Broken Lives Read online

  A yet greater shock was the Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, called the “night of broken glass” due to the smashing of shop windows. Leo Gompertz experienced the pogrom in Gelsenkirchen. It “supposedly was caused by the ‘boiling soul of the German people’” against the murder of a minor diplomat in Paris, “but in reality it was organized by Goebbels and Goering and carried out by the storm-troopers.” First the riled-up crowd set the synagogue on fire. Fire trucks arrived, but “only to protect the neighboring buildings.” Then the mob broke into stores, looted valuable merchandise, and destroyed the interior. Finally, “came the dreaded knock at the door” and the SA burst into the apartment: “They first searched for hidden weapons and took me away” to police headquarters while the police refused to stop the rioting. Lucy Mandelstam’s father was sent to a KZ where he was “beaten and starved and many died.” Gompertz was only ordered to sell his house for a pittance and “to emigrate as soon as possible.” The purpose of such intimidation and brutality was to frighten the Jews into leaving the country immediately.27

  The “night of broken glass” created a panic in the Jewish community and turned emigration from a matter of choice into a necessity for survival. Even patriots such as Peter Fröhlich’s father became determined “to do anything, no matter how illegal, to get the three of us away from the German nightmare.” Families frantically searched for sponsors, wrote letters, and besieged consulates to obtain entrance visas for a safe haven. The Fröhlichs finally obtained an exit certificate and left two weeks earlier than planned on a steamer to Cuba. This saved their lives, for their original ship, the St. Louis, was tragically turned back and many passengers perished. After completing the formalities, Gompertz sent his children ahead to Holland, eventually managed to join them, and they sailed to the United States. Less well prepared, Hanna Marlens and her family used her father’s Czech citizenship to leave Vienna “in secrecy” with “no goodbyes to anyone.” In such life-and-death situations it took a combination of luck, persistence, and daring in order to manage a family escape.28

  In this rush to leave, neighboring countries played a crucial role as stopping places from which safety might eventually be reached. Lacking sympathy for Jews, Switzerland only served as a transit route, while Czechoslovakia no longer offered escape after falling under Nazi control. Even Poland refused to renew the passports of Jews living in Germany, rendering the stateless Keils’ escape through Belgium more difficult. In spite of its own unemployment problem, France was more hospitable, but forced refugees such as the Marlens to make a living by starting an “independent business enterprise.” Britain remained restrictive, preferring children and potential domestic servants. Holland was more open: it sheltered Werner Warmbrunn until his US papers came through and allowed Tom Angress to organize the transit of the Gross Breesen group and made it possible for his mother and brother to survive underground. Cuba became a favorite refugee asylum because from there people such as the Fröhlichs could hope eventually to reach the not-very-welcoming United States.29

  The occasional help of gentile friends or officials in assisting Jews to escape was all the more impressive because it required courage to ignore Nazi decrees. When Lucy Mandelstam’s father was incarcerated in the KZ, a former classmate turned SS officer brought him food and news. Emil Busse, a close family friend, hid the Fröhlichs during the Night of Broken Glass and found ways to smuggle their jewels, silver, and stamp collection out of the country on their departure. Similarly, a group of loyal acquaintances helped veteran Erich Alenfeld avoid imprisonment, and a postal worker did not betray Ingeborg Hecht’s identity when she was hiding in the Swabian countryside. It took a Luxembourg border guard to look the other way, a friendly Belgian to provide refuge, and aid from another surprising SS man to permit the Keils to escape. A daring airline official helped get Werner Warmbrunn a seat on one of the last planes out of Berlin, a “good German who took some (probably minor—this was 1941) risk to help a young Jew to safety.”30

  Unfortunately, about a third of the German Jews either did not want to or were unable to leave and therefore became trapped in the Holocaust. Older men who had fought in the Great War, in particular, were reluctant to go away because they were emotionally invested in Germany. Many Jews “belonged to that naïve majority who believed that [the Nazis] would not last and that everything would be back to normal again.” Those living in a “privileged mixed marriage” with Aryan partners who “thought Christian, but felt Jewish” also wanted “to defend their position as Germans for the sake of the children.” Others, such as Ruth Klüger’s family, had the means to send only her father to safety; her mother “could not get the money” needed for the exit tax as “her property had been sequestered and the bank accounts blocked.” Similarly the Mandelstams were unable to leave because the father’s visa to Shanghai turned out to be a fraud and he was once more put into a KZ.31 For each heartwarming story of close escape, there are many others of tragic failure.

