Desperate, with no other options of escape, they paid an illegal smuggler to guide them over the Swiss border. The risks were great, but certain death awaited them if they remained. The gamble paid off, though the family was separated for the next four years of the war. Finally reunited, they came to America in 1946. Elsa tragically died of a brain tumor soon after.
Standing beside Sam in the photo was Erna, his second wife, my step-grandmother. Erna had left Germany in the early 1930s, working as a “baby nurse” in New York. Her family, including her father, a prosperous shop owner; stepmother Julie; and young half-brother Harry, had remained in Germany. Among the photos we found a picture of the grown Harry, and an elderly Julie sitting tall and proud in a fancy chiffon dress. As a boy I knew her as “Tanta Julie” and didn’t really understand the family relationships. Nor did I know how her life had been blighted, first by German savagery, then by American governmental indifference.
Julie’s husband had been arrested on Kristallnacht and taken to Dachau, where a guard shot him dead when he stepped out of line. The following year Julie and nine-year-old Harry obtained passage on the refugee ship St. Louis, scheduled to sail to Cuba with 935 other Jews. Hitler allowed them to leave as a cruel propaganda exercise. He wanted to show that Jews were universally despised; he could justify his anti-Semitism by showing that no country would accept them.
To humanity’s shame, the St. Louis passengers were indeed turned away from Cuba and America in what became known as the “Voyage of the Damned.” The ship’s captain, an anti-Nazi German, managed to land in Rotterdam, but many of the passengers would eventually perish in the Holocaust. Julia and Harry made it out, however, eventually coming to the United States where some thirty years after the Voyage of the Damned they attended my bar mitzvah.
The next photo showed two of my grandfather’s cousins who had fled Germany in the 1930s. One of them, Martin, had married in America and spent his honeymoon in Washington, D.C., attempting to get immigration papers for my grandparents and mother. The other cousin, Fred, had settled in Philadelphia where he hoped his sister would join him. She never made it – she was one of the six million. Fred eventually married Vienna-born Erna, who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Leaving the Jewish graveyard of Europe, she immigrated to Philadelphia to begin life anew. In my bar mitzvah photo, she is sitting contentedly beside Fred and their teenage son.
On my father’s side of the family, his two sisters, my Tantas Irma and Ray (Robertine) were pictured sitting at a table, heads close together in conversation. Three decades before, as young refugees in New York, they had worked as secretaries, married and did their best to adjust to a new life in America. But much of their focus had remained on Europe with their parents and brother. Heartsick, they wondered what was happening “back home.” Their memories of that time were of rushing to the mailbox, hoping for letters but never getting them.
Finally, after five years, they got one. A Jewish soldier from New Jersey had written that he had met a French Resistance fighter – none other than their brother. Both sisters would always say that receiving word their baby brother was still alive made that day one of the happiest of their lives.
Sitting beside Irma was her husband, my Uncle Henry, who along with his parents had immigrated from Germany in the early 1930s. In New York, Henry had become a one-man resource bureau for other German Jews seeking refuge in America. He tirelessly helped them navigate through the maze of bureaucratic paperwork and all the other daunting details of resettling. When America entered the war, he immediately enlisted. A week after D-Day, he landed in Normandy, slogging through the hedgerows as an infantryman. He was eventually recruited to a military intelligence unit for his German language skills.
