot two Martin towered over them.
Without giving a reason, the SA men searched the house—helping themselves to an expensive camera—then took Martin into custody along with his uncle, Julius Laub, who had been managing the family’s textile store next door since his sister, Ida—Martin’s widowed mother—passed away two years before. She had run the store following the death of Martin’s father from a heart attack fifteen years earlier. The SA men also arrested the housekeeper, the only other resident in the house. At the same time, other SA men were picking up Martin’s aunt Gitta and her three children, who lived nearby.
They were all driven five miles to an outdoor sports arena in the town of Ansbach, where they joined sixty other Jewish men, women, and children. The terrified group huddled in the bleachers for the rest of the icy night, shivering from fear and the chill of the blustery winds. Conversing softly with the others, Martin learned that the synagogue in Ansbach had been set ablaze, local Jewish homes vandalized, and Jewish men beaten. When Martin and some others asked the SA men what was going to happen next, they didn’t seem to know. They had only been ordered to arrest all the local Jews.
The following afternoon, at about 3 P.M., the women and children, as well as men over the age of fifty-five, were released without explanation. Martin, his uncle, and about fifteen other men remained in custody. They were marched to the local prison, an old, primitive structure, and locked up in a single cell. There was no running water or toilet—only a metal “honey bucket”—and the food was primitive and scarce. After two days in these cramped quarters, they were sent to Nuremberg, thirty miles away.
The Nuremberg district prison was filled nearly to capacity. Several hundred Sudeten Germans, ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, had also been arrested after raising opposition to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, where three million ethnic Germans lived, two months earlier. The local Jews picked up during Kristallnacht—about a hundred in total from Nuremberg—were locked inside the prison gym, which had been furnished only with bare mattresses on the floor. Martin’s group joined them.
Most of the guards were older men accustomed to dealing with hardened criminals, not political prisoners, and they seemed overwhelmed by the crowded conditions. They did their duty and nothing more, which meant the prisoners were largely left alone. An inmate crew brought food from the kitchen to distribute among the prisoners, and at one point everyone was allowed to take a shower in a communal washroom, which had a row of multiple showerheads. The prisoners were let out of the locked gym in small groups for an hour a day; they could pace circles in the prison yard only after it had been cleared of Aryan prisoners so they would avoid contact with the Jews.
Within a week, some of the Jewish prisoners were released, Martin’s uncle among them. The decisions about who got out and who did not were utterly mysterious to Martin and everyone else. While some of the guards revealed that they had received the release orders from the local Gestapo, none of the feared secret police had shown up at the prison, and no prisoners had been questioned. By December 22—six weeks after Martin’s arrest—nine of his original group remained. On that day, guards thundered down the corridor, announcing that they were being moved to the Dachau concentration camp.
Martin, who was now in his own cell, felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He knew about the existence of Dachau, as did most Germans, but it was spoken about only in ominous whispers. Opened in an old World War I munitions factory near Munich in March 1933, Dachau was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis after they came to power. Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler had announced in the newspapers that Dachau would be utilized to incarcerate those who “threaten the security of the state.” During its first year, the camp held nearly five thousand prisoners, primarily German communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazis.
But Martin had a very personal history with Dachau, too. In April 1933, his cousin, a lawyer in Munich, had been arrested and sent there. He died in Dachau three months later. Based on the grim stories he had heard, Martin considered the move to Dachau to be his own death sentence.
The locks on the cells of the Dachau-bound prisoners were rapidly keyed open and the doors swung ajar by guards. Frantic to write a farewell note to his twin brother, Leopold, who lived with an aunt elsewhere in Germany, and to his uncle Julius, Martin scribbled on a scrap of paper. When he stepped into the corridor and passed the cell of a prisoner he had gotten to know, Martin pushed his folded-up note through the bars.
At the Nuremberg train station, Martin and the eight other men brought in from Ansbach were loaded into a modern passenger train car, where they remained under guard for the hundred-mile ride to the Dachau depot. Upon arrival, their car alone was shunted to a sidetrack. The first thing Martin saw was SS troops in black uniforms with red swastikas, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, surrounding them on all sides.
The SS pushed the prisoners off the train and down the platform, then herded them past some administrative buildings, the guards’ barracks, and an outside shooting range, where the SS practiced their marksmanship. Martin would soon learn that it doubled as an execution site. A heavy iron gate opened onto the prisoners’ fenced compound, above which was a metal sign that read, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, “Work will make you free.”
Electrified barbed wire enclosed the rectangular compound—about three hundred by six hundred yards—on all sides. Tall gun towers rose up at strategic locations. Inside the compound was an infirmary, a laundry, workshops in which inmates produced goods ranging from bread to furniture, and a main yard for roll calls and other assemblies.
The inmates lived in ten single-story barracks made of brick and concrete; each had been built to house 270 prisoners and was subdivided into five rooms designed to hold fifty-four men apiece. The men in each room were referred to, in military fashion, as a platoon. Every room had thin wooden bunks covered with straw and an attached washroom with a few sinks and flush toilets.
When Martin and his group arrived, the guards pushed them into a large room and made them strip off their clothing. After their heads were completely shorn, they were ordered into a cold shower and herded naked into another room, where a camp doctor did a quick examination. They were then given lightweight, blue-and-white-striped uniforms to put on. Some of the men had arrived clutching the small bags they had been allowed to take from home when they were arrested. Now they had to leave the bags, and the only personal items they could take with them were whatever toiletries they could carry.
In prison in Nuremberg, Martin had become friendly with a man named Ernst Dingfelder, who was deeply religious. Now Ernst whispered to Martin that he wanted to keep his Tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. Martin couldn’t believe his ears; it struck him as crazy to try to sneak a Jewish prayer shawl into a Nazi concentration camp. He argued back and forth with Ernst, telling him that if the guards found the shawl, they would likely wrap him in it before shooting him. At last, Martin convinced Ernst to leave it behind.
Each prison uniform at Dachau had a number above the right breast. Martin’s was 31889. He soon realized that, according to Dachau’s numbering system, he was the 31,889th inmate since the camp’s opening. What he did not know was that he was also one of more than ten thousand Jews who had entered the concentration camp in the weeks since Kristallnacht.
It was midnight when Martin’s group reached block 8, room 4. Crammed into the unheated space were two hundred prisoners, four times more than the space was built to hold. To make room, the built-in bunks had been replaced with two levels of six-foot-deep wooden shelving, one at ground level, the other about four feet off the floor. A thin layer of straw crawling with lice and fleas covered each one. Without room to turn over, the men slept body to body, their heads against the wall. Despite the freezing temperature, many spent the night uncovered, as there weren’t enough blankets to go around.
Exhausted after little sleep, at five o’clock the next morning Martin stood for his first roll call. When this was complete, he and the others were led back inside and given watery ersatz coffee and bug-infested porridge. Dachau was a labor camp, but with the rapid influx of so many new prisoners, the officers in charge had not yet been able to schedule them all for forced-labor duties, which consisted of digging in gravel pits, repairing roads, and draining marshes, all under the watchful eyes of the guards. Instead, Martin and the rest of his group spent the day milling around in the main yard, clapping their hands and stamping their feet to keep them from freezing.
That night, dinner was a stew that resembled swill fed to pigs. Whatever meat was in it looked to Martin like chitterlings and other unidentified organs. Every third day, pairs of men shared a small loaf of bread; unfortunately, this wasn’t that day. Ernst, Martin’s friend, recoiled at the sight of the nonkosher meat and refused to touch the mysterious stew. Thereafter, Martin tried to help him stay kosher by trading his bread for Ernst’s stew. In the face of the indignities and deprivation of the Nazi concentration camp, Martin was determined to persevere, and in the process stay true to his principles and commitments. Helping a friend in need was one of them.
Martin saw right away that the prisoners who had been in Dachau longer—months, even years before he arrived—were dulled mentally and weakened physically by the daily grind and the brutal treatment they received at the hands of the guards. Beatings were commonplace, and many prisoners had lingering injuries and bad bruises. Others were feverish and sick. Most were afraid to seek treatment at the infirmary; not only was the medical care deplorable, but anyone reported as being sick was labeled a malingerer and could be subjected to punishment—most commonly solitary confinement for long periods of time or twenty-five strokes across the back with a whip that cut into the flesh. But the list of offenses for which prisoners received savage penalties at Dachau was long. An escape attempt meant death, warned a notice posted in the courtyard, as did “sabotage, mutiny or agitation.” Anyone who attacked a guard, “refused obedience,” or declined to work at assigned labor was to be “shot dead on the spot as a mutineer or subsequently hanged.”
Prisoners particularly dreaded Saturday afternoon inspections. Beforehand, the stubble on the men’s heads was trimmed to the skin. Room 4 had two dull hair clippers for two hundred men; with their dull blades, the clippers pulled out clumps of hair. Aluminum food bowls were inspected. The bowls had to be spotless, even though there was no soap and the men were prohibited from scrubbing with anything abrasive. Beatings were given out when guards found specks of food or scratches on the bowls.
When Martin failed one inspection, he had to stand at attention, motionless, while a leather-gloved guard repeatedly slapped his face. Martin had seen others similarly punished. The more they flinched, the longer the beatings lasted. With incredible determination not to show fear, he kept his reflexes under control and did not recoil from the blows. The guard gave up and moved on. It was a test of grit and resolve that Martin did not forget.
The cruelty of the SS was unlike anything Martin had imagined men could be capable of inflicting. He suspected that guard duty at Dachau was not a choice assignment, and that many of them were ordered there to be trained in brutality for duties in other camps and newly conquered territories. Dachau’s was a hierarchy of violence: the young soldiers were subject to such harsh treatment by their leaders that they were quick to vent their pent-up anger on the inmates. The process reminded Martin of training attack dogs.
One evening at roll call, the camp commandant announced that a prisoner had escaped. As punishment, all inmates would be held at attention in the main yard until the escapee was caught and returned. The long hours of the night crawled by, and it was bitterly cold under the bright spotlights. When the guard shifts changed, the men standing in the assembly area heard the clicking of machine guns in the gun towers—the loaded weapons were being checked.
Martin stood at the end of one row of prisoners. After midnight, exhausted and nearly frozen, he began to drift off to sleep on his feet. He must have swayed, though he was still standing when a rifle butt struck him in midback with painful force. He struggled to keep his balance and not fall.
In the morning, the assembly area was littered with men who had collapsed during the night—as far as Martin could tell, all were dead. The other prisoners were taken away briefly for food and water, then returned to the parade ground. The bodies had been removed.
Everyone remained standing until four that afternoon, when the escapee was returned to camp. Whisked out of sight, he was never seen again.
The man’s death would not have been easy, Martin knew. A favorite torture technique at Dachau had its roots in the medieval Inquisition: a victim was placed underneath a gallowslike structure, hands shackled behind his back, and pulled into the air by ropes attached to his wrists. Weights were added to the victim as he swung to inflict more intense pain on his arms and shoulders. Martin knew of men who had dangled helplessly for up to an hour as punishment for some real or imagined infraction. Most ended up with dislocated or broken bones and joints; some were permanently crippled.
Despite the horror of the consequences, there continued to be escape attempts by desperate men, but they seldom resulted in freedom. Some inmates chose another type of escape. A man would run toward the fence, attracting a hail of bullets from the gun towers. If he made it all the way, he would throw himself against the wire to be electrocuted. The SS guards usually made the quick kill, but not always. One prisoner, shot before reaching the fence, was left on the ground to writhe. His cries lasted all night.
On nights like that, with moans and shrieks sounding in the air and the constant cold biting at his body, Martin did more thinking than sleeping.
The big question was always: Why? As an avid reader with an interest in history—he had hoped to go to college, but when he turned sixteen in 1934, he was told he had received all the schooling to which a Jew was entitled in Germany—he knew about medieval Europe and the Inquisition. What difference was there between the suffering of men four centuries ago—ad majorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God)—and what the Nazis were doing now? Suffering was still suffering. And if there was supposedly only one God, whose was it?
Some inmates at Dachau, like Ernst Dingfelder, were devoutly religious when they arrived. Others became more religious the longer they stayed. And then there were those who found they could no longer believe in God—any God—because of what was taking place. Martin identified with this group. He would, he decided, observe and participate in the traditions and ceremonies he had grown up with, out of a desire to acknowledge his Jewish heritage. But for the rest of his life, he knew, he would just be going through the motions. The horrors of Dachau had destroyed his belief in God.
Prisoners were allowed to write one letter a week, though with Nazi censors reading all outgoing mail, there was little they could say. Martin could not describe the effects of the starvation diet and all the weight he had lost, or the painful, open frostbite sores on his feet that made walking a torment. If the inmates failed to say everything was fine, their letters would not be mailed. Since his letters were the only documentation his family had that he was still alive, Martin wrote dutifully each week. Under the sender’s name was the line: “Concentration Camp Dachau.” The return address included the words Schutzhaft-Jude, or “Jew in Protective Custody.”
On January 1, 1939, Martin turned twenty-one. As he was now of legal age, Uncle Julius was no longer his guardian or trustee of the home his mother had left Martin. How camp officials discovered these facts he never knew, but shortly after his birthday, Martin was summoned to an administrative office and shown a document mostly covered by a blotter. He was told not to attempt to read the paper—only to sign it.
“Was ist das?” he dared to ask.
“Sie haben drei Sekunden.” He had three seconds to sign. “Sonst.” Or else.
He signed, and the paper was taken away. Only then was he told that he had signed a power of attorney allowing his mother’s house to be sold.
Martin Selling knew then that he would not be going home.
PART ONE (#ulink_4638649c-1725-50c2-89f1-0c71745168e0)
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
–STATUE OF LIBERTY INSCRIPTION
by nineteenth-century Jewish poet Emma Lazarus
1 (#ulink_939f77a2-4eb1-5f03-ac74-387ecc9563f8)
SAVING THE CHILDREN (#ulink_939f77a2-4eb1-5f03-ac74-387ecc9563f8)
For nearly twelve years, Günther Stern had the best of childhoods.
He spent those idyllic days in Hildesheim, one of the oldest and most picturesque towns in northern Germany, built along the windswept banks of the Innerste River and surrounded by rolling hills dotted with farms, dairies, and grazing livestock. The town’s cobblestone streets were lined by centuries-old, spire-topped buildings and churches.
Reaching skyward as it climbed up the sides of the Hildesheim Cathedral’s apse was a thirty-five-foot dog rose reputed to be the world’s oldest living rosebush. It was nearly the same age as the town, which is how it got its name: Tausendjähriger Rosenstock (“Thousand-Year Rose”). According to local legend, as the pink-blossomed rose flourished, so did the town.
Since its earliest days, Hildesheim had been the seat of a Roman Catholic archbishop, and for centuries the majority of its residents were Catholic. After the Reformation, which had its roots in Germany, many Catholics turned Protestant (mostly Lutheran), and by the 1930s, Hildesheim’s sixty-five thousand inhabitants were divided between the two major Christian religions. There were fewer than a thousand Jews in the town, which mirrored their representation nationally. A June 1933 census found less than one percent of Germany’s population was Jewish: roughly a half million Jews out of 67 million people.
When Jews settled in Hildesheim early in the seventeenth century, they built half-timbered houses with ornate wood-carved façades. The town’s Moorish-style synagogue was built on Lappenberg Street in 1849, an area that became one of Hildesheim’s most scenic neighborhoods.
Günther was a bright and inquisitive boy. He had his mother’s sunny disposition, his father’s intelligent eyes, and unruly ears that refused to lay flat. Born in 1922, he made his first visit to synagogue at age six, when his parents took him for services on a High Holiday. For once, the boy hadn’t complained about being dressed in his best clothes. His mother had told him how important it was to make a good first impression on the Lord. They walked with other families to the synagogue, all dressed in their finest. Smiling passersby stepped aside, nodding to the Jewish procession as it passed, the men lifting their top hats in greeting, again and again.
Günther, the eldest child of Julius and Hedwig Stern, was four years older than his brother, Werner, and twelve years older than his sister, Eleonore. The family was solidly middle class, as were most of Hildesheim’s Jews. The Sterns lived in a rented apartment abutting Günther’s father’s small fabric store, which was located on the third floor of a well-maintained building near a bustling marketplace in the center of town. The apartment had high ceilings and good light. Fine curtains draped the tall windows. Each room had a wood-burning stove for heat, and the kitchen was outfitted with a modern stove.
The two boys shared a room on one side of the apartment. Their parents’ bedroom, where their little sister also slept, was at the other end. The bedrooms had hardwood floors; the carpeted living room had a sofa, two upholstered chairs, and Julius’s dark wood desk. The formal dining room, with a pastoral landscape by the Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller on the wall, was reserved for special occasions. Günther and his brother’s favorite part of the house was a tile-floored vestibule that served as an indoor playground, complete with a Ping-Pong table that they put to regular use.