  The farewells from Europe for those fortunate enough to leave were “short but emotional,” with different feelings contending with each other. While experiences of persecution had instilled an “indiscriminate hatred” of Germans in Peter Fröhlich, his arrival in Cuba nonetheless triggered a “profound depression”; the “sinister shadow” of Nazi Berlin followed him into exile. In contrast to his father, who “was saying goodbye to all he had once held dear,” Fritz Stern “had no regrets. I felt nothing but joy” at having escaped from a repressive system that had taken away his air to breathe. Because “Hitler and the Nazis weren’t letting us be Germans,” Tom Angress’ father argued that “Germany was no longer our homeland.” But his son wanted “to hang on to [his] blind German patriotism” and felt “incredibly sad.”32 Though escape offered a path to survival, refugees realized that mastering a future without resources in a new country with a different language and culture would involve a difficult struggle.

  MASS MURDER

  The unleashing of World War II sharply worsened the situation for Nazi victims: it removed international inhibitions and confronted opponents with a charge of treason. After the attack on the Soviet Union, Germany’s surviving Communists intensified their clandestine agitation. But the “Nazis had institutionalized terror. Torturers, judges, executioners, and wardens only fulfilled different functions within the same terrorist system.” The resistance faced brutal repression, arbitrary incarceration, and death by sham trial. In March 1942 the Gestapo arrested about fifty Leipzig Communists in order to try the charismatic leader Herbert Bochow for “forming a group for high treason.” During the show trial, the defendant predicted that the Fascists would be one day accused of “barbarism, imperialist wars of conquest and enslavement of whole peoples.” But this courage only speeded his execution. His accomplice Heinz Zöger was condemned to several years in the penitentiary, where he was treated sadistically and had to work in war production.33

  For partly Jewish Germans, the war brought new uncertainty, for the progressive radicalization of the Third Reich threatened their ambiguous racial status. Due to his half-Jewish wife, Bettina Fehr’s father, a medical doctor, experienced “a chain of private and public humiliations” in spite of his selfless effort to help sick patients. The Wehrmacht, needing manpower, generally let sons of such marriages serve in its ranks. However, the application of decorated veteran Erich Alenfeld was rejected because he was completely Jewish. Even when such husbands lived in a “privileged marriage” with an Aryan wife, they lost their jobs and had to pay a property contribution as Jews. Moreover, with the beginning of deportations into Poland, they faced being included in ghettoization. At the same time, Ingeborg Hecht’s divorced parents were accused of “miscegenation” because they had still maintained sexual contact after formal separation. Even after she married a gentile soldier, Mrs. Hecht and her little girl faced continual uncertainty. To extend the sweep, Nazi bureaucrats invented a new concept of Geltungsjuden, mixed-race people identifying with Judaism, who were to be
treated as regular Jews.34

  By blocking escape routes through hostile countries, the fighting also closed the door to further emigration, although Himmler prohibited it only in October 1941. When the Central Office for Jewish Emigration assumed control, Nazis imposed a new emigration tax, putting asylum destinations such as Honduras and Shanghai out of reach for impecunious refugees. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht victories trapped those Jews who had only relocated to neighboring countries such as France or Holland, because their governments protected long-time resident Jewish citizens from deportation by the SS and its local helpers better than newly arrived refugees. In the east, the advance of the Red Army with the Nazi-Soviet Pact allowed some fortunate individuals such as Lucy Mandelstam’s father to escape from Poland into the Soviet Union, where they would be safe if they moved far enough to stay out of the reach of German soldiers. In the west, only a trickle of refugees managed to cross into Spain or Portugal and catch a boat to safety.35 While some desperate escapes continued, on the whole, the mass exodus stopped.

