Читать книгу The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler - Bruce Henderson - Страница 11

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.¹

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.