Günther’s father was a slight man known for his boundless energy. Julius Stern worked six-and-a-half-day weeks, taking off only Saturday mornings to attend synagogue, where the sermon was in German and the service in Hebrew. He showed fabric samples and took orders in his store and on trips to outlying villages, where he called on customers who made their own clothing. The only ready-to-wear clothes he sold were men’s gabardine overcoats. His wife, Hedwig (née Silberberg), did his typing and billing. A raven-haired woman with dark, soulful eyes, Hedwig had a gift for writing witty limericks featuring relatives and friends.
Günther began his education in a one-room Jewish school. His teacher met the challenge of keeping students of varying ages and grade levels interested and engaged throughout the school day. None of it was lost on Günther, and he blossomed as a serious reader and an excellent student. Günther also enjoyed attending a Saturday afternoon youth group conducted by the synagogue’s charismatic young cantor, Josef Cysner, who led lively discussions about Jewish books and culture.
As was customary, Günther entered Andreas-Oberrealschule at age ten, in 1932. He was one of three Jews among his incoming class of twenty students. Even before starting school, Günther had had many non-Jewish friends; in Hildesheim at the time, young gentiles and Jews easily assimilated. They visited one another’s homes, attended the same parties, bicycled and swam together, and played soccer in the same athletic clubs.
But in 1933, the Nazis came into power, and they immediately started passing restrictive new laws targeting Jews. Hitler pledged to transform the nation: “Give me ten years,” he promised prophetically that year, “and you won’t recognize Germany.”
On April 1, 1933, two months after Hitler became chancellor, the government called for a twenty-four-hour nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. Storm troopers stood in front of stores, denouncing the proprietors and blocking the entrances. Jude was smeared on store windows; stars of David were painted across doorways. Local boycotts of Jewish businesses spread throughout Germany. Nazis marched through the streets, shouting anti-Jewish slurs; oftentimes these processions were accompanied by arrests, beatings, and extensive property damage.
Like many Jewish proprietors, Julius gradually lost most of his non-Jewish customers. They were afraid to be seen coming and going from his store; when he went to call on them at their homes, he was greeted by signs that read: JUDEN IST DER EINTRITT VERBOTEN. (Jews are forbidden entry.)
At the time, Günther, though an inveterate newspaper reader, had only a partial understanding of what was taking place in Germany. But he noticed when his friends became slow to greet him and then stopped speaking to him altogether. He found himself being invited to fewer birthday parties, and he was soon banned—along with the other Jewish youth of Hildesheim—from swimming at the local pool and playing on his soccer team. Even his athletic club eventually kicked him out; though he had accumulated enough participation points to earn a medal, he was not awarded it. These were formative years for Günther, and it hurt him deeply to realize he had become an outcast among his peers. The rupture in his young life was unexpected and wrenching.
At school, many of the teachers were replaced by newer instructors, from Berlin and elsewhere, who wore swastika pins and espoused Nazi propaganda. While a few of the older teachers showed empathy toward their Jewish students, they had to be careful for fear of being reported and losing their jobs.
For a time, Günther had a protector: Heinrich Hennis, a bright boy who was a year older and a head taller. More than once, Heinrich jumped between Günther and his tormentors. But all the non-Jewish boys were required to join a Nazi youth organization, and Heinrich was no exception. His leader singled him out for special indoctrination, perhaps because word had gotten around that he was protecting Jews. Eventually, Heinrich also stopped speaking to Günther. Soon, Nazi slogans spouted from the lips of this former friend.
Choir had always been one of Günther’s favorite classes. A few years earlier, his parents had taken him to the world-famous Hanover opera house for a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Ever since, he’d enjoyed music and choral singing. But one afternoon after the Nazis came to power, the choir teacher had the students rise to sing “Deutsche Jugend heraus!” Written a few years after Germany’s defeat in World War I, the song’s lyrics were violent and provoking: “German youth, gather! Slay our enemy in his own backyard, down him in earnest encounters.” Embraced by Hitler Youth organizations for its rousing nationalism, the song had been included in a 1933 songbook released by a pro-Nazi publisher.
It was Günther’s old friend, Heinrich Hennis, who indignantly shouted to the teacher: “How can you let Jews sing a song about German youth?”
The choir teacher stopped and said apologetically, “Our Jewish students will sit this one out.” Günther and the two other Jewish students sat down and remained silent as the class sang. Mortified and angered at the same time, Günther realized the Nazis had found a way to take even music from him.
Throughout 1933, Günther watched as German and European history was literally rewritten. One day, his history teacher came into the classroom and passed out single-edge razor blades. “Take out your textbooks,” he ordered the class, and he began writing page numbers on the blackboard. The students were to cut out the listed pages from their books and replace them with new pages. “Be sure to leave enough room on the margins,” he added helpfully, “so you can paste the new pages into the book.”
Excited murmurs rose up at this unusual assignment. When a razor blade reached Günther, he did as instructed. A few pages into the cutting, he began to read the passages, and realized with a jolt that the pages being taken out of the books all dealt with major accomplishments by Jews.
As the non-Jewish students were subjected to more and more anti-Semitic propaganda, at school and at home, they became increasingly hateful and aggressive toward their Jewish classmates. One day after school, Günther was cornered and beaten up by five boys from his school who took turns striking him as the others held him down. He limped home, bruised and battered physically as well as emotionally.
Nor was his family spared such violence. One night, his father worked late, and he took some letters to a mailbox a block away. On his way home in the dark, he was jumped by several men spewing anti-Semitic curses. They hit and kicked him. A sympathetic policeman passing by found Julius crumpled on the ground and took him to a hospital for first aid. When Günther saw his father the next morning, his father’s face was covered with cuts and bruises.
As the violence and hatred mounted around them, Julius and Hedwig Stern decided it was time to get the family out of Germany. They began writing to Jewish organizations, seeking information about emigrating to America.
A serious impediment for the Sterns and other Jews wanting to leave Germany was a new law passed by the Nazis, which restricted the transfer of cash, bonds, or other assets out of the country. Previously, Germans had been permitted to take out up to the equivalent of ten thousand dollars, but the Nazis reduced this amount, initially to four thousand dollars. As their campaign to plunder Jewish property and assets expanded, the amount was reduced further still, to ten Reichmarks, which was then worth about four U.S. dollars. The criminal penalties for exceeding this amount were stiff, including imprisonment and forfeiture of property.
At the same time, the U.S. State Department was diligently following a special order, issued by President Herbert Hoover in 1930, that required visa applicants to show they would not become public charges at any time, even long after their arrival. If they lacked the immediate means to support themselves, an affidavit was required from someone in America guaranteeing they would not end up on the public dole. The public-charge mandate and the various machinations one had to go through to prove financial independence—something not required of earlier immigrants to America’s shores—reduced the number of aliens admitted from 241,700 in 1930 to just 35,576 in 1932, and became a major impediment to anyone wanting to immigrate to the United States.
Desperate to escape from the Nazis, the Sterns wrote to Hedwig’s older brother, Benno Silberberg, who had moved to America in the 1920s and become a baker in St. Louis. Would he sign an affidavit for the family to come to America? they asked. It was not clear that Benno would be able to help them, but he was their only relative in America.
By spring 1937, school had become so fraught with anguish, anxiety, and actual danger that Günther’s mother and father pulled him out of all his classes. Instead, they hired a tutor to improve his English for their planned move to America. Those easy, bright years of Günther’s in German schools—from the one-room Jewish school where his curiosity was first awakened to the courses, choir, and sports he enjoyed in the public high school—were over. In their place? The sixty-year-old tutor, a graying, stooped, emaciated-looking gentile named Herr Tittel. Beginnning in the mid-1920s, he’d worked as a teacher at a Brooklyn orphanage. But after eleven years, he grew homesick and returned to his hometown of Hildesheim, where he eked out a living teaching English, mostly to Jews hoping to emigrate.
Günther grew to like Herr Tittel, who told him colorful stories about America during their weekly lessons. While living in the U.S., Herr Tittel had become a fan of professional baseball, and he wove grand narrative descriptions for the young Günther, extolling Grover Cleveland Alexander’s masterful pitching and Babe Ruth’s epic home runs. Herr Tittel was easygoing and somewhat eccentric, and would frequently start humming popular American tunes in the middle of lessons. Within a few months, Günther had learned more conversational English—albeit in peculiar German-accented Brooklynese—than he had in three years with his high school teacher.
That summer, Günther’s parents gave him permission to join three friends from his Jewish youth group on a monthlong bicycle trip to the Rhine, a six-hundred-mile round trip. His parents, certain the family would soon be leaving Germany, thought this might be their older son’s last chance to explore the geography of his ancestral country. Once they left Nazi Germany, Hedwig and Julius agreed, none of them would ever want to return.
The boys asked their youth leader to write a letter vouching for their character and wrote to Jewish community leaders in towns along their planned route to find places to spend the night. For most of the trip, families put them up, though in one town the best they could do was sleep on benches in the dressing room of the local Jewish soccer team. All three boys were good bicyclists, and they covered twenty-five to thirty-five miles a day.
In a sleepy river town, they pedaled along the riverside, watching people in canoes and paddleboats enjoying a day on the water. A short distance away, they saw a different scene: a line of docked military boats with heavy guns mounted on their decks. Their steel hulls shone, glinting in the sun; they looked newly built and ominous. Each vessel flew a Nazi battle flag with a swastika. These were unlike any boats the boys had ever seen. It was clear to them now: under Hitler, Germany was getting ready for war.
Günther had been home only a few hours when his parents called him into the formal dining room for a talk. The family never used this room unless they had company, so Günther knew this conversation was serious.
They had heard from Uncle Benno, Julius told his son. He explained to Günther that America was deep in a Depression, which meant that millions of people were out of work. The U.S. government required an affidavit of financial support for immigrants such as themselves, who had to leave their country with no money. But Uncle Benno had lost his full-time job and was picking up only part-time work, which meant he didn’t have the resources necessary to sign an affidavit for an immigrating family of five.
Günther’s father spread out a serious-looking document, several pages in length, on the table.
All this time, his mother had remained silent. Now at last she spoke up, her voice low and solemn. “Uncle Benno’s affidavit has come through for you alone,” she said, explaining that Günther would live with Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel in St. Louis until the rest of the family could join him. “You have an appointment at the American consulate in Hamburg in a few weeks,” she added softly.
“Mutti, I am going alone to America?” asked a shocked Günther. He could not believe what he was hearing.
“Ja, Günther.”
Since Uncle Benno had been able to provide an affidavit for only one person, she explained, it had to be Günther. Neither she nor his father would go without the other; at nearly sixteen, Günther was the oldest of the children. They would keep trying to find a sponsor for the rest of the family and hoped to all reunite in America soon.
It was obvious to Günther that his mother was struggling with this decision as much as he was. He had never pictured this day, and she had never fathomed sending her teenage son away to a foreign country alone.
Perhaps once he got settled in the United States, she suggested, Günther could find someone there to help them. She said this was a serious, grown-up assignment to give him, but she and his father believed he was mature enough to handle it. Most important to her and his father, his mother said, was that Günther would be safe in America.
His father, always the practical businessman, began to describe the logistics of Günther’s trip to Hamburg, one hundred miles north of Hildesheim. He had already worked out a ride for him with a Jewish family who had an appointment at the consulate the day before Günther’s. After what would be the longest automobile ride of his life, Günther would spend the night at a students’ pension, then return home the next day with the local family.
Günther’s father had contacted a Jewish organization in Hanover, which was helping plan his emigration. An affiliated group based in New York, German Jewish Children’s Aid, was taking small groups of Jewish children out of Nazi Germany. Günther would be joining one of these groups. The organization would pay for his ocean passage, provide a chaperon, and make sure he reached his aunt and uncle in St. Louis safely. The group had already sent a social worker to interview Benno and Ethel Silberberg; the social worker, according to her report, had found them to be “kindly, wholesome people” eager to welcome their nephew into their home.
The prospect of leaving without his parents, his brother, and his little sister saddened Günther deeply. Other than visits to his grandparents and his bicycling trip, he had never been away from home for any length of time. Going to America was an opportunity to leave behind the upheaval, suppression, and violence consuming Germany, and visions from Herr Tittel’s colorful stories about America—the land of the free, of baseball and Hollywood movies and pizza!—danced in his mind. Yet, even as he began to dream of these things for himself, Günther was apprehensive about leaving the rest of his family behind. How and when would they reunite?
In early October 1937, Günther stood before a U.S. official who, unbeknownst to the youth, held his future if not his life in his bearlike hands. Vice Consul General Malcolm C. Burke, an impressive, barrel-chested man of fifty, had been in charge of administering immigration laws and regulations in Hamburg since 1924. Günther was lucky that his visa application had been assigned to Burke. Many other U.S. consuls, quick to find sworn affidavits inadequate, routinely denied visa requests. For example, in 1933, seventy-four German refugees had applied to the U.S. consulate in Rotterdam, but only sixteen visas were granted. All but one of the fifty-eight refusals were based primarily on the grounds that the would-be immigrants were likely to become public charges.
For a long time, Burke had been an outspoken critic of inconsistent interpretations of U.S. immigration law. Beyond that, he was a strong believer in having the resources of the friends and relatives who signed the affidavits investigated in the United States, at the place where their assets were located and their income earned, rather than by overseas officials making arbitrary judgment calls. Günther had another advantage in being assigned to Burke: unlike some of his less compassionate, even anti-Semitic colleagues in the U.S. State Department at home and abroad, Burke recognized that Jews were being persecuted by the Nazis and was willing to look for loopholes in the laws and regulations that would allow them to enter America.
Burke had in front of him Günther’s paperwork, including the affidavit signed by Benno Silverberg. The bank balance on the document had been swelled by short-term loans from coworkers and friends, whom Benno had repaid a week after receiving his bank statement. Burke had enough experience reviewing affidavits and financial statements to know when they’d been fudged, but if he harbored any suspicions about the St. Louis baker’s sizable bank balance, he did not raise them officially or voice them to Günther. He asked the boy, in German, for his full name, date of birth, and years of schooling. Then, inexplicably, he asked, “What is the sum of forty-eight plus fifty-two?”
“Einhundert,” Günther responded.
With that simple bit of mathematics, the consul stamped and signed Günther’s Jugendausweis (youth card). Günther Stern had been accepted by the U.S. State Department for entry into America.
Now that he had an approved visa, things moved quickly. Within a couple of weeks, the Sterns received word from the Jewish organization that they had a group of children leaving Germany on a ship to the United States in November, and that Günther could join them.
In late October, Günther’s friends gathered in the Sterns’ apartment for a boisterous farewell party. The event added to his growing excitement—and yet, the whispers of fear remained. Not a single non-Jew attended, not even Günther’s longtime classmate and one of his few remaining non-Jewish friends, Gerhard Ebeling. This fact did not escape Günther’s attention.
Gerhard, a gentile, couldn’t openly criticize the mistreatment of his Jewish classmates by pro-Nazi teachers and students. However, he would occasionally say something quietly to Günther about staying strong during these difficult times. Further complicating matters, Gerhard’s father was a customs official, the type of government job generally reserved in those days for Nazi Party members.
Customs officer Ebeling did something unusual the week before Günther was to depart, however. At that time, anyone preparing to leave the country had to show up in advance at the customs house to have his or her baggage inspected and sealed. Now Herr Ebeling telephoned Julius and offered to come to their apartment, saving the Sterns the labor of bringing in the heavy steamer trunk packed with clothes and family memorabilia Hedwig wanted to get out of Germany. That afternoon, Ebeling placed the official seal on the trunk without looking inside and wished Günther safe travels. In normal times, this would be a small gesture by a friendly official, but these were not normal times.
Günther Stern’s youth travel document, bearing two Third Reich stamps with swastikas, which he used to emigrate to America. (Family photograph)
On October 27, 1937, Günther and his parents—Hedwig and Julius had arranged for someone to stay with the two younger children, both of whom cried brokenheartedly when Günther left—went to the Hildesheim railway station and boarded a northbound train for Bremerhaven. One of Germany’s most vital ports, Bremerhaven had become a hub of emigration from Europe.
After a daylong train trip, the Sterns arrived in the late afternoon and checked into a boardinghouse. Early the next morning, Günther and his parents met at a designated spot on the pier with the other children, their parents, and the chaperon from the Jewish organization. Looming above them was the ocean liner that would take the children to America, the SS Hamburg, a steamship nearly seven hundred feet long that could make a speedy twenty knots at sea. They could clearly see the large German flag flying high above its bridge.
It was time to say good-bye. Günther’s mother was weeping and dabbing her eyes with a hankie. They hugged and kissed. Determined not to feel helpless and hoping to make his mother a little less sad, Günther promised ardently to do everything he could to find someone in America to sponsor them. They would be reunited in America, he vowed, no matter what.
Hedwig nodded as she fought back more tears.
Günther turned to his father, who gave him a hug and a firm handshake. Throughout the Nazi years, Julius had hammered home the need for Günther to remain inconspicuous, to keep unwanted attention from being drawn to him. “You have to be like invisible ink,” he had cautioned many times. “You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, the invisible ink becomes visible again.”
For several weeks, as his beloved son’s date of departure drew closer, his concerned father had imparted such pieces of wisdom and a litany of instructions. Now, as he draped his arm over his son’s shoulders and drew him close, he had a final word of advice. Speaking softly, so none of the others could overhear, he reminded his son that he would be on a German flagship. He would not leave Third Reich territory until he set foot in America.