  For those Jews remaining in Nazi-controlled Europe, the war also imposed the required wearing of a yellow star as a “sign of shame.” The conquest of Poland allowed SS leader Richard Heydrich to insist that all the country’s Jews wear this mark in public, a practice extended in 1941 to the conquered Russian territories. After passports were stamped with a “J” as Jewish, the star of David was also introduced into the Reich, with severe penalties threatened for anyone who refused to comply. This requirement further isolated Jews from gentile neighbors who might have been willing to maintain their ties, since if caught, they would be accused of being “Jew-lovers.” Ingeborg Hecht remembered the fear of denunciation. “When a ‘wearer of the star’ visited us, he tried to cover up and hide the thing, because such a visit was one of the forbidden practices.” Ruth Klüger recalled how public appearances changed in Vienna: “Everywhere we met people who also wore the star.” One passing Jewish woman ironically complimented her mother by saying, “it fits your blouse.”36

  The Polish campaign of the fall of 1939 was the first step toward systematic mass murder. The Nazi leadership not only wanted to defeat the neighboring country, but also to acquire living space. The rapid conquest unleashed a wave of violence as retribution for real or imagined Polish reprisals against ethnic Germans during September’s “bloody Sunday” in Bromberg. But the shootings of civilians were also motivated by plans for ethnic cleansing, to change the balance in the nationalities’ struggle and re-Germanize territories in West Prussia and Upper Silesia lost in the Versailles treaty. In its “intelligentsia action,” mobile SS Einsatzgruppen and regular Wehrmacht soldiers murdered about sixty thousand civilians in order to snuff out any possibility of future Polish resistance. Jews were caught up in this bloodbath as well, beginning an extermination policy that has come to be called “the Holocaust by bullets.” Back in the Reich, Lucy Mandelstam and her family kept picking up “unreliable rumors. We had heard about ghettos and camps, but we did not know how bad the situation really was, at least we did not want to know.”37

  For the Jews still remaining in Germany, living conditions deteriorated with every Wehrmacht victory. The Nazi leadership lost all restraint. Irene Alenfeld remembered, “The noose grew tighter from month to month, the plunder more and more open.” With fanatic ingenuity, party bureaucrats dreamt up a succession of petty regulations to make Jewish life miserable: Jews were forbidden to use public transportation or go to the movies. Their telephones and pets were taken away. Their shopping was restricted to one hour in special stores and they could no longer purchase meat, eggs, or milk. Even after they had lost their regular jobs, they had to pay growing sums to the government under a variety of pretexts that took away their property and made them destitute. Eventually they were even evicted from their apartments and homes, and forced to live together in segregated Jewish houses. Going on required a passive kind of heroism. “There are things in life which you cannot change, but only bear.”38

  One way to postpone the looming deportation was to be indispensable to the war effort or the Jewish community. In the spring of 1941 Austrian Lucy Mandelstam “was one of fifty girls who were called up to work in Germany.” They were sent to harvest asparagus, backbreaking labor because the stalks had to be cut by hand in the soil. Similarly, Irmgard Mueller, the daughter of a prominent lawyer from Halle, was shipped east to help with agricultural work, replacing soldiers who had been sent to the front. Working “in a cigarette paper factory” or a munitions plant was boring, but a paycheck came in handy for buying on the black market “as our food rations became smaller and smaller.” Lucy Mandelstam’s mother worked at an institute for the blind. Ruth Klüger’s mother “got a position as a nurses’ aide and physiotherapist” in a Jewish hospital where there was food and heat. But “eventually things became hopeless.” In spite of all such efforts, the Klügers “were deported from Vienna with about the last Jews in the ‘hospital transport’ of September 1942.”39

