Cruel World (29 page)

By November 15 at this consulate alone, several thousand people a day, who “had been handled with the greatest possible consideration and sympathy as the enormous crowd would permit,” were “filling all the rooms and overflowing into the corridors of a building six stories high.”
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With the pretexts fabricated on Kristallnacht, expulsion of Jews from Germany proper would soon reach the same pitch as it had in Austria. On November 12 a decree titled On Eliminating the Jews from German Economic Life denied them most remaining forms of employment. On top of this, the Jewish community was to pay a fine of one billion marks for Grynszpan’s passionate act. All Jewish children were now banned from the schools and curfews were imposed. And, in late January 1939, a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, similar to Eichmann’s organization in Vienna, was set up in Berlin under the command of SS Police Chief Reinhard Heydrich. This agency stopped at nothing in its promotion of emigration. German shipping lines, eager to make money, were encouraged to sell passage to emigrants without visas and leave them in foreign ports without reference to the receiving country’s laws. This practice would soon backfire. Even Shanghai, where no visas were required, would limit entry in late 1939 after it had received more than 16,000 refugees.
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U.S. and South American authorities mercilessly turned away many such ships, the most famous of which was the ill-fated
St. Louis
, whose courageous
captain, disobeying orders from the Reich (where the vessel’s wanderings had become a public relations disaster) to bring his passengers straight back to Hamburg, radioed home that he had to put into Southampton due to “storms” in the North Sea, thus allowing his cargo to find refuge, albeit temporary for some, in England and Western Europe.
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The Nazis, working closely with the Jewish community in Palestine, also facilitated illegal emigration to that area. The clandestine traffic was promoted as well by the Poles and Romanians, whose citizens were not technically refugees, and was a bonanza for every kind of profiteer and con artist. Switzerland, France, and Italy knowingly helped the illegal travelers get to the decrepit ships, mostly of Greek ownership, which would take the refugees, among whom were many unaccompanied children, to Palestine. British consuls in the eastern Mediterranean described “shocking conditions reminiscent of the slave trade,” but British interception of the ships roused enormous public protest. This was hardly surprising, as some of the vessels sent back to their ports of origin broke down and sank en route, while those that made it were often not allowed to dock, leaving the passengers in ghastly conditions.
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By late 1938, one small wedge of hope remained. Certain elements in the German government—most particularly Göring, who was in charge of economic development—while eager to expel the Jews and take their assets, had not approved of the violent Kristallnacht activities. This group now seemed open to suggestions from abroad on how to facilitate emigration. George Rublee, who, despite lack of support from British and American diplomats, had courageously persisted in his attempts to speak with the highest Nazi leaders, now managed to negotiate a complicated five-year plan with Göring. This agreement would allow emigrating Jews to take a certain percentage of their tangible goods with them, and set up a fund in Germany that would use 25 percent of confiscated Jewish assets for their resettlement. A private international corporation would raise more funds and handle matters outside Germany. Rublee did not “believe that [Göring] was actuated by humane feelings” but that “he felt that the persecution was damaging Germany and that if the rest of the world was willing to take the Jews out it was foolish not to permit this to be done.”
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The rest of the world was not very willing. Not only did the simultaneous spectacle of the half-million Spanish refugees streaming into France give everyone pause, but the controversial rescue plan was rightly viewed by many groups outside Germany as pure blackmail. Some Jewish entities felt that the international corporation would confirm the existence of
Hitler’s favorite bugaboo of “International Jewry.” Others, however, saw acceptance as a means to save thousands of lives. As the redoubtable Dorothy Thompson put it: “It is easy to tell people inside a fortress to die for a principle rather than accept compromise.”
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After much further fussing, the corporation, known as the Coordinating Foundation, did come into being, but not for six long months, and by then it was of no use, as the German invasion of Poland, and the entrapment of millions in the Nazi web, was only weeks away.

As the doors of refuge inexorably closed, it had become clear to many that it might at least be possible to save the children of Jews and other groups deemed unacceptable by the Nazis from the narrowing vortex of violence, national self-interest, and bureaucracy that threatened their families. The Spanish experience had set a certain precedent. The individuals caught up in events were not concerned with the diplomatic ramifications of their flight. Having overnight lost all status and means of livelihood, facing incarceration if they did not leave the Reich by a certain date, they sought a safe haven, and often the only way to get there was illegal. For such fugitives, children were a dangerous impediment; thus long-lost relatives and all sorts of help organizations were deluged with appeals to take people’s offspring.