The last words his father spoke to him were familiar ones.
“Remember, Günther, be like invisible ink.”
Manfred Steinfeld was born in 1924, between two world wars, in the town of Josbach, located in the very heart of Germany. He would carry with him just two vivid memories of his father, Abraham, both from before he was five years old.
He remembered sitting next to his father, who wore a white robe over his clothes, and watching him as he prayed at synagogue on Yom Kippur.
And he remembered overhearing his father and his uncle Solomon discussing der Krieg (the war). At the time, the little boy didn’t understand much of what they said. Years later, Manfred learned that they had been talking about World War I, and that the Steinfeld brothers had fought in a far-off place called Macedonia, where Solomon won the Iron Cross for battlefield bravery. And that their younger brother, Isador, had been killed in the Battle of Verdun in France in 1916; growing up, Manfred had often wondered about the uncle he never knew whose name was engraved on the town’s stone war memorial.
A short time later, Manfred lost his father. Abraham died of pneumonia at age forty-four, leaving his wife, Paula, with their three children—Irma, six; Manfred, five; and Herbert, three. She took over her husband’s dry goods store, which was the family’s only means of support. They were already living in the house of her mother-in-law, Johanna Hanschen Steinfeld, who helped Paula take care of the children.
Josbach was a town of 419 residents, just sixty miles from Frankfurt, one of Germany’s largest cities, but a world apart. Most of Josbach’s citizens were subsistence farmers, working the land with plows pushed by hand or pulled by cows or oxen; few could afford horses for the task. No one had tractors or other farm machinery, and there was only one automobile in town. The wealth of a German farmer could be measured by the size of his manure pile, which was indicative not only of how much livestock he owned, but also of how much fertilizer he had available to spread on his fields.
There were only six Jewish families in Josbach: three Steinfelds, two Kattens (Paula’s kin), and one Fain. Abraham’s and Paula’s ancestors had settled there in the early 1800s, and by the 1920s, the only retail business not Jewish owned was the tavern. In addition to the Steinfeld store, which sold shoes as well as material and ribbon for home dressmakers, there was a hardware store, a livestock trader, and a confectionery shop. The tradesmen—the town’s carpenter, painter, shoemaker, and tailor—were all gentiles. This collection of businesses and trades provided the townsfolk with all of their basic needs.
Manfred’s childhood home was located next to the town well, and it was the only house in Josbach with running water, thanks to Abraham’s ingenuity: in the 1920s, Manfred’s father had run a pipe the short distance from the water pump to their house. The first floor had a living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms, one of which Manfred shared with his grandmother. There was a third bedroom on the second floor. A root cellar was used to store potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables from the garden during the winter months. During the summer harvest, Paula canned fruits and vegetables, stocking the pantry. She went to the community bake house on Friday mornings, which by town tradition were reserved for the Jewish women to make challah and cakes for Shabbat.
For Manfred, the absence of his father was filled by his extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and especially his grandmother, with whom he was especially close. She loved helping him with his homework and was overjoyed the day he came home and announced he was the best student in his class and the first to know all his multiplication tables.
“The teacher says I’ll probably be a finance minister when I grow up,” Manfred reported.
Serious minded and hardworking at an age when many boys were not, Manfred seemed older than his years. He had a classically proportioned face, twice as long as it was wide, and symmetrical features, making him look mature for his age. A willing harvester of apples and plums for his mother’s canning, he earned his first money picking and selling blueberries by the basket. He also made deliveries on his bicycle to his mother’s customers in surrounding towns.
Education for the children of Josbach took place in a two-room schoolhouse, with grades one through four in one room and five through eight in the adjacent room. Out of seventy students, ten were Jews. There was only one teacher, who went back and forth between the two classrooms. Although Josbach had its own synagogue, they were one Jewish male shy of the minyan required to hold communal worship. Worshippers walked two or three miles to the synagogue in Halsdorf for weekly services instead. Occasionally, arrangements were made for a tenth man to come to Josbach from another town so local services could be held for bar mitzvahs and High Holidays.
When Manfred was nine, his grandmother became ill. After several days, a physician was summoned. Manfred waited anxiously with the rest of the family for the arrival of Dr. Heinrich Hesse from Rauschenberg, eight miles away. It had been snowing all day, and the doctor finally showed up in late afternoon. He examined Johanna and left some medication for her chest congestion. What Manfred would never forget about this day had to do with what the doctor told them as he was putting on his overcoat to leave.
The date was January 30, 1933. With a cheerful lilt in his voice, Dr. Hesse announced, “Something wonderful has happened today. Adolf Hitler has been made the new chancellor!”
The changes wrought by this news came more slowly to isolated hamlets like Josbach—in those days in Germany, there was a little village every few miles. But it was only a matter of time before the quiet, rural town felt the brunt of Nazism. Manfred’s family first became aware of the anti-Semitic fervor sweeping the country during the twenty-four-hour boycott of Jewish businesses two months later on April 1, 1933. Even in neighborly Josbach, many customers observed the boycott and stayed away from the stores owned by Jews, although there were none of the demonstrations or outbreaks of violence that were so widespread in cities like Frankfurt and Berlin.
In November 1933, Germany held its first national election since Hitler had taken control of the government. All opposition parties had by then been banned, and voters were presented with a single slate of Nazi Party candidates. The voting was not by secret ballot, and in most locations, voters had to hand their ballots directly to party officials. Setting the tone for future elections during the Nazi era, voter intimidation was commonplace. Citizens were threatened with reprisals if they voted against Hitler, or even if they failed to vote. As a result, voter turnout was 95 percent, and the Nazi Party received nearly 40 million votes, some 92 percent of all those cast.
Manfred’s uncle Solomon went to the polls proudly wearing the Iron Cross he had earned fighting for Germany in the last war. Like so many other Jewish war veterans, Solomon, who owned the Josbach hardware store, believed that he would be protected against Nazi persecution because he had fought for the Fatherland. Like most German Jews, Solomon considered himself a German first and a Jew second. This feeling of security and a desire not to be ostracized led Solomon Steinfeld to vote for the Nazi slate. He was not alone; other Jews in Josbach, including Grandma Johanna, voted for the Nazi candidates, if only to avoid being identified as “no” votes.
In Josbach, it was local custom for Jewish families to gather each week—usually on Fridays after dinner or on Saturdays after lunch—to discuss topics of interest to them and their community. Most children would run around and play instead of paying attention to the grown-ups, but Manfred was fascinated by the adult conversations. One discussion he overheard had to do with Hitler and the Nazis. Most of the adults thought there was little future for the Nazis, and that Hitler and his party, for many years the minority, would not last long in power. Many chancellors and cabinets before them had lasted only a short time. Josbach had only one known Nazi in town, a man named Heinrich Haupt, who had joined the party in the 1920s.
A few of the adults were convinced, however, that the Nazis were a growing threat, and to bolster their argument, they pointed to surrounding towns, which were known to have more Nazis and had seen increased reports of persecution against Jews.
It took some time before Manfred sensed any divide between the Jewish and non-Jewish students at his school. But one day they were told that their teacher had retired. His replacement was a younger man from out of the area who preached Nazi doctrine. The appearance of this new teacher signaled a shift for Manfred and the other Jewish children. From that moment on, in the classroom and during recreational activities, the Jews were increasingly ridiculed by the teacher and bullied by their classmates.
The next summer, Manfred spent part of his vacation with his mother’s brother, Arthur Katten, and his wife, Lina, in nearby Rauschenberg. After befriending some neighborhood boys, Manfred was invited to attend a local meeting of a national organization, Deutsches Jungvolk, for boys aged ten to fourteen. Manfred was excited to hear that they would be participating in sports, camping, and hiking. However, the group was affiliated with the Hitler Youth movement, and when they learned that Manfred was a Jew, he was promptly excluded as being unfit.
Not long after Manfred returned home, the first of his family members was picked up by the Nazis. To his shock, it was his uncle Arthur. Arrested at home by uniformed storm troopers, his mother’s brother was held in “protective custody” for six weeks before he was released without any charges being filed. Arthur had honorably served his country in World War I, but he realized now that this meant nothing under the Nazi regime. He immediately began making plans to try to get himself and his family out of Germany as quickly as possible.
Anti-Semitism grew ever more prevalent in the daily life of Josbach, and the local Jews became convinced that the Nazi regime had entrenched its power, with Hitler in full control as the supreme leader of Germany. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, making Jews second-class citizens and revoking most of their political rights. Only Germans with four non-Jewish German grandparents were deemed “racially acceptable,” and Judaism was now defined as a race rather than a religion. It was irrelevant whether people practiced Judaism or were even practicing Christians; by law, if they possessed “Jewish blood,” they were Jews.
Guided by Third Reich dogma that encouraged “racially pure” women to bear as many Aryan children as possible, mixed marriages between Jews and persons with “German or related blood” were made a criminal offense. Hitler and his Nazi Party promulgated the notion that an enlarged, racially superior German population was destined to expand and rule by military force. One early step toward that goal—and the global conflict that would soon follow—took place in 1936, when Hitler sent German military forces to occupy the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone in western Germany established under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
In that same year, Manfred’s teacher, who kept a swastika pinned on the lapel of his jacket, herded all the students outside and lined them up like young military recruits along Josbach’s main street, where he told them a “special” motorcade was scheduled to pass through town. Some of the students eagerly pushed their way forward, but Manfred hung back. He had an idea it was going to be some Nazi-inspired demonstration, and he had no desire to be standing in front. Their wait wasn’t long. A black, open-roofed car approached at moderate speed. As they had practiced in school, upon the teacher’s command nearly all of the children snapped their right arms straight out.
“Sieg heil!” shouted a crescendo of high-pitched children’s voices.
Manfred did not raise his arm or his voice. He just stared at the mustachioed man in the backseat. He had seen his picture many times.
As the car passed, Hitler seemed to raise his hand to the side of his head in acknowledgment of the mass salute. Then he let it drop out of sight.
“Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”
The salutes ended only when the car turned a corner and was gone.
Young Manfred sensed that the mustachioed man in the black car meant danger to him, his family, and every Jew in Germany.
The day that two men in Nazi uniforms came to threaten his grandmother with arrest, she and Manfred were home alone. What crime could an old, sickly woman be guilty of? It seemed that Johanna Steinfeld held a first mortgage on a property in another town that these two men owned. But they had never made any payments and were thus greatly in arrears to her. Now they threatened the elderly woman with jail on a trumped-up charge if she didn’t agree to cancel the mortgage on the property. She went ashen. Turning to Manfred, she told him to run as fast as he could and bring back the mayor.
In 1930s Germany, a town’s Bürgermeister held a great deal of authority, even with outside officials. By then, the man who had once been Josbach’s first and only member of the Nazi Party, Heinrich Haupt, was serving as mayor. He was well liked by all, and even got together with some Jewish friends on Saturday nights to play Skat, the most popular card game in Germany.
Haupt hurried back to the house with Manfred and immediately asked to see the men’s credentials, which they showed him. But when he demanded to see a court-issued arrest warrant, the men admitted they did not have one.
“You have no jurisdiction here,” Haupt said sternly. “Mrs. Steinfeld is a citizen of this town, and your attempt to arrest her is totally unfounded.”
With that, Mayor Haupt kicked the uniformed men out of town.
For the Jews of Josbach, even their traditional Saturday morning stroll to the synagogue in neighboring Halsdorf had become unsafe. Whenever a flour-mill operator saw them approaching, he released his guard dogs with the command: “Los, fass die Juden!” (Go, get the Jews!) After several incidents, the procession of well-dressed men, women, and children started taking the long way around to bypass the mill.
Military convoys rattled through town almost daily. Once, a group of SA brownshirts stopped and began chanting, “When Jewish blood flows from the knife, that time will be so much better!” A pack of Hitler Youth rode through town on bikes, stoning stores with Jewish names and smashing windows. Even longtime customers were afraid to be seen patronizing Josbach’s Jewish merchants.
In 1937, Paula Steinfeld decided it was time to get her family out of Germany. Several Kattens had already left, including Arthur and his wife; after Arthur’s arrest, they had left to join their married daughter, who had settled in New York in the 1920s. Having come to the realization that Germany held no future for Jews of any age, and no matter their background, other Kattens and Steinfelds, including Uncle Solomon, were taking steps to emigrate.
By then, a backlog of Germans—most of them Jews—seeking entry into the United States had begun to form. Under the Immigration Act of 1924, the U.S. State Department was authorized to issue 150,000 immigrant visas annually, subject to quotas assigned to a country in proportion to its contribution to the U.S. population in 1890. As such, 85 percent of immigrants admitted came from Europe. Quotas were based on birthplace, not citizenship or place of residency. By 1937, when Paula decided to get her family out of the country, Nazi Germany was still open to the idea of Jewish emigration, but the annual quota of 27,270 Germans and Austrians allowed into the United States was filled rapidly.
Given the emigration numbers, Paula was told that the family would go on a waiting list for U.S. visas, but they might not make it to America until 1940 or 1941. There was also the difficulty of finding someone to sign an affidavit of support for a widow with three children. None of the relatives who had made it to America were in a position to accept financial responsibility for the family.
A desperate Paula resolved to get her children to safety, even if it meant doing the unfathomable: sending each one to a different foreign country, alone. In Jewish tradition, her oldest son was expected to carry on the family name, which meant Manfred would leave first. Information about emigration was flowing freely in Jewish communities, and Paula heard about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), an organization based in the United States that helped unaccompanied children under sixteen get out of Germany. Due to increased demand, and in the interest of fairness, the group accepted only one child per family. When she signed up Manfred he was just shy of fourteen.
A deluge of paperwork followed: five copies of his visa application; two copies of his birth certificate; a certificate of good conduct from German authorities (which became increasingly difficult for Jews to acquire from Nazi officials and was eventually eliminated from U.S. immigration requirements); proof of good health from a physician; and signed documents from HIAS as well as from Paula’s sister, Minna, and her husband, Morris Rosenbusch, who had left Germany in 1936 and were living on Chicago’s South Side. They had agreed to take Manfred, who knew little English, into their home.
In June 1938, Manfred’s U.S. visa came through, and an early-July departure date was set. He was to take a train to Hamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, which connected to the North Sea by the Elbe River. An HIAS escort would meet him there, and he would join other German Jewish children aboard an ocean liner for the trip across the Atlantic to America.
As part of an agonizing round of farewells, Manfred bicycled fifteen miles to visit his grandmother’s brother. Manfred had an idea this would be the last time they would see each other, and his elderly granduncle seemed to share his feelings. As they said good-bye, the old man reached into his pocket and took out a crinkled U.S. ten-dollar bill that he carefully smoothed out and handed to the boy. “To help you start a new life in America,” he said.
Paula had been warned that Manfred could bring very little cash with him, so she sewed the bill into the cuff of a pair of his pants. Other Jewish families who had sent loved ones abroad gave her another idea. She purchased two seventy-five-dollar Leica camera lenses and placed each one at the bottom of a talcum-powder can, covering the valuable lenses with talcum. She tucked the cans under some folded linens in Manfred’s steamer trunk, which was sent ahead to the ship in Hamburg. She advised her son to sell the lenses in America when he needed money.
Early on the morning of his departure, Manfred said good-bye to his sister and brother and the other relatives who had come to see him off. It was particularly hard leaving his little brother, Herbert, who idolized Manfred in the way younger brothers are inclined to do. They even looked alike; Herbert, although a head shorter, had the same open, pleasant countenance as Manfred.
Herbert always followed his big brother around like a shadow, wanting whatever Manfred had or did; “ich auch” (me too) was a common refrain. As a junior partner in work and play, Herbert was always happy to help with the chores and anything else to get his big brother’s attention and please him.
Manfred held his grandmother’s long, tight hug, understanding that it was likely to be their last. Then he was off, still feeling her teary kisses on his cheeks as he looked back to see her sadly waving good-bye with both hands.
He and his mother bicycled to the rail station in Halsdorf, where they boarded a train for the ten-mile trip to Kirchhain. Once there, Paula bought her eldest son a one-way ticket on the express train to Hamburg. She handed him a folded white handkerchief and ran through some final instructions: keep the handkerchief in his pocket until arriving in Hamburg, then take it out and hold it in his left hand. He would see a lady on the platform with a white handkerchief in her left hand. She would be his escort, and she would take him to where the other children were gathering to board the vessel.
When his mother had no more instructions, she began to cry. She kissed Manfred and hugged him tightly. She had told him that she was very happy and relieved he was getting out of Germany, and that he would soon be safe in America. But even at fourteen, Manfred understood that what his mother was doing was a cruel opposite to her most basic instincts and to the nature and desire of every Jewish mother he knew: to love, protect, and care for her children.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Mutti,” he said, bidding farewell with more brightness than he felt. After so many heart-wrenching good-byes, this was the one he dreaded the most. He did not want to reveal to her his worst fear, which had been gnawing at him ever since he learned of his upcoming move to America.
