But the men had not figured on the lengths to which the Swiss Red Cross nurse would go in order to assure that not a single survivor over sixteen would join the transport.
“The nurse was furious. She was faced with the fact that we had the full quota and she stated it was impossible and she wanted to see the boys one by one to check them out. They decided to check every boy’s card as he entered the train; they couldn’t find anything wrong with the cards but as we were afraid that some of the older ‘boys’ would be too tall or look too old, they entered the train through the back way.”
There was still more to come. “When the train was filled the nurse became furious and gave an order to hold up the train while she and the doctor moved from car to car to re-examine the boys. We gave a warning shout to the older boys and as the nurse and doctor moved from car to car they jumped out of the windows, running ahead to the cars that had already been examined so that she wouldn’t find them.”
Finally, after checking and re-checking the transport’s papers and peering once again into each railroad car, the nurse informed Rabbi Schacter she knew something was afoot. But as she was unable to prove it, she reluctantly signed the necessary documents. Only then was the group, accompanied by Rabbi Schacter, finally allowed to leave Buchenwald for Switzerland.
Nevertheless, as my father later learned, the nurse had her revenge. When they reached border control she informed the guards on the Swiss-German border to closely examine each member in the group and reject anyone even slightly suspected of being sixteen or older.
Rabbi Schacter recalled: “Here they could no longer escape and ninety-one of the group were not admitted into Switzerland. I contacted the Jewish Agency office in Paris, told them about what happened, and within hours they had permission from the French government to be admitted to France.”
Hearing this story in my youth I used to joke with my father that he had missed a great career as a forger. “It was only the first time that summer that we did such things, but not the last,” he would reply. “Reb Herschel was even better at this than I was and he would regularly forge documents for survivors during those months, stating that they were either older or younger than they really were in order for them to be included in various transports that were leaving Germany.”
From the way the two would laugh about these incidents and the stories they told me in my youth, one could almost forget the seriousness of the matter, but one sentence from Rabbi Schacter summed it all up: “We were saving lives, pure and simple…”
Looking back, I often wonder what enabled my father to consider such an undertaking. How did he differ from the majority of survivors who required a long period of recuperation after the years of deprivation and suffering?
After all, he was still suffering from malnutrition just like the other Jews liberated from Buchenwald; he was overcoming illnesses contracted in the Nazi camps during his years of forced labor; and he rode the emotional roller-coaster of hope and despair as he waited to hear if any family members – even the most distant ones – had survived the war.
And yet, he and a few friends had the presence of mind to put their own issues aside and try to save Jewish children and young men right after the war from the disturbing conditions existing in the liberated camp, making all efforts to allow them to leave the liberated sector for true freedom. Where did he find the inner strength that allowed him to do this instead of just sitting back and trying to heal from his years of horror and starvation?
When I once asked my father about this he looked at me with surprise. “What greater mitzvah could there be after what we had gone through than to try and help those in greater need than we were? We were older, we could wait, but they were children, young people and this was the first opportunity to help them after the war.”