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It was all too much for Ernst. He whispered to Werner that he should stay and watch the movie; they could meet afterward at the nearby apartment of his good friend Leo Gerson, to whom he wished to say good-bye.
Werner decided it was a good thing his father had left. The movie was about police chasing bank robbers in Amsterdam.
A surprise awaited Werner when he reached Leo Gerson’s apartment. Before he’d even had time to take off his jacket, his father told him there’d been a change of plans. Werner was to take a taxi to the train station and board the sleeping car, on which his father had reserved a private compartment. Once there, he would tip the conductor two Reichmarks and tell him that his father had been delayed in Berlin on business and wouldn’t be making the trip.
“I am to go to Amsterdam alone? What do you plan to do, Papa?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ernst answered.
His father said only that they would meet up in Amsterdam, and hurriedly sent Werner on his way with money for expenses. Shortly after Werner left, Ernst went to the same railway station, but to a different platform, and took a train heading in the opposite direction. He had a plan, of course, but had thought it was best for them both if he kept Werner in the dark. Ernst had also decided it was safer for them to travel apart. As he’d expected them to be on that morning’s flight to Amsterdam, he had advised his longtime secretary, Else Radinowsky, and the bank’s owner, Leo Königsberger, to report the missing funds to police that afternoon, so they wouldn’t be suspected as co-conspirators. When the flight to Amsterdam was canceled, Ernst had decided against contacting either his secretary or the bank’s owner, for fear of their becoming entangled in his crime. By now, they had likely notified police that the missing Jewish director of the Königsberger and Lichtenhein Bank had withdrawn all of his personal capital and was apparently fleeing the country. If that was the case, the authorities would try anything they could to stop him.
Ernst’s fears were justified. By that afternoon, his colleagues had reported the missing money, and the police in turn had notified customs officials, who sent out telegrams to all border crossing stations reading: “Family of five named Angress to be arrested.”
As he boarded the midnight train, Werner didn’t know any of this. He followed his father’s detailed instructions: he tipped the conductor and said his father would not be joining him as originally planned. The conductor asked for his passport, and Werner handed it over. In the sleeping compartment, Werner undressed and lay down on the lower bunk. Exhausted, he fell asleep before the train had even left the station.
A few hours later, the train stopped in the dark at Bentheim-Grenze, the last station in Germany before the Dutch border. Werner was still asleep when the light came on in the compartment; he awakened to three men standing next to his bunk. One was the conductor he had tipped. The other two wore trench coats and derbies—one of them held Werner’s passport, which he was studying intently.
Your last name is Angress? he asked in German.
A groggy Werner said yes.
Where is your father?
Without hesitating, Werner coolly lied as his father had instructed him and said he was in Berlin.
After further questioning, the Gestapo left the compartment and went into the corridor for a short conversation. They had been advised to be on the lookout for a family of five, not a teenage boy traveling alone. They handed Werner’s passport back to the conductor and left.
The train soon started rolling again. Werner dressed quickly and was given back his passport by the conductor, who said his shift was about to end.
In a few minutes, the train stopped at Oldenzaal, the first station in Holland. Only when the new conductor, speaking German with a Dutch accent, greeted Werner did it register on him that he was out of Germany and traveling in a free country. His mother and brothers were also safe; his one remaining concern was his father. Werner hoped that whatever plan his father had come up with yesterday would also bring him safely to Holland, and that they would find his mother and brothers waiting for them there and be reunited.
In Amsterdam, Werner went directly from the station to the Pension Rosengarten on Beethovenstraat, using directions his father had made him memorize. When he found the address, he saw that it was an old, dark apartment building, filled with newly arrived German Jews who were also waiting to make connections to someplace else. The owner, who was the head of the currency-smuggling ring, had just received a telegram from Ernst, asking if “Werner and Minna” had made it to Amsterdam. “Minna” was code for the briefcase filled with money. The owner was now able to wire Ernst that both Werner and Minna had indeed arrived safely.
It took Ernst another week to reach Amsterdam. To avoid arrest, he followed an agonizingly circuitous route. From Berlin, he had taken the train to Prague. When he arrived at the Czech border, he exited on the wrong side of the train and walked across the tracks, avoiding the German border guards. Entering Czechoslovakia, he identified himself as a Jewish refugee from Germany. He assured the Czech border guards that he was en route to Holland via Austria, Switzerland, and France—a path German refugees called the “Jewish Southern Loop”—and thus avoided being sent back.