Her last words to him, “Be quiet and do not draw attention to yourself,” would stay with him throughout his rail and sea journeys. Stepping into the train compartment, he found a window seat. He and his mother waved to each other as the train pulled out of the station. He could see that she was sobbing now, standing there alone on the platform. His train gained speed, and his mother grew smaller and smaller, until he could no longer make out her figure.
Manfred Steinfeld was deathly afraid he would never see her again.
For Paula Steinfeld, sending her oldest son away, alone, across an ocean to a foreign land to live with others, had been an agonizing decision. Now she prayed this move would save his life and ensure his future, even if she never saw his sweet face again. With a heavy heart, she returned home to Josbach and began to plot how to save her other two children.
Stephan Lewy was seven years old in 1932, when his father, Arthur, a widower for the past year, left him at the Baruch Auerbach Orphanage for Jewish Girls and Boys in Berlin. Stephan’s mother, Gertrude, had been an invalid for several years, and for a time after her death, Arthur had been able to care for his son with the help of a woman he hired to run the household.
The boy missed his mother terribly. She had been a soft and gentle presence in his life. When he did something well, it was his mother who hugged, kissed, and praised him, while his father slapped or spanked him for his transgressions. One of Stephan’s earliest memories was of his mother saying the blessing over the Shabbat candles on Friday night before the special meal she had prepared. But he had many more memories of her bedridden, due to a weak heart. They both enjoyed her reading to him as he snuggled up next to her, and Stephan liked doing things for his mother that she was unable to do herself.
Three months after Gertrude’s death, her younger brother, Ewald, defaulted on a sizable loan that Arthur, a tobacco merchant with his own shop, had guaranteed, against his wife’s advice. In satisfying the debt, Arthur lost the family’s savings and even their household furniture, which Stephan watched being taken away by movers from his perch on a windowsill.
Arthur could no longer afford the hired woman to care for Stephan while he was at work, and none of Gertrude’s relatives were willing or able to help with the little boy. Arthur’s parents and seven siblings were all dead by 1902, wiped out by some contagion, leaving him the only surviving member of the family at the age of nine. A Jewish organization had brought a frightened Arthur to the Auerbach Orphanage, where he remained until he was eligible to leave at age sixteen. Drafted into the German army in 1914, Arthur saw combat on the western front, including the second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, in which the Germans used mass poison gas attacks for the first time in history, killing thousands.
Stephan Lewy with his mother, Gertrude, shortly before her death in 1931. (Family photograph)
After he was discharged following the armistice, Arthur was invited by an army buddy to a dinner party. There, he sat next to a charming young woman dressed in pale gray chiffon; as Arthur would later tell friends, he fell in love with Gertrude between the soup and the apple strudel. They were married several months later.
While still in her twenties, Gertrude endured a near-fatal bout of rheumatic fever that left her heart damaged. A doctor warned her that the rigors of childbirth would endanger her life, and Gertrude and Arthur agreed not to have children. But within a year she was pregnant. The doctor repeated his dire assessment and offered to terminate the pregnancy.
“I’m going to have this baby,” she told the doctor and her worried husband. “And we’re both going to survive.”
Near the end of her life, Stephan saw his mother growing weaker, but even when she was hospitalized for the last time, he was too young to seriously consider the possibility that she would really die and leave him for good.
He was with his father, packing boxes in the back of the tobacco store, when the hospital telephoned. His father hung up the phone and said heavily, “She’s gone, my son. Your mother is dead.”
They sat down together on a wooden crate and cried. It was the first time that Stephan saw his stern father show any emotion.
“We are all alone now,” Arthur said, weeping. But, he reassured his son, they would be all right, because they had each other.
Then came the loan default, bill collectors, and furniture movers. Arthur lost their two-bedroom apartment in downtown Berlin; he could afford only a sparsely furnished room that came with kitchen privileges and a shared bathroom.
Sitting his son down for a talk, Arthur said in his most serious tone, “Do you remember what I told you about where I grew up?”
Stephan nodded.
“You are a good boy, and I am not doing this to punish you. But for your own good, I have decided to send you to the orphanage.”
“But, Papa, you said we’ll be all right, because we have each other.”
“This is not open for discussion,” said his father. He would not be dissuaded by sentiment or emotion. “I am familiar with the place. I feel sure you will receive proper care and supervision.”
A few days later, Stephan’s father took him to the Auerbach Orphanage. The ornate, three-story structure at Schönhauser Allee 162 was topped with a towering spiral; it had been built in the late 1800s as a beer brewery and still had a dank, dark interior. Stephan waited in a long hallway while his father went into an office.
When his father reappeared, Stephan could tell he wasn’t interested in a prolonged good-bye. He said Sundays were visiting days, bent down for a quick hug, then backed away and shook the boy’s hand.
Stephan, his heart beating rapidly, was left alone in the hallway.
An older boy soon appeared and led him to the boys’ dormitory, where Stephan unpacked his small suitcase. That night, he covered his face with a pillow so no one would hear him cry. When he woke the next morning to a clanging bell, his pillow was damp from tears.
One hundred children lived at the orphanage, all of them Jewish. Most had no parents, though there were some, like Stephan, whose single parents were unable to raise them for various reasons.
During the week, the children attended a public school, but other than that, they stayed at the orphanage. There were many rules, and if they behaved and had local relatives, they could visit them on Sundays, though they had to be back by 6 P.M. Having been raised in a home with a strict father aided Stephan’s adjustment to the authoritarian atmosphere.
Spring 1933 arrived; Hitler rose to power, and the orphanage, like the rest of the country, found itself abuzz with news of all the political happenings and the new anti-Semitic laws. The Nazis were banning Jews from holding public office and closing many professions to them, not only in civil service but in radio, newspapers, teaching, and theater arts.
“Stephan,” one friend said, “there will be nothing left for us when we grow up.”
When he heard about the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, Stephan worried about his father. Would he be able to keep his shop? He knew his father called himself a socialist. Although Stephan didn’t know what that meant—he was still only eight years old—the older boys who read the newspapers told him that socialists were among the people being rounded up by the Nazis.
Seven-year-old Stephan Lewy in the yard of the Baruch Auerbach Jewish Orphanage in Berlin, 1932. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Not long after, Stephan was called to the superintendent’s office. A grim-faced man behind a desk said, “I am sorry to tell you that you will not be allowed to go home for a Sunday visit until further notice.”
“But—what did I do?”
“The request came from your father.”
Stephan left the office weeping and confused. What had he done to make his father not want to see him? First his mother had died, and now this. He was alone in the world with no one who loved him. His wounded feelings soon turned to anger at Arthur, who he believed had completely abandoned him.
Months went by. Stephan heard nothing from or about his father. Then the mother of a friend from the orphanage, who had been bringing Stephan home with her son for Sunday visits, told Stephan the truth. The Nazis had arrested his father and were holding him in a concentration camp. The orphanage officials had tried to protect him from this terrible news, but she believed the boy should know why he was unable to see his father.
Arthur Lewy had been sent to Oranienburg concentration camp, one of the first detention facilities established by the Nazis after they came to power. Located in the town of Oranienburg, near Berlin, the camp’s initial purpose was to hold Hitler’s political opponents from the region, and by 1933, it was crowded with Social Democrats, socialists, and communists, along with others deemed “undesirable.” The SS took over the camp in mid-1934 and often marched the prison-uniformed inmates out for the day to perform hard labor.
Arthur was released from Oranienburg in 1935, after suffering a heart attack, and was admitted to a Jewish hospital in Berlin. Shortly after his discharge, he came to the orphanage to see his son. This time, he gave Stephan a big hug and kisses on both cheeks as they were reunited, standing in the same hallway where father and son had parted two years earlier. As overjoyed as Stephan was to see his father, he found his appearance deeply alarming. Arthur was missing most of his teeth, and his once solid build had withered.
A friend had kept the tobacco shop running in his absence, Arthur told Stephan, but the new laws made it difficult for Jews to own businesses, and he was being pressured to sell out for a low price to a non-Jew. “People are taking advantage of the situation,” he lamented. Now he was back to living in a rooming house.
As they talked, Stephan could not believe how his father had changed. Not only physically, but he had a warmer, less stern manner about him.
Stephan had changed, too. In the institutional setting of Auerbach, the little boy who had always tried hard to please had become proficiently mischievous. He was rarely caught doing anything wrong, however, even when he carried off pranks like leading boys through airshafts to spy on the girls as they took showers. And for the most part, Stephan obeyed the rules. He also did well in his studies.
As a reward, in early 1938, shortly after his bar mitzvah, he became a shamus, which meant he would be responsible for opening the synagogue, which also served the local Jewish community, on the top floor of the orphanage. Each morning, Stephan reset the Torah scrolls for the day’s reading and turned on the electric organ to warm it up. The older boys at the orphanage attended services three times a day. They learned to conduct services, too, and studied Hebrew so that they could read the scriptures. Surrounded by their religion, they lived Judaism at Auerbach Orphanage—in Stephan’s case, more fully than he had at home.
The neighborhood school had a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish students, with the boys and girls segregated. One day, a group of adults entered Stephan’s classroom: a nurse, a doctor, a policeman, and a Nazi official, all in their respective uniforms. The official announced they would be taking “Aryan measurements,” and ordered all the Jews—there were ten or twelve in the class, most from the orphanage—to stand in one corner. The other forty boys formed a wide circle, with the adults in the center. One by one, each stepped forward so the doctor could use a mechanical device to measure the size and shape of his skull. The doctor made other measurements, such as the distance between their ears and the length of the brow and nose, calling out the figures to the nurse, who wrote them down in a book. They used a board filled with color samples to match and document the color of each boy’s skin, eyes, and hair.
Off in the corner, Stephan and the other Jews were ignored.
In the fall of 1938, Stephan’s father remarried. His new wife was Johanna Arzt, and Stephan had played a role in how the couple met: Johanna was the sister of the woman who’d brought Stephan home with her son on Sundays while his father was in the concentration camp. After Arthur’s release from Oranienburg, father and son attended several Sunday dinners with the Arzts, and it was at these dinners that Arthur and Johanna were introduced.
Stephan, starved for a mother’s love, quickly grew close to Johanna, a nurturing and kind Jewish woman like his mother. Soon, he felt close to her and was calling her Mutter without reservation.
By then, Arthur had lost his shop. At night, he went out to knock on the doors of old customers, taking tobacco orders. He turned these over to an Aryan tobacconist to fill and received small commissions. Johanna worked as a bookkeeper. They still lived in a tiny rented room, so Stephan stayed at the orphanage.
As he was returning from school one day in early November 1938, Stephan saw a banner headline at a corner newsstand.
JEW KILLS GERMAN ATTACHÉ IN PARIS
Stephan knew immediately that this was big news, and he dug into his pocket for the change to buy a newspaper.
A week earlier, more than twelve thousand Polish-born Jews, who had resided legally in Germany for years, had been expelled from the country. Forced from their homes in a single day, they were taken to the nearest railroad stations and put on trains to the Polish border. Four thousand were allowed into Poland, but the remainder were denied entry and found themselves in limbo, trapped on the desolate frontier between the two countries. They spent a week in the rain and cold, enduring a lack of adequate food and shelter. Then, on November 7, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old boy living in Paris, the son of two Polish Jews who had been rounded up, walked into the Third Reich embassy there and shot the diplomat. He wanted to avenge the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, and his family in particular.
At the time, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, were reveling at the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, which commemorated Hitler’s first attempt to seize power in 1923. Within hours of hearing the news, they had plotted a response. They viewed the killing—Nazi propaganda called it the “first shot of the Jewish War”—as an opportunity to unleash a long-planned, violent mass action against Jews. Later that day, Goebbels outlined to wildly applauding party leaders the nationwide pogrom that would become known as Kristallnacht.
Beginning at midnight, secret teletype messages from Gestapo headquarters in Berlin went out to military and police units across the country, ordering organized anti-Jewish demonstrations in cities, towns, and villages throughout Germany, encouraging the destruction of synagogues and other Jewish properties, and authorizing the mass arrest and detention of Jews.
In Berlin the next day, angry crowds filled the streets, chanting, “Down with the Jews!” Nazi gangs—many of them SA brownshirts in uniform or Nazis in civilian clothes—armed with guns, knives, crowbars, and bricks, assaulted Jewish men at random, made widespread arrests, and plundered and set fire to synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. Firemen stood by and watched as the buildings burned.
Early the next morning, a group of uniformed Nazis burst through the doors of the Auerbach Orphanage, taking the staff members, all of them Jewish, into custody. They went into the dormitories on the ground floor of the U-shaped building—one wing for the boys and the other for the girls—and rounded up the children, herding them all upstairs to the synagogue. The coverings on the bimah—a raised platform from which the Torah is read—had been ripped away. The holy ark where the Torah scrolls were kept had been torn off the wall, and other symbols were destroyed.
The terrified boys and girls filled the pews and lined up along the walls, waiting to see what horrible things the Nazis had in store for them. But the Nazis simply left the synagogue without saying a word, leaving the frightened children to exchange confused looks.
A few moments later, Stephan heard the jangle of keys and the sound of the door being locked from the outside. Then he smelled the gas. The eternal light (ner tamid), located in front of the ark and symbolizing God’s enduring presence, had been smashed; the gas line that fed the flame had been cut. A steady stream of gas was flowing through the broken pipe and into the synagogue filled with children. If they did not escape from the confined space—and quickly—they would all die.
Some of the older boys desperately tried to break down the heavy door, but it wouldn’t budge. When the children realized they couldn’t get out, their fear turned to panic. Many of them, crying and screaming, started coughing and choking from the fumes.
One of the older boys picked up a chair and began smashing it against the beautiful windows. Stephan and some other boys joined in, and working together, they were able to break out several tall panes. The openings allowed fresh air to come in and the fumes to begin to dissipate. The children remained locked inside the synagogue for the rest of the day, until a concerned neighborhood policeman came by and let them out.
Two days later, the orphans were directed by staff members to return to school. Those orphanage staff members who had been released from custody seemed eager to bring some normalcy back to the children’s lives. “Pick up your lunches and go to school,” they told the orphans. “Life goes on.”
The sights Stephan saw on that two-mile walk would stay with him for the rest of his life. Buildings were burnt shells; stores had been looted; Torah scrolls and prayer shawls lay crumpled in the streets. Armed Nazis patrolled corners and rooftops. Jewish men, forced to sweep up in front of their destroyed stores and homes, were beaten and jeered as they worked.
Shortly after Stephan and the other boys from the orphanage reached the school and took their seats in their classroom, a uniformed Nazi came into the room to lecture the children about the “mixing of our pure Aryan race.” He announced that Jewish children could no longer attend “Aryan state” elementary schools. “You have to leave this school now,” he said.
Puzzled but not daring to ask questions, Stephan and the other Jewish students quietly collected their things and left. Back at the orphanage, the administrators had also just been informed of this new policy. A building on Kaiserstrasse—about a forty-minute walk from the orphanage through downtown Berlin—was soon designated as an all-Jewish school.
By then, the children were all well aware that anti-Semitism surrounded them any time they ventured outside. There was no escaping it in Germany’s capital city and no way to prevent the inevitable: it followed them to their new school. On most afternoons, the students were confronted by uniformed Hitler Youth, lined up in rows on either side of the sidewalk for about one hundred feet. Swinging their leather belts overhead, they whipped the students—who were forced to run the gauntlet—with the buckle ends like cattle. Policemen stood by and watched, but did nothing other than stop the Jews from trying to defend themselves.
Thirteen-year-old Stephan understood that his life had changed. This realization was confirmed when he went home the following Sunday and told his father about the night of horror at the orphanage and about the other appalling things he had seen. It wasn’t only happening in Berlin, his father told him in hushed, tense whispers, but all across Germany. Although Jewish newspapers and magazines had been ordered to cease publication, he had heard that hundreds of synagogues had been destroyed. Thousands of Jews were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
Two Gestapo agents had come to pick him up the other night, Arthur said, when he was out taking tobacco orders from his customers. Jewish men were being arrested in their own homes for no reason, he explained; the Nazis would show up late at night, when they thought people would be in bed. When they came for Arthur, Johanna told the men she didn’t know when he would be back. They waited for an hour before leaving. When would they return? Afraid even to be home, Arthur had begun leaving in the early evening and walking the streets most of the night. He and Johanna had worked out a signal. If men were waiting, she would place the parakeet’s cage in the window, and Arthur would keep walking. If he didn’t see the cage, it was safe to come up.
They had decided it was time to get out of Germany, he told his son. Johanna had a distant cousin living in Boston. Though they had never met, she had written him to see if he would be able to sponsor the three of them for entry into America. Stephan’s father explained that they would be submitting visa applications to the U.S. State Department. It was still possible for Jews to leave Germany as long as they didn’t take any money or other assets. But the emigration doors could slam shut at any time; America’s policy could change as well. Adding to these uncertainties, the German government had recently started civilian rationing of meat, coffee, and butter. Arthur took that as a sign that all-out war was imminent. If they didn’t leave soon, he feared that they might never be able to get out.
