50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (7 page)

Throughout the night and into the predawn hours of the next day, more than seven thousand Jewish shops were burned and destroyed throughout Germany and Austria. Although physical violence against Jews had not been specifically sanctioned in Heydrich’s telegram, nearly a hundred Jews were beaten to death. Synagogues were ransacked and burned, with only one left standing in Vienna. The Nazi-ordered pogrom quickly came to be known as Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—because of the sounds of shattered storefront and synagogue windows. “Anti-Jewish activities under the direction of Storm Troopers and Nazi party members in uniform began early this morning,” reported the
New York Times
from Vienna on November 11. “In the earlier stages Jews were attacked and beaten. Many Jews awaiting admittance to the British consulate-general were arrested, and according to reliable reporters others who stood in line before the United States consulate were severely beaten and also arrested. . . . Many of those arrested were sent to prisons or concentration camps in buses. Mobs of raiders penetrated Jewish residences and shops, flinging furniture and merchandise from the windows and destroying wantonly.” The official Nazi press praised party members for practicing restraint during the Kristallnacht riots even as Nazi officials accepted full responsibility for the violence. “It is true that the Propaganda Ministry accepts responsibility for today’s events,” said a ministry spokesman. “The police did not intervene in the spontaneous demonstrations against Jewish shops.”

Goebbels called off the riots a day after they had erupted. “The justified and understandable anger of the German people over the cowardly murder of a German diplomat in Paris found extensive expression during last night,” he declared. “Now a strict request is issued to the entire population to cease immediately all further demonstrations and actions against Jewry, no matter what kind. A final answer to the Jewish assassination in Paris will be given to Jewry by way of legislation and ordinance.” Within days, Hermann Göring imposed a fine of one billion reichsmarks—equivalent to $400 million—on the collective Jewish population of Germany and Austria in retribution for vom Rath’s murder in Paris.

In reporting the horrifying events of Kristallnacht, the
New York Times
also described the frightening new reality facing Jews living inside Germany and Austria. “All Jewish organizational, cultural and publishing activity has been suspended,” the newspaper reported. “It is assumed that the Jews, who have now lost most of their possessions and livelihood, will either be thrown into the streets or put into ghettos and concentration camps, or impressed into labor brigades and put to work for the Third Reich, as the children of Israel were once before for the Pharaohs.”

Over the course of three days, somewhere between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand Jews—mostly adult men—were arrested throughout Germany and held as prisoners either in local jails or concentration camps. A news brief published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s correspondent in Berlin on November 14 stated that “virtually every Jewish doctor” had been arrested in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, “as well as practically all practicing Jewish attorneys.” Although most of the arrested men would be released over the next three months, more than two thousand prisoners died, either from illness or from beatings.

Other men were lucky and narrowly avoided being arrested during Kristallnacht. Erwin Tepper’s father was not at home when a marauding group of Brown Shirts forced their way into the family’s apartment. Several months earlier, Juda Tepper had lost his salesman’s job at a women’s lingerie shop, a casualty of Aryanization. But the new owner of the shop had little sympathy for Nazis and, in anticipation of the Kristallnacht riots, bravely agreed to hide Tepper inside the shop. “My father spent that night and the following day and the following night hidden in the back of the store, where he used to work,” Erwin recalled. “The owner hid my father until it was safe to go home.”

Fritzi and Elizabeth Zinger’s father was also hidden away during Kristallnacht—concealed behind a large armoire in the family apartment. “My mother grabbed my father and shoved him behind the closet,” remembered Elizabeth. “She then told me and my sister, ‘Don’t say anything when the Nazis come looking for him.’ Of course, we knew where he was, but we were smart enough not to say. When the storm troopers came, they looked around for father, and then said to mother, ‘If he’s not here when we come back, we’re going to take you.’ She had saved his life, and for some reason Kristallnacht was called to a close for that night. I guess they had captured enough Jews to send off to the concentration camps.”

Emil Weisz’s stall in the Fleischmarkt was among the thousands of Jewish businesses that were vandalized during Kristallnacht. Looters freely made off with his cash registers, scales, and butcher’s knives. The shop itself was heavily damaged, and the entire inventory was stolen. Weisz knew that non-Jewish shopkeepers had eagerly helped themselves to things from his store, but he also realized he no longer had any recourse. Complaining to the police only resulted in a beating, along with stern orders that he clean up the mess that was left. Shortly after Kristallnacht, the shop itself was confiscated, although Weisz was still forced to pay taxes on a business that he no longer owned with money that he could no longer earn. One night, while his eight-year-old daughter, Helga, lay fast asleep, Weisz slipped out of the family apartment, intent on selling his wedding band in order to scrape together at least some of the money that he owed in taxes. He never returned that evening, and his family would not learn until several months later that he had been arrested and sent off to Dachau.

The steady, somewhat orderly exodus of Jews from Vienna that had begun with the Anschluss now gave way to a panic-fueled effort to find any possible way out as quickly as possible. “All of a sudden, you had people at home all day long. They didn’t have their businesses any longer,” said Paul Beller, whose father and uncles had lost their successful plywood business. “Suddenly it was a different kind of a life, with all of the stress and hearing conversations about trying to get visas and trying to find ways out. In most cases, if you didn’t have somebody to sponsor you in the United States, you were not going to get a visa. And there were the grim thoughts that if you were not going to get one, were you going to be one of those who was not going to survive.”