In Amsterdam, the family was finally reunited. Yet, for weeks after they had moved into a rented apartment, Ernst struggled to put the ordeal behind him. He had done things in an effort to get his family out of Germany that he had never thought he was capable of doing. He had not only broken the law for the first time in his life, but in doing so, he had subjected his wife and sons to dangers as well. Adding to these deep blows to his self-esteem, Ernst had to reckon with all that the family had left behind in the city and country of their birth. There was their home and all their belongings, which Ernst heard had been seized by the Gestapo, and the respectable reputation he had built in his profession. There were also their extended families and ancestral burial sites, all left behind. No matter how safe they were outside Germany, there were so many things they could not replace or replicate elsewhere.
Werner was nearly inconsolable, too. He’d left all his friends in such a hurry that he hadn’t even been able to say good-byes. After the financial crimes his father had committed, he would never be able to return to Gross Breesen or Germany. Like it or not, he was in exile, too. He talked about this with his father, who understood how he felt. He had always been a German patriot, Ernst told his son. When he was in the army in the last war, he had volunteered to go to the front to take part in the fighting, and had been disappointed when he was assigned to military base duty because of a hearing disorder. But now—
“Hitler and the Nazis aren’t letting us be Germans anymore,” Ernst said bitterly. “They have humiliated and degraded Jews to second-class citizens. For that reason, Werner, Germany is no longer our homeland. I’ll take up a gun against those crooks anytime!”
His own heart made heavier by his father’s sorrow and deep sense of betrayal, Werner had no idea how soon the day would come when he, rather than his father, would be taking up arms in just that fight.
Stephan Lewy’s train ride out of Germany landed him and the other Jewish orphans from Berlin on the outskirts of Quincy-sous-Sénart, a French village of fifteen hundred residents about twenty miles south of Paris. The boys were awestruck as they approached their new home, a majestic old château owned by Count Hubert Conquéré de Monbrison. The count and his wife, Princess Irina Paley, a cousin of the last Russian czar, had for years opened the château to refugee girls from the Russian and Spanish civil wars, and they had recently been asked by a board member of a Paris-based Jewish children’s aid society, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), to take in German Jewish refugee children, whom the group had been rescuing after Kristallnacht.
When the forty boys arrived from Berlin in July 1939, there were no rooms available in the château; most were already occupied by Spanish girls. For the first several months, while the girls waited to be taken in by local families, the boys had to stay in an annex building, along with instructors and other staff, most of whom were also Jewish refugees.
The boys were enrolled in the village school across the road. Since Stephan and the others didn’t speak French, they were placed in the first grade. Stephan, who was already fourteen years old, picked up the language quickly. And given how good he was at mathematics and geography, he was soon advanced to his grade level.
One of the things he learned in his French history class was that France, a country of forty million, had lost two million men in the last war with Germany. It was a crushing loss, one that still lingered in recent memory. And yet, in spite of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and the rearming of Germany, there existed among the French a cheerful optimism and a strong sense of safety and security. The newly constructed Maginot Line, which consisted of miles of concrete walls, obstacles, and fortifications on the French side of the border with Germany, was believed to be impenetrable. Built to replicate the static defensive combat of the first war, French military experts thought it would protect their country from future German invasions.
From their own experiences with the Nazis, and after the military buildup they had seen in Germany, Stephan and the other Berlin boys did not share the locals’ sense of well-being. Stephan’s father, Arthur, had predicted that Hitler would wage war in the fall, “after the crops are in the barn,” so as to feed his army. This was the same timing Germany had employed in the last war, his father had explained to Stephan before he left Germany. Now Stephan worried about what would happen to his parents, still in Germany, and to himself in France in the event of war.
On September 1, 1939, everyone in the château gathered around the console radio to hear the BBC bulletins about Germany’s invasion of Poland. Columns of horse-mounted Polish cavalry were reported to be charging armored tanks. Two days later, France and England, allies of Poland, declared war on Germany. With the Germans unleashing a new type of modern, highly mobile warfare tactics that became known as blitzkrieg (lightning war), the battle in Poland lasted just weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 27, and a week later the nation of Poland ceased to exist, subjugating thirty-five million Poles, including more than three million Jews, to Nazi rule.
After the fall of Poland, news reports indicated that the warring nations had found themselves in a defensive stalemate, with French and Allied troops manning the Maginot Line and Germans holding the fortified Siegfried Line on their side of the border. In what the British press and politicians labeled the “Phoney War” for its lack of major fighting, for months only minor skirmishes took place. But Stephan was unable to send mail to Berlin or to receive it, and as a result, he lost all contact with his parents after fall 1939.