Part of the visa process involved an appointment at the U.S. consulate for medical exams to ensure the applicants were not carriers of infectious diseases and were otherwise in good health. Johanna and Stephan passed, but Arthur was notified that he had failed because of his high blood pressure. He would go on medication, change his diet, and try again to pass the exam, but it would take time.
Arthur and Johanna broke the news to Stephan during his next Sunday visit. Though he was disappointed to hear that they would not be leaving Germany any time soon, the thought that they would not all be together made Stephan feel even worse. He had thought a lot about what it would be like to be part of a family again, to live at home with parents instead of at the orphanage. Emigration to the United States had offered more than safety—it was a chance to again live under the same roof with his parents at long last.
“You know how concerned we are for your safety?” asked Johanna.
Yes, Stephan did know.
It had become increasingly dangerous for Jews to remain in Germany, Arthur said. He and Johanna had decided to send Stephan out of the country ahead of them. “We are taking advantage of a plan offered through the orphanage,” he said.
“What kind of plan?” Stephan asked.
His father explained that European countries like England, Denmark, Holland, and France were admitting unaccompanied Jewish children as refugees. He had learned from Auerbach administrators of arrangements they were making to send some children to Paris, where they would be cared for by a Jewish rescue organization. He had already signed Stephan up. It would be safer for him in France, said his father.
“Leave Germany without you?”
Stephan realized his dream of reuniting with his parents was lost.
His father promised that they would join him as soon as possible in France—or possibly in America. “We’ll see. We will write each other.”
On July 4, 1939, Arthur and Johanna took Stephan to Berlin’s cavernous Anhalter Bahnhof railroad station. There, they found a group of about forty boys and their chaperons off in one corner. Stephan knew about a dozen of the children from the orphanage. As relatives said their good-byes, many of the younger boys were laughing, joking with each other about the great adventure they would soon embark on. Aware of the trip’s implications, Stephan stayed silent.
None of the adults present, including Arthur and Johanna, revealed to their children any foreboding that they might not ever see each other again. Of course, as the situation in Germany worsened daily, the grown-ups knew this was a possibility. Arthur had had to sign a conservatorship document assigning the legal responsibility for Stephan’s welfare to the rescue organization until he was eighteen. Even without parental permission, the organization would be free to take Stephan to wherever they felt he would be safe.
As the group moved toward the train platform, Stephan heard his father calling out to him: “Be sure to behave.”
Stephan went back to the last car as the train pulled out of the station, and looked out a frost-covered window at Berlin, fading into the distance behind him. With his finger, he drew three X’s in the condensation on the pane. The triple X was a well-known German sign of displeasure. It would be left, for instance, by a customer on the check at a restaurant after a bad meal, signifying that he would not come back.
Stephan was a German, but he was also a Jew. And after what he had already lived through in his young life, he never wanted to return to Germany.
2 (#ulink_6ff31dc6-4f94-5c06-92b5-4c3763ddb864)
ESCAPING THE NAZIS (#ulink_6ff31dc6-4f94-5c06-92b5-4c3763ddb864)
By January 1939, hundreds of the Jews interned at Dachau concentration camp after the Kristallnacht roundups two months earlier had already died, casualties of SS brutality or the vile conditions. After being forced by camp officials to sign over title to his mother’s home, Martin Selling didn’t think he would leave alive. He had every reason to believe the rumors he heard that the crematories in Munich were working day and night to process the corpses from Dachau, a result of the major influx of Jews into the camp beginning in November 1938.
But some Jewish prisoners were luckier—about half of those brought in after the roundups had been released to ease overcrowding, with priority given to those who could prove they had a way to get out of Germany. The population decrease in the camp meant there were now enough thin blankets to go around; each inmate could have his own during the frigid nights. Martin found some sewing kits and put his tailoring skills to work, repairing the straw mattresses and prison uniforms. He also gathered some of the cleaning cloths used to prepare the barracks for inspections and sewed them together into a long-sleeved undershirt. Wearing his new shirt under the lightweight prisoner garb helped cut the chill. When the other prisoners saw what he had done, they asked him to make undershirts for them, too. The guards began to notice the shortage. Word spread that at the next inspection, the guards would be looking for the missing cloths, and anyone found with them would be punished. Martin collected all the undershirts he had made, took out the seams, and folded them so as to hide the alterations. When the guards searched, they found only neat piles of cleaning rags, which had somehow reappeared.
The highlight of each day came after the evening meal, when the guards posted a list of the prisoners who would be processed for release the next day. Every day Martin hoped his name would be on the list, and every day he was disappointed. By the time his name appeared—January 27, 1939—he was the last of the nine men who had come in with him on the transport from Nuremberg still at Dachau. His friend Ernst Dingfelder, who had tried so hard to stay kosher in Dachau, had been let out a few days earlier.
Martin didn’t sleep at all that night. Each day had been spent just trying to survive. What lay ahead now? he wondered. As he lay awake, he thought about other inmates, men whose names might never appear on the list.
Another friend he had made at Dachau, Alois Stangl, had been a deckhand on a Danube river barge. He was thirty-five years old, but after five years at Dachau, he looked fifty. Although Stangl was a German Aryan, he had been an outspoken member of the Socialist Party, which meant the Nazis considered him an enemy of the regime. His sister was married to a fervent Nazi official, who had denounced Stangl to the party, leading to his arrest. His release would be an embarrassment to the man who had put him there, he told Martin. Alois Stangl saw no chance of ever getting out of Dachau alive.
The next morning, Martin and the fifty other men being released that day were taken to the communal shower room, where they stripped and showered. Next, they went for a medical examination with a singular purpose: anyone with evidence of maltreatment or injury had to wait until their wounds healed, else they be used to corroborate claims of physical abuse. Martin was pulled aside because of a long scar on his right knee, which he explained to the doctor was an old injury. The SS physician seemed skeptical. Martin had to show he had full range of motion in his knee before he was allowed to continue on.
To the surprise of Martin and the others, the prisoners were handed bags marked with their names; inside were the clothes they had been wearing upon arrival. After they dressed, an SS officer lectured them about the threat of reincarceration if they spoke publicly about Dachau. He also reminded them that they were Jews, not Germans, a refrain that had been drilled into them daily, often while they were being beaten by the guards.
Martin had grown up with Judaism as his religion and German as his nationality. His family celebrated Jewish religious holidays as well as German national holidays. Their ancestral roots in the country went back centuries, and the family included men such as his mother’s brothers, Hugo and Julius Laub, who had fought for the German empire in the trenches of World War I and were proud, patriotic Germans. As Manfred Steinfeld’s uncles, Solomon and Arthur, had also once believed, Martin’s uncles held on to the hope even after Hitler rose to power that their country would not turn on its veterans. But for Germany’s Jewish veterans that was not to be. It had been forcefully impressed upon Martin and his uncles, as well as Manfred and his uncles, and thousands like them, in countless insidious ways, that they were no longer Germans.
Calling the prisoners about to be released verdammte Saujuden (damn dirty Jews), the SS officer warned, “After you leave Germany, the louder you complain abroad, the less likely will you be believed.”
The prisoners boarded the train at the same platform from which they had arrived. A number of armed SS guards boarded with them. Although they were told that they were no longer in custody, but were merely being escorted to Munich, Martin and the others were afraid to show relief or any other emotion. They remained silent. Lulled by the rhythmic sound of the train on the tracks, an exhausted Martin, who had not slept in forty-eight hours, struggled to keep his eyes open. He was about to lose the battle and drift off when a prisoner sitting across from him let out a sharp cry. Martin’s bleary eyes darted open. The man was holding his bloodied nose. The SS had to get in a last lick.
“No one falls asleep in my presence!” hollered the guard who had struck the sleeping man with the butt of his rifle. “So you thought you were already rid of us?”
After that, no one dared to close his eyes. Even after the released prisoners had been turned over to the reception committee from the Jewish Community Council at the Munich station, even after the guards had long since departed, Martin kept looking over his shoulder to see if they were being followed by SS or Gestapo goons.
The next day, Martin took a train to Nuremberg, where he was met by his mother’s sister, Isa Laub. He learned it was Aunt Isa who had secured his release from Dachau; she had sent to the authorities documentation showing he had been accepted to a large, newly formed Jewish refugee camp in England and could emigrate immediately. She told Martin he would be allowed to remain in England until he was able to secure a visa to the United States.
Shortly after his mother’s death in 1936, Martin had applied for a visa to the United States and had begun learning English at a private language institute. The other students were all Jews, who hoped similarly to reach America. With so many wanting to flee Germany, his name was still on a long waiting list for America.
Aunt Isa, who invited Martin to stay with her until he left for England, had some tragic family news. Martin’s father’s brother, Siegfried Selling, a bachelor in his fifties, had been arrested in Nuremberg on Kristallnacht and kept for two days at Gestapo headquarters. There, he had been questioned about his non-Jewish housekeeper, a violation of one of the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited Jews from employing non-Jews, and badly beaten. When Uncle Siegfried was released, he returned to his apartment and took his own life by hanging. Aunt Isa had also heard about her late sister’s house in Lehrberg being sold. Martin told her about the papers he had been forced to sign in Dachau.
Martin had a picture taken, which showed his telltale concentration camp haircut, and took it to the passport office in Nuremberg. On the visa application form, he wrote his full name, Martin Ignatz Selling, and checked the box for Jude. The passport clerk rejected his form, explaining that under the Nuremberg Laws, his middle name must be recognizable as Jewish. The clerk did not think Ignatz qualified. In the absence of such a middle name, he said, all Jewish males must use “Israel,” and all females “Sarah.”
Martin had not been overly alarmed when the Nuremberg Laws were first enacted in 1935. At the time, he was leading an unobtrusive, simple life working for a Munich tailor, and had no interest in politics. He was terribly wrong, he knew now. These dangerous laws declared Jews and other non-Aryans racially inferior and robbed them of their German citizenship. The laws were designed by the Nazis not only to discriminate against Jews; they were meant to keep the Aryan race pure by outlawing racially mixed marriages between Germans and Jews. Martin had seen the disastrous results of the prejudice and hatred they bred, both in and out of Dachau. He had seen the brutality of the Nazis close up, witnessing innocents being killed for no reason except that they were Jews or other “enemies” whom Hitler and his henchmen considered inferior and undesirable. At Dachau, he had believed he would end up a victim, too. Even though he had been among the lucky ones to make it out of the concentration camp alive, he knew he was still not safe.
The wait to pick up his passport grew nerve-racking as his scheduled departure date inched closer. Less than two weeks before he was to leave, Martin was finally able to pick up his new passport. His name was listed as “Martin Israel Selling,” and there was a big red “J” stamped next to his grim picture. Also stamped on the passport: “Gut nur für Auswanderung!” (Good For Emigration Only!) Martin hurried to the foreign consulates to get visas to transit Belgium and enter England.
In late June 1939, Martin joined a group of eighty German Jews assembled in Cologne by an international relief agency. Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, spread along both banks of the Rhine less than fifty miles from the border with Belgium. The plan was for the men to travel together in a special passenger rail car attached to an express train, cross into Belgium, and head directly to the coastal city of Ostend, where they would take a ferry across the English Channel to Dover. A bus would then take them to the refugee camp in Kent, England.
But when the train was halted at the border with Belgium, the German authorities ordered that the rail car with the Jews be detached and pushed onto a siding. Soon, it was swarming with Gestapo agents in black leather coats and helmeted SS soldiers, who ordered everyone out. Martin and the other men were taken into a nearby warehouse and subjected to thorough body searches; their luggage was opened and rifled through. While this was happening, the interior of the rail car was checked for hidden contraband.
This went on for close to six hours. At last, they were allowed to reboard, and the rail car was coupled to another train about to depart. Within minutes, they had crossed the border into the lush, rolling countryside of eastern Belgium. Their destination, the port of Ostend, lay three hundred miles to the west.
Only now did Martin allow himself to believe he was out of danger. At the border, he had been dead certain he and the others were about to be taken into custody. Since his arrest on November 10, 1938, he had been trapped in an unending nightmare. His release from Dachau had not relieved the tension and anxiety he felt living in the country he had once thought of as his homeland. But now that he had finally made it out of Nazi Germany, he was both relieved and exhausted.
Mesmerized by the clickety-clacking of the tracks, his body went limp. He fell into a stupor, the deepest sleep he had enjoyed in months. He stayed sprawled across the seat until the conductor gently shook him awake; the man wanted to know, strangely, whether he was all right.
“I am now,” said a groggy Martin, who then went back to sleep.
Growing up in Berlin, Werner Angress often wondered why he was blond and blue eyed and the other Jewish boys were not. And why did he do well in athletics but not academics, like so many of them?
Born in 1920, Werner was the oldest of three boys. His brother Fritz was younger by three years, and Hans by eight. His parents, Ernst and Henny Angress, were third-generation Berliners whose forebears had been bourgeois Prussians. They had married relatively late, at thirty-six and twenty-seven, respectively, and were solidly middle class with little formal education. In other ways, they were a study in contrasts. Henny was outgoing and fun to be around. She loved to give parties, dance the polka, and sing Schubert songs at the grand piano in their apartment. A brunette with dark brown eyes, she was always well dressed and coiffed. In contrast, Ernst was balding and rotund, the managing director of a bank. He favored conservative three-piece suits and was a conscientious businessman who espoused Old World virtues and demanded precise accounting, even of household expenditures. Though he could be upset by something as small as the cost of dinner ingredients, he was incapable of denying his attractive wife a new dress or sweater.
At the same time, he managed to teach his sons the value of money. When Werner was ten years old, he asked what it meant to be Prussian. His father didn’t hesitate. Responsibility, he told his son. Honor. Thrift.
For young Werner, who wanted so much to please his father by striving for those upstanding qualities, meeting them in his schoolwork did not come easily. Though he earned high marks in reading, writing, and gymnastics—even leading his school squad to a regional championship—he earned Ds and Fs in geometry, algebra, physics, and chemistry. In middle school, he was barely promoted to the next grade, and his parents received a letter warning that he would have to repeat eighth grade if his work didn’t improve.
Going to school became even more uncomfortable for Werner after January 30, 1933. On that cold, rainy Monday, he rode his bicycle home past the newsstand at the Botanical Garden train station and saw blaring headlines announcing that Hitler had been appointed chancellor. On the same day, three hundred miles away in the hamlet of Josbach, Manfred Steinfeld was hearing the “wonderful” news from the physician treating his sick grandmother.
When Werner reached the apartment, he was surprised to see his father home early from work. A friend of his father’s was visiting, and both men, along with Werner’s mother, were in the living room, cracking jokes about Hitler.
“Hitler was running back and forth in the state chancery opening all the desk drawers and cabinets,” said Werner’s father. “When asked what he was looking for, Hitler answered, ‘My government program.’ ”
Ernst added confidently, “He won’t last two weeks,” expressing a point of view about Hitler that many Germans held at that time.
His mother said she had heard a good one at the fish store. “Know what a Hitler herring is? You take a herring, remove its brain, tear its mouth wide open, and you have a Hitler herring.”
This was the last time Werner heard his parents joke about Hitler.
When Werner stepped into the room, his father asked how the kids at school had reacted to the news. Werner said they had not known before school let out. Uninterested in any further discussion of politics, he went to his room.
The next day at school, Werner could feel the tension as soon as he walked into the classroom. His teacher hadn’t shown up yet, and in his place at the podium was one of the students in his Hitler Youth uniform. When the boy spotted Werner, he instructed the class to shout in unison, “Wake up, Germany! Death to the Jews!” He received a round of applause.
Werner felt the eyes of his classmates following him as he took his seat, his knees suddenly wobbly, a red-hot blush spreading across his face. With his blond hair and blue eyes, he was accustomed to not being identified as Jewish, and to be singled out was extremely uncomfortable. Like everyone else, he raised his arm to give the obligatory German salute and shout “Heil Hitler!” at the beginning of each class. None of his classmates had ever commented about his doing so; in fact, Werner knew, not doing so would make him a spectacle.
When the twenty-four-hour boycott of Jewish-owned businesses was staged two months later, Werner’s mother made a point of shopping at a Jewish sewing store for items she didn’t really need. She brought Werner with her, and they passed SA brownshirts taking photos of anyone entering the store. Inside, Henny found a packet of needles and Werner picked out a spool of thread. They left, his mother holding her head high, Werner beside her, hoping none of his friends had seen him in a ladies’ sewing store.
Later, out of sheer curiosity, Werner went downtown to watch a large Nazi rally. At first, he couldn’t see over the crowd—he was a thirteen-year-old boy among adults—but the next thing he knew a helpful bystander had hoisted him up several rungs of a ladder. From his perch, he easily saw to the front of the rally, where uniformed Nazis were waving torches and flags. He heard their amplified voices yelling hateful slogans, each of which was loudly cheered by the enthusiastic crowd.
“A bunch of dirty Jews!”
“Throw them out of our Fatherland!”
“Send them off to Jerusalem, but first cut off their legs so they can’t come back!”
Werner climbed down from the ladder and headed home.