For many Jewish families, such thoughts were exacerbated by the depressing realization that they had few, if any, hopes of even qualifying for a visa to America—or anywhere else, for that matter. “My parents had been trying to get visas, but they had no connections,” remembered Robert Braun. “They had no relatives close enough in the United States that they could call on for an affidavit, and it all looked quite hopeless. Of course, there were rumors going around that you could buy a visa to get to Cuba or to Shanghai or places like that. But my parents were not wealthy. We were strictly lower middle class, and my father by then had lost what little business he had. I don’t think they had any hope of being able to leave.”

Families without relatives in the United States also tried anything they could to find ways, despite overwhelming odds, of somehow getting to America. “My mother was so desperate that she went to the telephone company and picked out some telephone directories from the United States,” said Kurt Herman. “She looked up our last name, copied down all the addresses, and got an interpreter to write letters in English to see if they would sponsor us. Of course, that didn’t work. But that’s how desperate she was.”

The Nazis were now enforcing their policy of
Judenrein
even more aggressively. Men who had been arrested and sent off to concentration camps in the days and weeks following Kristallnacht would often be released only if they could obtain exit visas. They were typically given only a couple of weeks to leave the country, and faced being arrested and sent back to the concentration camps if they were unable to do so.

In the wake of Emil Weisz’s arrest and imprisonment in Dachau, Helga and her mother, Rosa, had been forced out of their spacious apartment and were now living, with two other families, in a cramped three-room apartment in Leopoldstadt. Helga’s aunt and uncle, along with their two children, occupied one room. Helga and her mother—Helga’s sister had recently escaped to Palestine—lived in a second room. Yet another family was crammed together in a third room. Rosa Weisz spent her days in a frantic effort to find out what had happened to her husband and whether she might be able to obtain a visa that would allow the family to leave Vienna. For Helga, the viciousness of Kristallnacht continued on the day that she, along with her other Jewish classmates, were thrown out of their school. “You can’t come to school because you’re a dirty Jew,” one of her classmates told her. As Helga—who had once fantasized about singing like Shirley Temple—stood crying in the hallway of the school, waiting for her mother to take her home, a sympathetic teacher came over to her, lifted up her chin, and said, “I’m very sorry this is happening to you. This is not right.”

The day after the Kristallnacht riots, eleven-year-old Kurt Roth was also sent home from school, even though he attended a private Jewish school that, for the moment at least, was still permitted to operate. The school’s principal, frightened by the likelihood that the school would be singled out for attack by Nazi thugs, instructed the students to go home without explaining why. But rather than dismiss all the students at once, the principal filtered them out a few at a time so that the neighboring streets would not suddenly be filled with Jewish children who would be easy targets for the anti-Semitic mobs still rampaging through the streets of Vienna. “I began walking home, but I didn’t get home,” said Roth. “There was a synagogue near our house on one of the main streets in our district. I walked by there, and I saw this huge crowd around the synagogue. I had no idea what was going on, and I kept pushing myself into the crowd to see what was happening.” A few moments later, he found himself in front of the temple’s smoldering ruins. “I left the crowd and walked home, but I still had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t until I got home that I learned what was happening out there in the streets. I also found out later that one of my uncles had been arrested during that first night of Kristallnacht.”

A few weeks later, a young couple showed up at the Roths’ apartment, brandishing an official notice declaring that the apartment now belonged to them. The Roths moved into a small apartment on the same street, just a couple of blocks away. The front of the building had been occupied by a store, whose Jewish owner had already been evicted. The Gestapo had stored the owner’s belongings in one of the apartment’s rooms, locking the door leading into the room and pasting a paper seal across the door. Kurt’s mother leaned a small dining table against the door to prevent anyone in the family from accidentally tearing the Gestapo’s official seal. “I sat at that table during every meal,” Kurt recalled years later, “filled with terror from thinking what would happen if I broke the seal.”

CHAPTER 6

The members of Brith Sholom are extremely eager to bring fifty refugee children from Germany to the United States. They are ready to provide a home and education for them
.

—G
IL’S LETTER TO
A
SSISTANT
S
ECRETARY OF
S
TATE
G
EORGE
M
ESSERSMITH

P
HILADELPHIA
–W
ASHINGTON
, D.C
.

F
EBRUARY
1939

G
il had spent the past several hours scrutinizing a thick stack of documents he had spread across the leather-top mahogany desk that dominated his office on the tenth floor of Albert Greenfield’s Bankers Securities Building. Despite his aptitude for figures, Gil was confused by what seemed to be an inexplicable discrepancy in the jumble of numbers before him.

As he continued to dig through the papers detailing the government’s immigration quotas and the actual numbers of visas that had been issued to fill them, Gil could not reconcile the number of would-be immigrants from Germany and Austria with those who ultimately had arrived here. Unless he was missing something, the number of visas that had been issued did not match up with the number of immigrants who arrived under the quota.

Assuming that Gil was deciphering the figures correctly, the number of visas appeared to exceed the final number of immigrants. Given how difficult it was to obtain a visa, he could not understand why any would have gone unused, particularly when tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of Jews living inside Nazi Germany and Austria were so desperate to leave. Something was not right.

After agreeing to take on the rescue project, Gil had immediately embarked on a crash course in America’s heavily regulated immigration system. In an attempt to curtail the waves of immigrants flooding into the United States, Congress in 1924 had established the quota system that fixed the number of immigrants allowed in from every foreign country. By the end of World War I, America had ceased to be a nation that warmly invited immigrants from around the world. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a virulent xenophobia pervaded the United States, and the once-idealized sympathy for those millions of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” had long since vanished into thin air. The noble words of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” sonnet remained engraved on the bronze plaque affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, but increasingly restrictive laws designed to keep most would-be immigrants at a distance all but silenced Lazarus’s plea to send the world’s “homeless, tempest-tost” into the embrace of that “mighty woman with a torch.”