Organizations suitable for handling such transfers already existed in the Western nations. Indeed, they had been receiving more appeals for rescue than they could handle ever since 1933 and had already taken action. A Kindercomité of upper-crust ladies in Holland, having heard rumors that unaccompanied refugee children were wandering in the woods along the frontier with Germany, set out along forest tracks in their cars and were “speechless with emotion” when they saw small figures, “shy as deer,” running away among the trees. Reassuring the children, the women bundled them into their cars and smuggled them past the border patrols, which were not about to stop ladies of such standing.
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American organizations, as we have seen, could offer little help, but Britain, closer to the scene, had done better. Under the auspices of the well-funded Central British Fund for German Jewry,
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it had already allowed in small groups of children. In 1936, after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, the Central British Fund was joined by the Save the Children Fund and the Quakers in the Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany, which had quietly aided 471 threatened children of various categories to emigrate by 1938.
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But, like everyone else, the British Jewish community was still not completely convinced of the danger facing those in Germany and was inclined to limit itself to funding programs in the Reich that would help their German brethren “adjust” to the situation. The community proposed to fund a
four-year plan to send German Jews aged seventeen to thirty-five, plus 2,000 orphans and poor children, to Palestine. The problem, once again, was how to save the children from Germany and still avoid the “dumping” of Jews by Romania and Poland. This attitude did not help British attempts to raise funds for the project from Jews in the United States, as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had always resented its British cousin’s lack of support for “Eastern” Jews.
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The Joint was not the only fussy mainstream Jewish organization: even in the face of the mounting danger, bureaucrats of the long established Youth Aliyah program in Palestine and of the Jewish Agency for Palestine refused to lower their screening standards or to speed up their processing, noting huffily that they were “not a rescue organization.” Although this stance did eventually change, for many children who had applied, it would be too late.
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Kristallnacht not only increased exponentially the number of children needing immediate help, but also swept all these subtleties away. One British social worker felt that the violent events in Germany had activated a passionate desire to save threatened children that resonated even in the remotest areas of her country.
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And indeed, within days, a new entity, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, was put together from members of existing British help organizations. For this group, as for the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, speed was of the essence. Negotiations with different groups of Jews and consultations with child welfare groups were set aside. Using all possible pull, the committee, within a week of its formation, had managed to arrange a meeting with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Home Office officials, who approved the unrestricted entry of unaccompanied children up to age seventeen. No passports would be necessary. A special pass would be issued for each of the children, who would be chosen by the central Jewish organizations in Germany and Austria. The idea was to get as many children as possible to England immediately and then worry about their placement. Soon Holland, Belgium, France, Sweden, and Switzerland joined in and offered to take some 4,650 more.
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Once in Britain, the German children, like the Spanish ones, would be housed in one large group, this time at a summer camp at Dovercourt on the North Sea coast. Transportation would be by train across Holland to ferries, which would go to Harwich.

To achieve this exodus, complex arrangements had to be made with German railroads, British ferries, and Dutch child care agencies. For once, all were agreed. Preference was given to orphans who had been thrown out of their institutions, young boys in concentration camps, and homeless children whose parents had been arrested. On December 1, less
than three weeks after Kristallnacht, the first group of 320 children left Berlin and another was being made ready for Saturday, December 10. Their departure was delayed until Monday, December 12, when the Chief Rabbi of England, apparently not fully aware of the urgency of the situation, fussed that the children should not travel on the Jewish Sabbath.

Meanwhile, the various agencies had persuaded a remarkable Dutchwoman, Gertruud Wijsmuller-Meijer, one of the heroines of the rescue of children, to go to Vienna and try to convince Adolf Eichmann himself to release children from that city. Mrs. Wijsmuller was the childless wife of a well-to-do banker and had been working with the Dutch Kindercomité for some time. To this snappily dressed woman, known to the children as “the lady in the hat,” bureaucratic rules were meaningless. She was chosen because she was not Jewish, which, it was thought, would make access to Eichmann easier. She not only accepted the task: she took a plane, not so usual in those days. Once in Vienna she stayed at the fashionable Hotel Excelsior in order to impress the Gestapo. Getting to the Grand Executioner was not easy, but after much harassment by the Gestapo, she was rudely received on December 5 by Eichmann, who was seated at a desk on a raised platform with a large and vicious-looking dog at his side. Mrs. Wijsmuller was not impressed; nor was she humiliated when Eichmann required her to remove her gloves and shoes and raise her skirt above her knees so that he could check to see if she had any of the sixty-five or so physical characteristics that, according to the Nazi race agencies, would indicate she was a Jew.
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Apparently she passed, as Eichmann later described her as “a very pure Aryan, but quite mad.”
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The Nazi emigration chief was only too delighted to be rid of hundreds of Jews and, just as aware of the Jewish Sabbath as the British rabbi, authorized that first departure for Saturday, December 10. Mrs. Wijsmuller, delighted at this result, politely invited Eichmann to have coffee with her the next time he was in Amsterdam. Such cultivation of the Nazis would stand Mrs. Wijsmuller, and many other rescue workers, in good stead and enable them to bend many a rule and get many an additional child out.

Mrs. Wijsmuller now had four days to choose the children, give them physicals, and arrange trains, food, and escorts plus transit arrangements through Holland. She and her team did it. This would be only the first of her extraordinary performances. Once the Kindertransports got going, she went to Germany four times a week to escort the groups, now limited to 150 at a time, and to facilitate their handling. Soon she was such a fixture on the German railroads that the Gestapo did not bother with her too much and she was able to cheat more and more. Indeed, things got so
folksy that on the occasion of her fiftieth trip, the Gestapo insisted on giving her a party at the main transfer station, complete with band and wine. Feeling that a refusal to accept this bizarre celebration would have “ruined everything,” she limited her disapproval to dressing entirely in black.
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And on it went: from Prague she brought out a group of half-starved Sudeten-German children whose parents had been jailed for being anti-Nazi. The children had been put in a camp: “It was the first time that we saw truly malnourished children,” Mrs. Wijsmuller later recalled. “The Jewish children were still well fed.” In Holland Dutch railway workers and Kindercomité ladies plied them with food. At the ferry dock, porters tenderly carried the children on board.
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A few months later she chartered seven airplanes and provided fuel for them in order to bring over several hundred Baltic refugee children stranded in Sweden. Sixty more were loaded into ferries at the Hook of Holland on the day Germany invaded Poland, despite protests from the authorities. And in May 1940, at the fall of the Netherlands, as thousands jammed the port town of Ijmuiden, Mrs. Wijsmuller got seventy-five Jewish children out of an Amsterdam orphanage and onto several buses, and, well after most people had been ordered to disperse, arrived at the locked gates leading onto the dock and a ship about to sail to England. Just as all seemed lost, she ran into a director of the steamship company and persuaded him to open the gates. Two hours later the seventy-five children were on their way to safety.
¹²
Mrs. Wijsmuller continued her daring efforts throughout the war, and is said to have been personally involved in the saving of some 10,000 children.