In May 1940, German troops invaded Belgium and Holland. Deftly bypassing the Maginot Line to the north, the Germans split the French-British-Belgian defensive front and drove Allied forces back to the coast at Dunkirk, where hundreds of small boats ferried more than three hundred thousand evacuees across the English Channel. In the south, German forces broke through the suddenly obsolete Maginot Line, and the blitzkrieg steamrolled into France, headed for Paris and the Normandy coast.
Early one morning, Stephan and the other boys were awakened by the sound of several large vehicles pulling up in front of the château. Jumping from their beds, they ran to the windows and looked out. The large courtyard was filling up with French military trucks and artillery pieces. Within an hour, the French soldiers had set up their big guns, pointing in the direction of their country’s capital. The soldiers waited, ready to try to halt the anticipated German advance after it rolled through Paris. One played an accordion; others idly smoked cigarettes.
At 10 A.M., a clearly distressed Count Monbrison gathered the boys and their instructors. He told them that the Germans were approaching Paris; and he could not guarantee the refugees’ safety. They needed to escape, and he had arranged for two trucks to take them to Limoges, 250 miles to the south. The boys went to their rooms, rolled up their blankets, put a single change of clothes in their backpacks, and went outside to the waiting trucks. They and several instructors piled into the canvas-covered back of the bigger truck; the smaller truck was loaded with their belongings and several bicycles.
Not long after leaving the château, the trucks joined a long line of stalled traffic. The German invasion had set off a mass exodus of civilians in cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, and carts, clogging the highways and secondary roads leading south. After four hours, the two trucks had made it just six miles—to the town of Corbeil, where boats and barges of varying sizes and power were motoring westward on the Seine. One instructor left to find a vessel to take them to the coast, in the hope that the waterways would be less congested than the roads. He returned an hour later and took the boys to a nearby péniche, a steel motorized river barge built for moving cargo. The vessel was about a hundred feet long, but just fifteen feet wide; it had limited space above deck for the boys and their instructors. The only available space below deck was a cargo hold half filled with coal. The boys packed into the unlit space atop the coal, and the hatch was closed. The air, thick with coal dust, was nearly unbreathable.
At dawn, the hatch was opened; the boys, blackened with soot from head to toe, came out into daylight. Stephan was surprised to discover that the barge had traveled only a short distance on the river; now it was held up in a line of traffic at a floodgate. It took a few more hours for the barge to pass through. When they finally came to a village, they docked to find food and water.
By about noon, they were back aboard the barge, ready to get underway. Suddenly, gunfire sounded all around them, and they heard people screaming on shore. Stephan had never heard gunfire before, and he had not pictured how loud it would be. The shots sounded very close. The boys had no choice but to rush back down into the darkened cargo hold, and the hatch was slammed shut after them. The barge slowly pulled out into the middle of the river. A short time later, no more than a half hour, they heard shouted orders in German, followed by the sound of the barge’s motor shutting down.
The staccato clicking of heavy boots sounded across the deck, and the cargo hold’s hatch flew open. The Jewish boys looked up to see German soldiers pointing guns down into the cargo hold.
“Juden!”
One soldier spat, “Ein Haufen schmutziger Juden!” (A bunch of dirty Jews!)
The soldiers laughed, then slammed down the hatch.
After the soldiers left, the instructors let the terrified boys out and huddled for a tense meeting. They decided to get everyone off the barge. Traffic on the river was moving too slowly, and in any case, the German army had overtaken them. The last thing they wanted to do was wind up near the front lines of a battle between the German and French armies. The instructors told the boys it would be best to return to Quincy, now some twenty miles in the opposite direction.
They found a big wooden pushcart, pulled by two long handles, and loaded their belongings. The trek back was against the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which still poured forth out of Paris as the mass evacuation of civilians continued southward.
After sunset, far-off fires and explosions turned the sky bloodred, and the boys heard the muffled explosions of distant bombs. In the dark, they walked into a checkpoint manned by French paratroopers. Wary of the group of young Germans, the soldiers questioned them closely. Where had they come from? Where were they going? Had they seen any German soldiers? Finally, they were allowed to pass. They found a barn in which to spend the night, but heard gunshots around midnight—very close. Few of the boys slept, and they were back on the move at sunrise.
As the morning dew settled on the ground, the group found themselves surrounded by an eerie, profound silence. It was difficult to believe they were in the midst of a shooting war. When the boys stopped for lunch, the instructors passed out small chocolate bars, crackers, and three sardines in oil apiece. They ate, watching as a billowing white parachute floated down into a nearby field. As soon as the German paratrooper hit the ground, he was cut down by sniper fire. For most of the boys, Stephan included, it was the first person they had ever seen killed. But there was no time for reflection or discussion. They quickly got back on the road and continued on.