On the first Yom Kippur after the Nazis’ ascent to power, Werner went with his parents to synagogue, which he had attended since age ten. As the worshippers made their way toward the tall, imposing temple, uniformed storm troopers crowded the sidewalks, shouting catcalls and insults as the Jews walked past. Tucked between his mother and father, Werner was frightened not only by the Nazis but by the fear he saw etched on the faces of his parents and the other Jews who walked with them.
At the synagogue, Werner followed his parents to their seats. Soon he would become a bar mitzvah in this same temple, although he had yet to learn the short prayer he had to recite, let alone the passage he was to read in Hebrew from the Torah.
That night, two Nazis sat behind the congregation to monitor the sermon. The young rabbi, Dr. Manfred Swarsensky, spoke explicitly about the political turmoil taking place across Germany. Condemning the outrages being committed daily by the Nazis, he quoted, in conclusion, the New Testament and the dying words of Christ on the crucifix.
“Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Nearly everyone in the congregation was weeping. Werner kept a steady gaze on the rabbi, this holy man who had dared to speak up publicly before the Nazis when so many others remained silent. Werner knew he was hearing something special from a very brave man. He watched to see if the young rabbi was arrested by the two Nazis after his sermon, but to the boy’s relief he wasn’t.
When the 1933–34 school year began, a substitute teacher in Werner’s biology class paused the lesson to advocate for the superiority of an Aryan master race. To demonstrate what he meant, he tried to show how different skull shapes dictated various racial characteristics. At one point, he pointed to Werner, who always sat in front of the class because he was nearsighted and didn’t want to wear glasses.
“This boy has a typical Aryan skull. Just look at its shape. Exactly the same sort of head as Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels.”
Uproarious laughter erupted from the students, who knew that the visiting teacher had picked out the one Jew in the class. Several of the kids came up to Werner after class, not to make fun of him but to ridicule the teacher and the nonsense they were being fed by Nazi teachers.
After Hitler came to power, most Jewish children and teenagers attending German public schools eventually transferred to private Jewish schools. Werner did not. Instead, his education stopped at age sixteen. No one considered Werner too slow witted for higher education, least of all his parents, but he was simply not motivated. He had seldom been challenged; at school, his unimaginative teachers had seemed more concerned with going through the prescribed curriculum than with getting students interested in the material.
Werner told his father he wanted to leave school and learn a trade. Ernst knew that, based on his grades, Werner would not be attending university, and he agreed that there was thus little reason for him to continue in school. He encouraged Werner to look for a field not barred to Jews, which he could enter after he finished the term in spring 1936.
Werner wasn’t interested in working in retail, but he liked animals and hit upon the idea of working at a zoo. Perhaps, he thought, with the optimism characteristic of youth, he might one day lead an expedition to darkest Africa and capture exotic creatures.
Rather than dismiss the idea out of hand, his father helped him write a letter to the director of the Berlin zoo, inquiring about an apprenticeship. The director wrote a polite letter in return, thanking Werner for his interest but pointing out that, under the Nuremberg Laws, he was prohibited from hiring non-Aryans to work at the zoo.
“You see,” said Ernst, “even the chimpanzees are anti-Semitic now.”
One Sunday afternoon, Ernst invited him out on a walk. Werner knew this was how his father liked to have serious talks; out of earshot of the two younger boys—Fritz, thirteen, and Hans, eight—as well as his wife, he could speak more freely.
They strolled down Willdenowstraße, beside the botanical gardens, under old trees, and past the sprawling villa of Reichsminister Walther Darré, a member of Hitler’s cabinet. Black-uniformed SS soldiers stood on guard outside. Other well-known Berlin neighbors were Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who had once lived above a delicatessen on Reichskanzlerplatz, and Hermann Goering, whose old apartment was in a nondescript building on the corner of Kaiserdamm, but none had been as interesting to the neighborhood children as boxer Max Schmeling’s mother, whom Werner once talked into giving him a signed picture of her famous son.
On their walk, in a voice trembling with emotion, Ernst told his son that he could not stay in Germany. The Nazis, he said, had taken away their rights and honor. He was convinced that the younger generation of Jews to which Werner and his brothers belonged no longer had a future there, and must make a life elsewhere. His own generation, his father said, would likely have to stick it out in Germany; resettling at their age and position in life was difficult. He told Werner to keep looking for a trade he wanted to learn, and promised to help him find some practical training, preferably abroad. Werner loved the sound of going “abroad” and looked forward to having an adventure.
Two weeks later, Werner’s father showed him an item in a Jewish newspaper announcing the start of a training farm for prospective Jewish emigrants. Located in western Poland, the farm trained boys and girls over the age of sixteen in agricultural, animal husbandry, and teaching crafts in preparation for emigration to other countries. The sound of working outside and with animals was to Werner’s liking, and he applied. On April 1, 1936, days after finishing the school term, he was called in for an interview with Curt Bondy, the forty-two-year-old psychologist and social educator who headed the program.
The only question Werner would remember from the fifteen-minute interview was Bondy asking him how he felt about being Jewish. Since Werner knew nothing about Bondy’s own position on the subject, he gave a very cautious answer, attesting mainly to attending temple with his parents on holidays. In truth, he had nothing to worry about; Bondy was Jewish, and had been a university teacher until the Nazis fired him in 1933.
A few days later, Werner got a call telling him he had been accepted. The next month, his mother took him to the train station. Their parting was quick and painless, as Werner had been assured he would be able to come home for regular visits. Henny was pleased that her son had the opportunity to learn a trade that would help him emigrate, and Werner was filled with thoughts of forthcoming travel and adventures.
Gross Breesen was a former knight’s manor owned by a Polish Jew who had purchased the property after World War I and was leasing it to Bondy’s group. Upon arrival, Werner found himself in the middle of rolling hills, surrounded by groves of fruit trees and cultivated fields. A large manor stood apart from the livestock barns. The setting looked ideal to Werner; here, he could learn farming and work with animals. He joined more than fifty boys and girls, nearly all of them German Jews, living in the stately manor in the middle of nowhere, with modern conveniences like electric lights, central heating, and bathrooms with hot and cold running water.
Unlike in school, Werner found a real purpose in what he learned at Gross Breesen. From his first six-week training assignment in the dairy barn—up at 4 A.M. every day to feed the cows, milk them by hand, separate the cream, churn the butter—to training in carpentry, hoeing out the weeds in the potato and turnip fields, harvesting crops, and driving horse teams, the lessons, labors, and camaraderie with instructors and trainees alike suited him. The long workdays ordinarily lasted until 6 P.M., although at harvest time they kept working well past sunset, picking crops in the moonlight.
The next year and a half went by quickly for Werner. He learned to farm, grew taller and sturdier, and gained new confidence. Then, in October 1937, a few months after his seventeenth birthday, he received an ominous postcard from his father.
My dear son, I am writing you at this unusual time for a reason. I must speak to you, and ask you to come to Berlin. Don’t ask questions. We will talk about it when you’re here. A big kiss, Papa.
It sounded serious, though Werner had no idea what it could mean. The next Saturday, he took the train to Berlin and went straight to his family’s apartment on Holsteinische Straße. His mother was there alone; his two brothers were out with friends. Henny was clearly happy to see him, but she seemed nervous and distressed. Werner soon found out why.
Papa had decided, Henny told her son, that the entire family had to get out of Germany. It was no longer safe for them to stay. Almost breathlessly, she described their escape plan. Werner’s head spun, trying to take it all in. His banker father, always so honorable in his financial dealings, planned to smuggle the family’s money to Amsterdam, thereby violating the strict national currency laws put in place by the Third Reich to stop emigrating Jews from taking their assets with them. If they were caught, the consequences would be severe.
Werner’s mother said Papa was in Amsterdam that very day, making final arrangements, and he would return to Berlin by Sunday. On the Friday of the following week, she and the two younger boys were to leave Germany, quite legally, as tourists visiting Amsterdam. They would each carry only the allowable ten marks. The next day, Werner was to fly with his father from Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport to Amsterdam, taking only carry-on baggage, so as not to arouse suspicions. A few days later, a Jewish moving company would empty out the apartment and ship their furnishings to them in Holland.
Werner Angress, sixteen, at Gross Breesen, 1936. (Family photograph)
Werner’s first inclination was not to join his family on their desperate journey. He had already discussed with Bondy the possibility of settling elsewhere with friends from Gross Breesen—perhaps even in America, where Bondy was talking about setting up a new agricultural training operation. Werner told his mother he didn’t want to wait around for his father to return, that he needed to get back to Gross Breesen. He left soon after for the railroad station, where he caught the next train.
When he arrived back at the farm, Werner told Bondy of his father’s audacious escape plan and his own desire to stay at Gross Breesen. Bondy didn’t say anything as Werner spoke. When he finished, Bondy explained that he was going to Berlin the next day, and that they would speak upon his return.
Two days later, Bondy called Werner into his office. He had spoken with colleagues in Berlin, and they had all agreed it would not be possible for Werner to stay at Gross Breesen after his parents fled Germany. The authorities would soon learn that his father had taken their money out of the country; they would most likely arrest Werner and hold him until his father returned to face criminal charges. That could put the entire Gross Breesen program in danger.
Bondy’s next news sent a jolt of surprise through Werner. He had met with Ernst while in Berlin, Bondy said. He advised the conflicted young man to do what his father expected of him. Ernst understood Werner’s feelings about Gross Breesen and promised to consider any future settlement plans. Given all that was happening, Bondy said Werner could hardly expect more generosity from his father. For his part, Bondy promised to include Werner in any plans for a new agricultural settlement in the United States or elsewhere.
Werner realized that Bondy was right. He had reacted like an impetuous teenager. If his father felt so strongly that the family needed to get out of Germany, the danger must be great indeed. In such perilous times, he belonged with his family.
On Friday, October 29, 1937, Werner took an overnight train to Berlin, where he met his father at the station café. They embraced warmly, and over a quick breakfast, his father calmly explained that Mutti and the two boys, Fritz and Hans, had left the day before and were now safely out of the country.
What Ernst did not tell his son—for Werner’s own good, in the event that he was questioned—was that a young German woman had arrived that morning at their apartment with an empty briefcase. She was there to pick up the currency Ernst had brought home from the bank the night before and hidden under his mattress. Together, they packed a hundred thousand bundled-up Reichmarks (then worth about forty thousand U.S. dollars) into the briefcase.
Ernst had offered the young woman money for a taxi, but she demurred; taxis, she told him, could get into traffic accidents. It would be better if she took a streetcar to the train station. And then she was gone. After turning over his family’s entire life savings to a complete stranger, Ernst wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. But it was done; there was no turning back. The money-smuggling operation, which was based in Amsterdam, would receive 10 percent of whatever currency made it there. True to his upstanding character, Ernst had withdrawn only his own money and left the bank’s other deposits untouched.
From the café, Werner and his father took a taxi to Tempelhof Airport in south Berlin. Werner had all his clothes and about a dozen books stuffed into two suitcases, while his father carried a small bag suitable for a short trip. At the airport, which had four or five departure gates, Werner followed his father. At their gate, his father showed their airplane tickets to two men wearing long trench coats and derby hats, which everyone knew was the favorite attire of Gestapo agents, who were now closely monitoring all modes of transportation out of Germany.
Asked the purpose of their trip to Holland—they both had valid passports that bore the red “J”—Ernst said he was taking his son to Amsterdam, where Werner was to enroll in special agricultural training. The Gestapo men searched his bag, then allowed Ernst to pass through. After Werner’s bags were searched, he joined his father in the waiting area.
Before they sat down, they heard an announcement over the terminal’s loudspeaker: the plane for Amsterdam had been unable to take off from Dresden due to heavy fog. Passengers bound for Amsterdam could either wait until the next day’s flight or take the train that night.
Flights were departing from other gates for Copenhagen and Paris. Ernst knew it would look suspicious if they suddenly changed their destination to Denmark or France. They had given the Gestapo agents a specific reason why they were traveling to Holland.
“We’ll take the night train to Amsterdam,” he told Werner.
Since the train did not leave until midnight and it was now only noontime, they had a long wait. During their time together, Werner learned more about what had finally compelled his father to get the family out of Germany. New restrictions on Jews were being enacted all the time, he said, including the confiscation of their properties and assets. Germany was witnessing the “gradual strangulation of Jewish businesses.” Ernst feared that sooner or later there would be no opportunity for carrying on business and no way for him to make a living. Under the Nazis, he feared the family would eventually end up paupers with no place to go.
After sitting in a neighborhood café for a while, his father suggested they go see a movie. Dragging their bags along, they took a taxi to the cinema and settled into seats for a film, which was preceded by a newsreel entitled “Papi’s Fortieth Birthday.” It turned out that “Papi” was Joseph Goebbels, who had just turned forty. He was shown celebrating with his wife, Magda, and their young children, who presented bouquets of flowers to the beaming Nazi propaganda minister.
It was all too much for Ernst. He whispered to Werner that he should stay and watch the movie; they could meet afterward at the nearby apartment of his good friend Leo Gerson, to whom he wished to say good-bye.
Werner decided it was a good thing his father had left. The movie was about police chasing bank robbers in Amsterdam.
A surprise awaited Werner when he reached Leo Gerson’s apartment. Before he’d even had time to take off his jacket, his father told him there’d been a change of plans. Werner was to take a taxi to the train station and board the sleeping car, on which his father had reserved a private compartment. Once there, he would tip the conductor two Reichmarks and tell him that his father had been delayed in Berlin on business and wouldn’t be making the trip.
“I am to go to Amsterdam alone? What do you plan to do, Papa?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ernst answered.
His father said only that they would meet up in Amsterdam, and hurriedly sent Werner on his way with money for expenses. Shortly after Werner left, Ernst went to the same railway station, but to a different platform, and took a train heading in the opposite direction. He had a plan, of course, but had thought it was best for them both if he kept Werner in the dark. Ernst had also decided it was safer for them to travel apart. As he’d expected them to be on that morning’s flight to Amsterdam, he had advised his longtime secretary, Else Radinowsky, and the bank’s owner, Leo Königsberger, to report the missing funds to police that afternoon, so they wouldn’t be suspected as co-conspirators. When the flight to Amsterdam was canceled, Ernst had decided against contacting either his secretary or the bank’s owner, for fear of their becoming entangled in his crime. By now, they had likely notified police that the missing Jewish director of the Königsberger and Lichtenhein Bank had withdrawn all of his personal capital and was apparently fleeing the country. If that was the case, the authorities would try anything they could to stop him.
Ernst’s fears were justified. By that afternoon, his colleagues had reported the missing money, and the police in turn had notified customs officials, who sent out telegrams to all border crossing stations reading: “Family of five named Angress to be arrested.”
As he boarded the midnight train, Werner didn’t know any of this. He followed his father’s detailed instructions: he tipped the conductor and said his father would not be joining him as originally planned. The conductor asked for his passport, and Werner handed it over. In the sleeping compartment, Werner undressed and lay down on the lower bunk. Exhausted, he fell asleep before the train had even left the station.
A few hours later, the train stopped in the dark at Bentheim-Grenze, the last station in Germany before the Dutch border. Werner was still asleep when the light came on in the compartment; he awakened to three men standing next to his bunk. One was the conductor he had tipped. The other two wore trench coats and derbies—one of them held Werner’s passport, which he was studying intently.
Your last name is Angress? he asked in German.
A groggy Werner said yes.
Where is your father?
Without hesitating, Werner coolly lied as his father had instructed him and said he was in Berlin.
After further questioning, the Gestapo left the compartment and went into the corridor for a short conversation. They had been advised to be on the lookout for a family of five, not a teenage boy traveling alone. They handed Werner’s passport back to the conductor and left.
The train soon started rolling again. Werner dressed quickly and was given back his passport by the conductor, who said his shift was about to end.
In a few minutes, the train stopped at Oldenzaal, the first station in Holland. Only when the new conductor, speaking German with a Dutch accent, greeted Werner did it register on him that he was out of Germany and traveling in a free country. His mother and brothers were also safe; his one remaining concern was his father. Werner hoped that whatever plan his father had come up with yesterday would also bring him safely to Holland, and that they would find his mother and brothers waiting for them there and be reunited.
In Amsterdam, Werner went directly from the station to the Pension Rosengarten on Beethovenstraat, using directions his father had made him memorize. When he found the address, he saw that it was an old, dark apartment building, filled with newly arrived German Jews who were also waiting to make connections to someplace else. The owner, who was the head of the currency-smuggling ring, had just received a telegram from Ernst, asking if “Werner and Minna” had made it to Amsterdam. “Minna” was code for the briefcase filled with money. The owner was now able to wire Ernst that both Werner and Minna had indeed arrived safely.
It took Ernst another week to reach Amsterdam. To avoid arrest, he followed an agonizingly circuitous route. From Berlin, he had taken the train to Prague. When he arrived at the Czech border, he exited on the wrong side of the train and walked across the tracks, avoiding the German border guards. Entering Czechoslovakia, he identified himself as a Jewish refugee from Germany. He assured the Czech border guards that he was en route to Holland via Austria, Switzerland, and France—a path German refugees called the “Jewish Southern Loop”—and thus avoided being sent back.
