Читать книгу The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler - Bruce Henderson - Страница 13

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 1938.¹

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.)²

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.³

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.