  More daring was the attempt to go underground and to beat the Nazis at their own game. When her aunt told Anna Fränkel that she had barely escaped murder in Belzec, the sixteen-year-old girl decided to use her “‘Aryan’ face,” blue eyes, blonde braids, and peasant dress and scarf to turn into a Ukrainian. A local priest gave her the birth certificate of a dead Christian and she took the identity of Anna Osimok. Her family hit upon the ingenious idea of her “volunteering for work in Germany” in order to escape death in the ghetto. Protected by a cross pendant, she embarked with a friend on the long train ride to the Reich with much trepidation. “I felt that I was going into a war in which I needed fortitude, circumspection, flexibility and iron nerves as weapons.” Eventually “Osimok” was assigned to the Steinkeller estate in Austria where the mistress liked her due to her good manners and ability to speak German. But “I had a hard time while getting used to the idea that I had to take care of the children of an SS officer” who was her mortal enemy.40

  In the end, Fränkel was unable to keep up the charade. She was sustained by her friendship with Nadja, another Jewish girl from her region who also posed as a Christian Ukrainian. But when she finally tried to get away from the SS estate to another employer, she attracted the attention of the secret police, who secured information about her true identity from Lemberg, her home town. In late 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and brutally interrogated to make her admit her real name. But in spite of the terrible conditions in jail and threats of being beaten, she stuck to her Ukrainian disguise, telling herself, “don’t give in, your head is still on your shoulders, everything is not yet lost.” After sixty-three harrowing days in the penitentiary, she was released and the policeman admitted, “If you are not Ukrainian, you are a great actress.” But her relief did not last, because in April 1944, she was rounded up again on the basis of new evidence and sent to a so-called work camp, which turned out to be the KZ Auschwitz.41

  By contrast, with a mixture of daring and luck Marie Jalowicz Simon actually succeeded in surviving illegally in Berlin as one of about 1,700 “U-boats” who had gone underground. As a bold and beautiful twenty-one-year-old, she was determined to escape deportation and resolved, “I am going to do everything imaginable to survive.” When the Gestapo came to pick her up, she ran away, ripped off her yellow star, and sought shelter with anti-Nazi friends who provided a fake identity card. But she paid dearly for her daring when the husband of her protector demanded to sleep with her during the absence of his wife, as a result of which she was forced to have an abortion. Dodging the constant threat of denunciation, she became the mistress of a rabid Nazi businessman. Then she took up with a Dutchman with whom she lived for two years, half-protected by a pro-Nazi woman who became a hated and loved substitute mother. When the desperately hoped-for German defeat finally came, she was raped by a Russian soldier. Simon therefore paid a high price just to stay alive.42

  One somewhat unusual KZ was Theresienstadt, which the Nazis used as a showcase for foreigner
s to prove that conditions were acceptable. It “was a strange and confusing place,” a former Austrian garrison town “meant for a few thousand people” but numbering “at least ten times as many.” Looking like a normal ghetto, the camp was designed for older Jews who could move around in relative freedom. There were “shops that sold items stolen from our luggage, a coffeehouse where an orchestra played every afternoon, a library.” Moreover, Rabbi Leo Baeck could explain the Jewish heritage to spellbound youths. But “behind the façade there was unbelievable misery.” The inmates had no money. There was widespread hunger. Diseases such as dysentery or typhus ran rampant. While Lucy Mandelstam could fall in love there with a Czech man, her marriage was cut short by his being transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Ruth Klüger both loved the chance for Jewish self-assertion and hated the transit function of the camp as a “holding-pen for slaughter.”43

  The sinister KZ at Oświęcim, known by its German name of Auschwitz and built around a former Austrian military compound, was an even more deadly place. It actually consisted of three different camps: the Stammlager holding Poles, political prisoners, homosexuals, and criminals; the adjoining Birkenau, dedicated to murdering Jews; and a series of satellite camps of forced labor for German companies. SS man Joachim Bässmann, sent there to handle foreign currency, found the ensemble of electric fences, wooden barracks, and the gate’s misleading promise “work will set you free” rather depressing. “Tired, wearing blue-white striped sack-cloth, groups of prisoners shambled by on their way to work.” He had “no doubt that those Jews who were not fit to work, were killed,” according to the simple logic, “the Jew was the enemy who was responsible for the first and second world war.” Similarly teacher Marianne Busch, dispatched to instruct the guards’ and ethnic Germans’ children, was told, “Every week more inmates are added, but the number always stays the same.”44