In Amsterdam, the family was finally reunited. Yet, for weeks after they had moved into a rented apartment, Ernst struggled to put the ordeal behind him. He had done things in an effort to get his family out of Germany that he had never thought he was capable of doing. He had not only broken the law for the first time in his life, but in doing so, he had subjected his wife and sons to dangers as well. Adding to these deep blows to his self-esteem, Ernst had to reckon with all that the family had left behind in the city and country of their birth. There was their home and all their belongings, which Ernst heard had been seized by the Gestapo, and the respectable reputation he had built in his profession. There were also their extended families and ancestral burial sites, all left behind. No matter how safe they were outside Germany, there were so many things they could not replace or replicate elsewhere.
Werner was nearly inconsolable, too. He’d left all his friends in such a hurry that he hadn’t even been able to say good-byes. After the financial crimes his father had committed, he would never be able to return to Gross Breesen or Germany. Like it or not, he was in exile, too. He talked about this with his father, who understood how he felt. He had always been a German patriot, Ernst told his son. When he was in the army in the last war, he had volunteered to go to the front to take part in the fighting, and had been disappointed when he was assigned to military base duty because of a hearing disorder. But now—
“Hitler and the Nazis aren’t letting us be Germans anymore,” Ernst said bitterly. “They have humiliated and degraded Jews to second-class citizens. For that reason, Werner, Germany is no longer our homeland. I’ll take up a gun against those crooks anytime!”
His own heart made heavier by his father’s sorrow and deep sense of betrayal, Werner had no idea how soon the day would come when he, rather than his father, would be taking up arms in just that fight.
Stephan Lewy’s train ride out of Germany landed him and the other Jewish orphans from Berlin on the outskirts of Quincy-sous-Sénart, a French village of fifteen hundred residents about twenty miles south of Paris. The boys were awestruck as they approached their new home, a majestic old château owned by Count Hubert Conquéré de Monbrison. The count and his wife, Princess Irina Paley, a cousin of the last Russian czar, had for years opened the château to refugee girls from the Russian and Spanish civil wars, and they had recently been asked by a board member of a Paris-based Jewish children’s aid society, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), to take in German Jewish refugee children, whom the group had been rescuing after Kristallnacht.
When the forty boys arrived from Berlin in July 1939, there were no rooms available in the château; most were already occupied by Spanish girls. For the first several months, while the girls waited to be taken in by local families, the boys had to stay in an annex building, along with instructors and other staff, most of whom were also Jewish refugees.
The boys were enrolled in the village school across the road. Since Stephan and the others didn’t speak French, they were placed in the first grade. Stephan, who was already fourteen years old, picked up the language quickly. And given how good he was at mathematics and geography, he was soon advanced to his grade level.
One of the things he learned in his French history class was that France, a country of forty million, had lost two million men in the last war with Germany. It was a crushing loss, one that still lingered in recent memory. And yet, in spite of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and the rearming of Germany, there existed among the French a cheerful optimism and a strong sense of safety and security. The newly constructed Maginot Line, which consisted of miles of concrete walls, obstacles, and fortifications on the French side of the border with Germany, was believed to be impenetrable. Built to replicate the static defensive combat of the first war, French military experts thought it would protect their country from future German invasions.
From their own experiences with the Nazis, and after the military buildup they had seen in Germany, Stephan and the other Berlin boys did not share the locals’ sense of well-being. Stephan’s father, Arthur, had predicted that Hitler would wage war in the fall, “after the crops are in the barn,” so as to feed his army. This was the same timing Germany had employed in the last war, his father had explained to Stephan before he left Germany. Now Stephan worried about what would happen to his parents, still in Germany, and to himself in France in the event of war.
On September 1, 1939, everyone in the château gathered around the console radio to hear the BBC bulletins about Germany’s invasion of Poland. Columns of horse-mounted Polish cavalry were reported to be charging armored tanks. Two days later, France and England, allies of Poland, declared war on Germany. With the Germans unleashing a new type of modern, highly mobile warfare tactics that became known as blitzkrieg (lightning war), the battle in Poland lasted just weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 27, and a week later the nation of Poland ceased to exist, subjugating thirty-five million Poles, including more than three million Jews, to Nazi rule.
After the fall of Poland, news reports indicated that the warring nations had found themselves in a defensive stalemate, with French and Allied troops manning the Maginot Line and Germans holding the fortified Siegfried Line on their side of the border. In what the British press and politicians labeled the “Phoney War” for its lack of major fighting, for months only minor skirmishes took place. But Stephan was unable to send mail to Berlin or to receive it, and as a result, he lost all contact with his parents after fall 1939.
In May 1940, German troops invaded Belgium and Holland. Deftly bypassing the Maginot Line to the north, the Germans split the French-British-Belgian defensive front and drove Allied forces back to the coast at Dunkirk, where hundreds of small boats ferried more than three hundred thousand evacuees across the English Channel. In the south, German forces broke through the suddenly obsolete Maginot Line, and the blitzkrieg steamrolled into France, headed for Paris and the Normandy coast.
Early one morning, Stephan and the other boys were awakened by the sound of several large vehicles pulling up in front of the château. Jumping from their beds, they ran to the windows and looked out. The large courtyard was filling up with French military trucks and artillery pieces. Within an hour, the French soldiers had set up their big guns, pointing in the direction of their country’s capital. The soldiers waited, ready to try to halt the anticipated German advance after it rolled through Paris. One played an accordion; others idly smoked cigarettes.
At 10 A.M., a clearly distressed Count Monbrison gathered the boys and their instructors. He told them that the Germans were approaching Paris; and he could not guarantee the refugees’ safety. They needed to escape, and he had arranged for two trucks to take them to Limoges, 250 miles to the south. The boys went to their rooms, rolled up their blankets, put a single change of clothes in their backpacks, and went outside to the waiting trucks. They and several instructors piled into the canvas-covered back of the bigger truck; the smaller truck was loaded with their belongings and several bicycles.
Not long after leaving the château, the trucks joined a long line of stalled traffic. The German invasion had set off a mass exodus of civilians in cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, and carts, clogging the highways and secondary roads leading south. After four hours, the two trucks had made it just six miles—to the town of Corbeil, where boats and barges of varying sizes and power were motoring westward on the Seine. One instructor left to find a vessel to take them to the coast, in the hope that the waterways would be less congested than the roads. He returned an hour later and took the boys to a nearby péniche, a steel motorized river barge built for moving cargo. The vessel was about a hundred feet long, but just fifteen feet wide; it had limited space above deck for the boys and their instructors. The only available space below deck was a cargo hold half filled with coal. The boys packed into the unlit space atop the coal, and the hatch was closed. The air, thick with coal dust, was nearly unbreathable.
At dawn, the hatch was opened; the boys, blackened with soot from head to toe, came out into daylight. Stephan was surprised to discover that the barge had traveled only a short distance on the river; now it was held up in a line of traffic at a floodgate. It took a few more hours for the barge to pass through. When they finally came to a village, they docked to find food and water.
By about noon, they were back aboard the barge, ready to get underway. Suddenly, gunfire sounded all around them, and they heard people screaming on shore. Stephan had never heard gunfire before, and he had not pictured how loud it would be. The shots sounded very close. The boys had no choice but to rush back down into the darkened cargo hold, and the hatch was slammed shut after them. The barge slowly pulled out into the middle of the river. A short time later, no more than a half hour, they heard shouted orders in German, followed by the sound of the barge’s motor shutting down.
The staccato clicking of heavy boots sounded across the deck, and the cargo hold’s hatch flew open. The Jewish boys looked up to see German soldiers pointing guns down into the cargo hold.
“Juden!”
One soldier spat, “Ein Haufen schmutziger Juden!” (A bunch of dirty Jews!)
The soldiers laughed, then slammed down the hatch.
After the soldiers left, the instructors let the terrified boys out and huddled for a tense meeting. They decided to get everyone off the barge. Traffic on the river was moving too slowly, and in any case, the German army had overtaken them. The last thing they wanted to do was wind up near the front lines of a battle between the German and French armies. The instructors told the boys it would be best to return to Quincy, now some twenty miles in the opposite direction.
They found a big wooden pushcart, pulled by two long handles, and loaded their belongings. The trek back was against the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which still poured forth out of Paris as the mass evacuation of civilians continued southward.
After sunset, far-off fires and explosions turned the sky bloodred, and the boys heard the muffled explosions of distant bombs. In the dark, they walked into a checkpoint manned by French paratroopers. Wary of the group of young Germans, the soldiers questioned them closely. Where had they come from? Where were they going? Had they seen any German soldiers? Finally, they were allowed to pass. They found a barn in which to spend the night, but heard gunshots around midnight—very close. Few of the boys slept, and they were back on the move at sunrise.
As the morning dew settled on the ground, the group found themselves surrounded by an eerie, profound silence. It was difficult to believe they were in the midst of a shooting war. When the boys stopped for lunch, the instructors passed out small chocolate bars, crackers, and three sardines in oil apiece. They ate, watching as a billowing white parachute floated down into a nearby field. As soon as the German paratrooper hit the ground, he was cut down by sniper fire. For most of the boys, Stephan included, it was the first person they had ever seen killed. But there was no time for reflection or discussion. They quickly got back on the road and continued on.
A short time later, a German soldier passed them, speeding by on a motorcycle. The sound of nearby machine gun fire caused the boys and their instructors to scramble for cover. Several planes dove out of the clouds, dropping bombs that landed close enough for the boys to feel the concussive waves from the blasts. The planes had the red, white, and blue circular markings of the French military. Booming antiaircraft guns fired somewhere in the distance, and the boys saw in the sky the trailing dark smoke of a plane that within seconds crashed in a ball of fire.
After a second full day of walking, they reached the château. A sentry halted them in the courtyard; to their alarm, he was not French. The German army had taken over. Two older boys accompanied the instructors inside to speak with the officer in charge. When they returned, they reported that the German colonel had given them two choices: be sent back to Germany, or work at Quincy. They opted to stay. Henceforth, the boys would do the soldiers’ laundry, clean vehicles and equipment, serve meals, polish boots, and do anything else required. If anyone refused to work or caused trouble, they were warned, the entire group would be deported.
With more than a hundred soldiers occupying the château as well as the annex building, the boys and instructors moved some cots into the basement. The occupying Germans shared little of the meat, dairy, and produce that was delivered to the château, and the boys were constantly hungry. They sneaked out at night and foraged for fruit and potatoes in nearby fields.
Two weeks after they returned, it was announced on the radio—now tuned to German broadcasts, full of Nazi propaganda—that Germany and France had signed an armistice, resulting in the division of France. The Germans would occupy the north and coastal areas, including Paris and Normandy, while newly appointed French leaders would govern the unoccupied southern part from the new capital of Vichy.
One of Stephan’s jobs was to do the soldiers’ laundry. He put the dirty clothes into a huge pot of water on the stove, added soap, and boiled everything for an hour. When it cooled down, he carried the pot to the sink, poured out the soapy water, and added water to rinse the clothes before hanging them up outside.
As he did the wash one day, Stephan saw dark specks floating to the surface of the boiling water. They appeared to be food particles. Thinking that they must have been left on the table linens after meals, he began scooping them out of the pot, rinsing, and eating them. He had learned how to share growing up at the orphanage, so he split his bounty with some other hungry boys, and they all agreed that the soggy crumbs tasted delicious. Their snacking ended when one of the instructors caught them in the act, and showed the boys that they were actually eating pieces of army T-shirts that had disintegrated in the boiling water and shredded into tiny pieces.
In early October 1940, their instructors awakened the boys in the middle of the night and told them to quickly pack a few essentials. Quietly, they filed out of the basement into the courtyard. Two covered trucks were waiting, engines idling. They pulled out of the darkened courtyard and drove until midday. At the border between occupied and unoccupied France, the trucks stopped, and everyone got out.
When they realized they would be walking into unoccupied France, out of reach of Nazi troops, the Jewish boys became very excited. Their gait increased still more when they saw that the German soldiers guarding the border were not going to stop them. By the time they were on the other side, where the French gendarmes (police) stood at the crossing, the boys were running and cheering. They found their ride waiting nearby: a dilapidated old bus that didn’t have enough seats for everyone, so they took turns standing.
They pulled into the village of Chabannes three hours later. This was a remote and unspoiled region of central France, 120 miles west of Vichy, whose residents had a spirit of independence and justice carried over from the earliest days of the French Republic.
The boys’ new home was another rambling château, one that had passed through many hands. The aristocratic d’Anrémont family acquired the estate in the 1870s, but it was rundown by the time OSE took it over in 1939 to serve as one of its fourteen children’s homes in unoccupied France. (OSE could not operate in German-occupied France.)
The director at Chabannes was former journalist Félix Chevrier, an imposing man of fifty-six who came off as gruff but understood that many of the children laughed by day and cried by night. Chevrier reminded the dedicated staff, which included cooks, nurses, janitors, and teachers, that they were to provide the children, all of whom had known exile and separation, not just shelter and sustenance but a sense of normalcy in abnormal times.
At Chabannes, Stephan and the other boys from Berlin joined more than one hundred other Jewish children—mostly Germans, along with some Austrian and French refugees—ranging from eight to eighteen years of age.
Given his age, now fifteen, and the overcrowding at the village school, Stephan started learning the leather trade in a well-equipped shop sponsored by the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT). ORT helped refugees immigrate to other countries as skilled workers. Stephan learned to use all of the machines and cutting tables; soon he was crafting handsome pocketbooks, wallets, and comb holders that were sold in the village, with the proceeds going back to ORT.
Sports and physical education were an important part of each day, and there were spirited regular basketball and soccer games. Georges Loinger, a former engineer who coached gymnastics and track and field, often drove the boys to the point of exhaustion. He told them he wanted them fit in case they ever had to run for their lives. Stephan, fast and athletic, excelled in the sports.
Château Chabannes, Jewish children’s home near Limoges, France, where Stephan Lewy lived for nearly two years, 1941. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
There were enjoyable times for the children at Chabannes, too. Music was played every Saturday night after Shabbat, and young and old alike danced; the lively songs were performed by teenagers, with Jean-Pierre Marcuse on guitar, Armand Chochenbaum on drums, Walter Herzig at the piano, and Marjan Sztrum on banjo. Sztrum, an eighteen-year-old Polish Jew, was also a talented artist; he painted a fresco on the dining room wall depicting a farmer on a tractor.
The newfound security the children and their instructors began to feel at Chabannes vanished when they heard that gendarmes were showing up at other OSE homes, arresting the older Jewish boys, and transporting them to concentration camps. Tipped off by sympathetic locals in the village as a contingent of French police approached, Stephan ran with some other boys into the woods, where they spent the night hiding out.
Sixteen-year-old Stephan Lewy (right) working in the kitchen at Chabannes, 1941. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Throughout unoccupied France, it had become clear that the one-party fascist regime headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain was nothing more than a puppet government of Hitler’s Germany. The Vichy regime became increasingly brazen in carrying out Nazi-ordered pogroms, and in 1940 it began passing its own anti-Semitic laws, banning French Jews from working in certain fields and forcibly expelling foreign-born Jews. The French government gave lists of Jews to Nazis and assisted in identifying and expropriating the assets of wealthy Jewish families. More and more roundups of Jews swept France, and the gendarmes soon became as feared as Nazi storm troopers.
The year after he arrived at Chabannes, Stephan was summoned to the director’s office. Months earlier, he had sought Monsieur Chevrier’s help in trying to contact his parents, whom he had never stopped thinking about during his own flights through wartime France. Were they in danger? Or had something terrible already happened to them? So much had transpired since they had parted in Berlin. Now the Nazis were at war with the world, not just the Jews in Germany. Although he was terribly afraid he might get bad news, Stephan had decided that he needed to know one way or another. Were his parents dead or alive?
Mercifully, on this day, Chevrier was not bearing bad news. He explained that he had just received a wire from the Red Cross in Switzerland, reporting that Stephan’s parents had been located in America.
Stephan wasn’t sure he had heard right. “America?”
“Yes,” Chevrier said, smiling. “You can write to them.”
Stephan was excited and greatly relieved that his parents had found a way to get to America. Would he be able to join them? He hurriedly wrote a letter that same day. Several weeks passed before he heard back. When a return letter arrived, forwarded via Switzerland, it was written in his stepmother’s graceful cursive.
Dearest Stephan,
We were so excited when your letter came we first stared at the envelope before we dared open it . . .
Back in Germany, Arthur had lost weight, lowered his blood pressure, and passed his follow-up physical with ease. In quick order, they had received an affidavit from Johanna’s cousin, Bert Klapper, in Massachusetts, and visas for the United States. They had taken what they believed was their last opportunity to escape the Nazis, departing Germany in May 1940. It had been an agonizing decision for them because they did not know where Stephan was or even if he was still alive.
On their third day at sea, aboard a ship that left from Rotterdam, they heard news of the German invasion of Holland and Belgium. By the time they arrived in the U.S., France was at war, and the organizations they contacted were unable to find out anything about Stephan. There was more, much more, in the letter: their excitement at locating him, their love for him, how they were determined to find a way to bring him to America, too. Stephan read the letter again, and then, for the first time in a long time, he cried.
Over the next several months, and after some bureaucratic hitches, the paperwork for Stephan’s entry into the United States was finished. Johanna’s cousin signed an affidavit for him, as did his parents’ employer, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and become very successful in business. Arthur and Johanna Lewy were working as butler and maid at his mansion in Boston, Massachusetts. Their employer even gave them five hundred dollars to pay for their son’s ship passage.
In April 1942, Stephan said good-bye to everyone at Chabannes and took the train to Lyon, where he picked up his visa at the U.S. consul’s office. He then traveled two hundred miles by rail to Marseille, France’s southernmost Mediterranean port, and boarded a French passenger ship. Once on board, the captain gathered everyone together and explained the circuitous route he planned to take.
“If we leave here and head straight out into the Mediterranean toward North Africa,” he said, “we’ll probably get torpedoed by a German U-boat and no one will ever know what happened to us.” Instead, he was going to hug the coastline, slipping in and out of every inlet. “If we get torpedoed, I can at least scuttle the ship near land and maybe save our lives.”
They reached Barcelona and took on fifty Spanish refugees. Continuing along the eastern and southern coast of Spain, they crossed the seven-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, heading toward North Africa. Not forgetting the captain’s dire U-boat warning, everyone on board was relieved to finally arrive in Rabat, Morocco.
Stephan took a bus to Casablanca, where he waited several weeks for the ship that would take him across the Atlantic: the Portuguese steamship Serpa Pinto, a six-thousand-ton vessel chartered by the U.S.-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to take seven hundred Jewish refugees to America. Because it flew under the flag of a neutral country, the Serpa Pinto was one of the few passenger ships still making transatlantic voyages despite the U-boat menace. It departed Casablanca on June 7, 1942.
As the five-hundred-foot ship sped across the Atlantic at near top speed, Stephan found himself unnerved by the ship’s running lights, which were left blazing all night. The ship stood out like a beacon in the inky darkness. One morning, Stephan questioned a ship’s officer about all the lights. With all the U-boats, wasn’t it dangerous to be so lit up at night?
“We are neutral,” said the officer. “That is why we fly an extra-large Portuguese flag so prominently with the lights glowing. Any vessel can see we are a neutral ship.”
The flag, clearly visible at the stern and lit by flood lighting at night, was a huge green-and-red wooden one that did not crumple or ruffle in the wind. The officer’s explanation seemed plausible to Stephan—up until a few hours later, when the vibration of the engines ceased. He joined the other passengers in a rush to the railings and saw a low-slung submarine with a swastika painted on its conning tower.
Several German sailors from the U-boat climbed into a small, motorized launch, which they took to the ship. When they reached the Serpa Pinto, a rope ladder was thrown over the hull for them to climb up. On deck, there was no chatter from the refugees, only deathly silence. Stephan felt sick to his stomach. He knew there was no place to hide.
For three hours, the armed boarding party searched all the compartments on the ship, apparently looking for contraband. When they found none, they had the crew collect the passengers’ passports and went through them one at a time. Nearly all carried the red “J.”
At last, the boarding party left and returned to the submarine. The passengers remained on deck, watching to see what would happen next. “Habt keine Angst,” said a multilingual ship’s officer. He circled the deck, telling the mostly German-speaking passengers not to be afraid.
But every one of them was scared to death. Would the U-boat turn toward them, launch a torpedo, and sink them? Hoping he hadn’t come this far only to drown in the middle of the ocean, Stephan joined the others on deck who were praying in German and Hebrew; they continued until they could no longer see the submarine in the distance.
On June 25, 1942, the Serpa Pinto arrived in New York harbor. The ship slowed as it passed the Statue of Liberty, allowing the passengers a good look at the three-hundred-foot sculpture of the Roman goddess Libertas. She held high the copper torch, lighting the path to freedom from tyranny and suffering for oppressed immigrants from other shores. Some on the boat were smiling and laughing; others were struck speechless.
Stephan Lewy, who had been an orphan for more than half his lifetime, knew his father and loving new mother were waiting for him dockside. He breathed deeply, and his eyes filled with tears. He had made it.
3 (#ulink_7e9af2b7-f5cc-5c8b-9a03-72e3059c6048)
A PLACE TO CALL HOME (#ulink_7e9af2b7-f5cc-5c8b-9a03-72e3059c6048)
Günther Stern’s father had cautioned him to “be like invisible ink” so as to not draw attention to himself. But soon after they said good-bye at the port of Bremerhaven, where he boarded the SS Hamburg in November 1937, Günther joined in with the other emigrant children on the ship, running around playing hide-and-seek and pulling practical jokes on one another. The Jewish youngsters were eager to be free of the restrictive rules under which they had been living in Nazi Germany, which required them to be better than good in public so as to remain inconspicuous. In fact, Günther was still so wrapped up in his new oceangoing adventure that he hadn’t yet had time to be homesick.
On deck one sunny day, the children befriended an older American who was traveling alone. When he treated them all to an exotic drink they had never tasted before, called Coca-Cola, they became convinced he must be one of those fabled American millionaires. Near the end of the voyage, he told them he was in fact a mailman who had saved up for years for his first European vacation. The refugee children did not believe him: How could an average American afford such a trip? They decided that their generous millionaire simply wished to remain anonymous.
When they reached New York, a committee representative decided that Günther, after all his private lessons from Herr Tittel, was fluent enough in English to travel by himself the rest of the way to St. Louis. He would have to change trains in Chicago, however, so someone would meet him there and help him make his connection.
During his short time in the heart of New York City, Günther was most impressed by the jumble of skyscrapers, the crowded subways, and the curious Automatenrestaurants, or automats, at which busy people inserted coins in machines and instantly received sandwiches and other food items.
He arrived in Chicago on a Sunday and had a three-hour layover. The woman who met him decided they had time for a quick tour of the Windy City. The excursion included a stroll through the open-air Maxwell Street Market, which occupied several square blocks. Founded in 1912 by newly arrived Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, the market featured booths selling a variety of discounted items: produce, clothes, tools, and all things in between. To Günther, it was a wild mix of cultures and ethnicities; he saw people of all colors and ages, many of them Jews, intermingling easily, talking and joking with each other.
Günther had never seen anything like this in Germany. If this was what it meant to be in America, the land of the free, his days of trying to disappear in public like invisible ink were over.
After another long train trip, he arrived in St. Louis. His aunt Ethel and cousin Melvin met him at the station. Uncle Benno, his mother’s brother, was working the night shift at a bakery, and Günther did not meet him until he came home later that night. His uncle’s story was familiar to Günther; as a rebellious youth of fourteen or fiftteen, Benno had been exiled by his strict father, who sent him to America in the days when it was easier for immigrants to gain entry. Benno was a short, squat man who had been stymied but not defeated by the Depression. The Silberbergs did not live easy lives, but they had never been threatened with eviction or relegated to standing in a breadline for their next meal. Benno did not apologize for the family’s cramped apartment, located in a subdivided mansion on the predominantly Jewish west side, though the accommodations were markedly different from Günther’s family’s spacious, well-appointed home in Hildesheim. Nor was any explanation offered for Günther having to share a small room and a single bed with another refugee boy, Rudy Solomon, whom his aunt had taken in at the request of the Jewish Aid Society.
Although he quickly began to miss his own family and ache for home, Günther’s youthful dreams of adventure in his new country remained intact, no more so than when he enrolled five days later in Soldan High School, a public school reputed to be the finest in St. Louis. At Soldan, students from affluent families sat next to those in threadbare clothes, and all of them were taught and inspired by dedicated teachers and administrators determined to rival the top college-prep schools in the country. It was America at its best.
On his first day, Günther was received personally by the principal, who told him he had been assigned to the homeroom of Mrs. Muller, the German language teacher. When the principal asked if he was interested in any extracurricular activities, Günther quickly answered, “Swimming and the school newspaper.”
His first class was geometry, and after being warmly welcomed by the teacher—“our new student from Germany!”—he discovered that the class had just started taking a test. Mrs. Carmody, the geometry teacher, encouraged him to take it, too, in order to “show what you can do.” Günther sat down and read through the questions. Approaching the teacher’s desk, he asked softly, “Please, what is ‘isosceles triangle’?”
She went to the blackboard and drew one.
“Ah, yes,” Günther said. “Ein gleichschenkliges Dreieck.”
He took the test, and received a G for good.
Before long, his natural curiosity led to his becoming a reporter for the school paper, Scrippage, whose name was borrowed from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Günther got a job in the cafeteria, working for free hot lunches, and in the spring became the number-three breaststroker on the varsity swim team. By then, he had his first girlfriend, Idamae Schwartzberg, an energetic, attractive brunette. They went to free summer musicals, such as the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat, performed outdoors at Forest Park.
Even though she had a rather improbable name of her own, Idamae had little patience for Günther’s name, which she termed a “German tongue twister.” She decided he should retain the first two letters and add a “y.” Happy to assimilate, Günther became Guy. It caught on; everyone agreed that the name suited his upbeat personality well.
And his transformation was not in name only. The past several years in Germany, during which he had been required to be endlessly unobtrusive, had led to an inevitable loss of confidence, even feelings of worthlessness. Guy’s climb back to self-assurance and self-worth in his country of refuge came faster than anyone, even he, would have thought possible. His kind heart, winning smile, and playful sense of humor won him a legion of new friends.
Guy’s two biggest stories for the school paper, which earned him the nickname “Scoop,” were interviews with bandleader Benny Goodman backstage at the Fox Theater in midtown St. Louis—they discussed jazz and swing for half an hour—and the German novelist Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1929), who came to town for a lecture at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.
Mann, who wrote in German, was accompanied by his daughter, Erika, an actress and writer who translated his books and speeches into English. With a heavy German accent, he read his speech, “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” in precise but at times uncertain English, to a capacity crowd of three thousand. He damned the Munich Agreement of 1938 as a “betrayal” by England and France for permitting Germany to annex the Sudetenland portions of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler proclaimed as German territory. He criticized British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler and warned that Hitler’s thirst to expand Germany’s borders at the expense of other nations could not be quenched.
Afterward, some twenty chairs were set up in another room for a press conference. Mann arrived before his daughter, who had earlier interpreted some questions from the audience for her father. Mann would answer in German, and she would report: “My father believes . . .” Now, rather than await Mann’s interpreter, a Time correspondent asked a convoluted question in English, which stumped the novelist. Guy piped up, repeating the query in German and then translating Mann’s answer into English.
With Mann looking directly at him, Guy summoned the courage to ask his own question—also in German. Even in such august company, Guy’s inquiry revealed his own sharp intellect and grasp of current events. Did Mann, a well-known anti-Nazi advocate since his exile from Germany after Hitler came to power, think that the German dictator and Stalin could find common cause? Mann vigorously denied the possibility. “Dictators can never be appeased,” Mann told Guy, “because they will never be satisfied with their territorial gains.”
In what amounted to an exclusive interview for Guy, the German novelist went on to discuss his advocacy for national health insurance in the United States in his native tongue. Guy took notes in shorthand, which he had learned in school in Germany, as Mann explained that a democracy is only strong if every citizen is guaranteed his own social well-being, which must include affordable medical treatment, a chance for an education, and a pension.
Erika Mann’s arrival at the podium ended Guy’s exclusive. But before taking questions from the other reporters, Mann looked squarely at Guy and said in German, “I wish for young people like you to have a tuition-free college education.” The next edition of the school newspaper raved: “Believe it or not, a Scrippage reporter scooped a Time magazine interviewer!”
Guy made his mark elsewhere. His Latin teacher, Rose Kaufman, who was well connected in the local Jewish community, took an interest in him, and in Guy’s senior year, she recommended him for part-time work at the historic Chase Hotel downtown. Hired on as a busboy, Guy took pride in being self-supporting and being able to start paying some rent to his aunt and uncle.
As he made his way in his new country, Guy did not forget the promise he had made to his parents: to try to find someone who could sign the affidavit required for the whole family to come to America. Unfortunately, he hadn’t yet come across anyone who could help. America was still in the Depression, and most people were out of work or barely getting by. Guy had never dreamed it would take this long. It had been a year since he and his parents had parted at the dock in Germany, and at the time he had believed that they would be reunited in the United States by now. They had kept up their correspondence through twice-monthly letters, but while Guy wrote freely of his life in America, his parents were constrained about conditions inside Germany. These subdued missives did little to soothe Guy’s growing urgency as to how and when his family would get out of Germany.
He never stopped trying to obtain the critical affidavit needed for the State Department to allow his family into the United States. To save bus fare, Guy regularly hitchhiked to his hotel job. One afternoon in the fall of 1938, a well-dressed Jewish man driving a luxury sedan picked him up. Guy told his now well-rehearsed story of his immigration to America: how he had arrived the previous year; how his parents and two younger siblings were still stuck in Germany. The man listened, nodding sympathetically at times. Then, as if on cue, he asked, “What’s involved in getting them over here?”
Guy said he had to find someone with the financial means to sign a government document guaranteeing that his family members would not become public charges.
“Well, I could do that,” the man said breezily.
It was all Guy could do to keep from reaching over and wildly shaking his benefactor’s hand as they drove through traffic along Delmar Boulevard.
“But I’m not sure the government will accept me,” the man went on. “I’m a gambler. That’s how I make my money.”
Guy didn’t think that posed a problem. Money was money.
“Are you willing to try?” Guy asked.
“Sure. After all,” the man added, smiling, “life’s a gamble.”
It took Guy a full week to get an appointment with a lawyer, whom the Jewish Aid Society had recruited to do pro bono work for refugees. The three of them finally met at the lawyer’s office, and the attorney went through a sheaf of forms with Guy and his benefactor, asking a series of routine questions. The process halted abruptly after the lawyer asked the man’s occupation.
“Gambler?!” the lawyer croaked. “You’re a professional gambler?” He pushed aside the papers he’d been filling out. “We needn’t go any further. The signer of an affidavit for the United States State Department must be a stable citizen with an assured income.”
“But, sir,” Guy said, “can’t you just put down ‘businessman’?”
The lawyer shot Guy a withering look. “Circumvent the law to deceive the U.S. government? No, I will not!”
With that, the gambler cursed the lawyer and stormed out.
Guy froze, momentarily unable to breathe, as if he had been punched in the stomach. He could not believe what had just happened. A lawyer designated to provide legal assistance to refugees was more concerned with being a stickler on a government form than with the plight of a Jewish family trying to get out of Nazi Germany? That was the last time Guy saw the gambler, and he never again came so close to getting an affidavit signed for his family.
A few weeks later, Guy had left his aunt and uncle’s to walk to school when he passed a corner newsboy hawking the St. Louis Star Times.
“Synagogues burning in Germany! Read all about it!”
It was early November 1938, and the news was about Kristallnacht.
The family he tried to save: Guy Stern’s parents, brother, and sister in Hildesheim, Germany, circa 1938. (Family photograph)
When Guy read about the nationwide anti-Semitic campaign in Germany that destroyed hundreds of synagogues and other Jewish properties, he was shocked and outraged. The century-old Hildesheim synagogue he had first attended at age six rose up in his mind; it had not only been a house of worship, but the center of the town’s Jewish community. Now he pictured it in cinders. He remembered the Saturday morning processions down Lappenberg Street, the finely dressed families walking to temple. Guy had begun his education in the one-room school adjacent to the synagogue. Was it destroyed, too? Was it gone? All of it?
And what of his family? The worst part for Guy was not knowing if they were all right. He had to wait until he received their next letter for news that they were okay, and to have confirmed what he had feared: the town’s synagogue was no more. In their correspondence, his parents, worried about censors, had developed a kind of code, which Guy could now easily decipher. When they wrote, “If one way doesn’t turn out, try always a new way of proceeding,” or “Hope you can realize all your plans,” he knew it meant “Keep trying to secure the papers for our immigration.”
Guy graduated from high school in June 1939 and worked full-time for a year to save money for his college tuition. In fall 1940, he enrolled at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit university known for its high academic standards. Guy found a part-time job at a hotel restaurant only a block from school. It was so convenient, he often dashed back and forth from work to classes still dressed in his waiter uniform.
Eighteen-year-old Guy Stern (right), busboy at the Melbourne Hotel, St. Louis, spring 1940. (Family photograph)
In the summer of 1942, he received a short, ominous letter from his mother that bore a Warsaw postmark. It read, in part:
We have a room here in the ghetto and we are managing. We hope for better days. As we told you when you left, do the best you can.
Guy knew her words, again, had been chosen more for the censors than for him. The envelope had clearly been opened; the flap had been resealed with an official Nazi stamp bearing a swastika. His mother obviously couldn’t divulge their full situation. Had they been forcibly moved from their home? They would never have chosen to leave Hildesheim, and she had never mentioned that possibility in previous letters. And why Warsaw? Guy knew his European geography: Warsaw was five hundred miles east of Hildesheim.
Nonetheless, the meaning of “do the best you can” was clear; though she knew he was still looking for someone, anyone, who could help them get to America, she was absolving him of blame if he failed to do so. Guy held his mother’s note in trembling hands, his mind tumbling with terrible thoughts of her and his family’s despair. And there was that strange postmark—
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