A short time later, a German soldier passed them, speeding by on a motorcycle. The sound of nearby machine gun fire caused the boys and their instructors to scramble for cover. Several planes dove out of the clouds, dropping bombs that landed close enough for the boys to feel the concussive waves from the blasts. The planes had the red, white, and blue circular markings of the French military. Booming antiaircraft guns fired somewhere in the distance, and the boys saw in the sky the trailing dark smoke of a plane that within seconds crashed in a ball of fire.
After a second full day of walking, they reached the château. A sentry halted them in the courtyard; to their alarm, he was not French. The German army had taken over. Two older boys accompanied the instructors inside to speak with the officer in charge. When they returned, they reported that the German colonel had given them two choices: be sent back to Germany, or work at Quincy. They opted to stay. Henceforth, the boys would do the soldiers’ laundry, clean vehicles and equipment, serve meals, polish boots, and do anything else required. If anyone refused to work or caused trouble, they were warned, the entire group would be deported.
With more than a hundred soldiers occupying the château as well as the annex building, the boys and instructors moved some cots into the basement. The occupying Germans shared little of the meat, dairy, and produce that was delivered to the château, and the boys were constantly hungry. They sneaked out at night and foraged for fruit and potatoes in nearby fields.
Two weeks after they returned, it was announced on the radio—now tuned to German broadcasts, full of Nazi propaganda—that Germany and France had signed an armistice, resulting in the division of France. The Germans would occupy the north and coastal areas, including Paris and Normandy, while newly appointed French leaders would govern the unoccupied southern part from the new capital of Vichy.
One of Stephan’s jobs was to do the soldiers’ laundry. He put the dirty clothes into a huge pot of water on the stove, added soap, and boiled everything for an hour. When it cooled down, he carried the pot to the sink, poured out the soapy water, and added water to rinse the clothes before hanging them up outside.
As he did the wash one day, Stephan saw dark specks floating to the surface of the boiling water. They appeared to be food particles. Thinking that they must have been left on the table linens after meals, he began scooping them out of the pot, rinsing, and eating them. He had learned how to share growing up at the orphanage, so he split his bounty with some other hungry boys, and they all agreed that the soggy crumbs tasted delicious. Their snacking ended when one of the instructors caught them in the act, and showed the boys that they were actually eating pieces of army T-shirts that had disintegrated in the boiling water and shredded into tiny pieces.
In early October 1940, their instructors awakened the boys in the middle of the night and told them to quickly pack a few essentials. Quietly, they filed out of the basement into the courtyard. Two covered trucks were waiting, engines idling. They pulled out of the darkened courtyard and drove until midday. At the border between occupied and unoccupied France, the trucks stopped, and everyone got out.
When they realized they would be walking into unoccupied France, out of reach of Nazi troops, the Jewish boys became very excited. Their gait increased still more when they saw that the German soldiers guarding the border were not going to stop them. By the time they were on the other side, where the French gendarmes (police) stood at the crossing, the boys were running and cheering. They found their ride waiting nearby: a dilapidated old bus that didn’t have enough seats for everyone, so they took turns standing.
They pulled into the village of Chabannes three hours later. This was a remote and unspoiled region of central France, 120 miles west of Vichy, whose residents had a spirit of independence and justice carried over from the earliest days of the French Republic.
The boys’ new home was another rambling château, one that had passed through many hands. The aristocratic d’Anrémont family acquired the estate in the 1870s, but it was rundown by the time OSE took it over in 1939 to serve as one of its fourteen children’s homes in unoccupied France. (OSE could not operate in German-occupied France.)
The director at Chabannes was former journalist Félix Chevrier, an imposing man of fifty-six who came off as gruff but understood that many of the children laughed by day and cried by night. Chevrier reminded the dedicated staff, which included cooks, nurses, janitors, and teachers, that they were to provide the children, all of whom had known exile and separation, not just shelter and sustenance but a sense of normalcy in abnormal times.
At Chabannes, Stephan and the other boys from Berlin joined more than one hundred other Jewish children—mostly Germans, along with some Austrian and French refugees—ranging from eight to eighteen years of age.
Given his age, now fifteen, and the overcrowding at the village school, Stephan started learning the leather trade in a well-equipped shop sponsored by the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT). ORT helped refugees immigrate to other countries as skilled workers. Stephan learned to use all of the machines and cutting tables; soon he was crafting handsome pocketbooks, wallets, and comb holders that were sold in the village, with the proceeds going back to ORT.
Sports and physical education were an important part of each day, and there were spirited regular basketball and soccer games. Georges Loinger, a former engineer who coached gymnastics and track and field, often drove the boys to the point of exhaustion. He told them he wanted them fit in case they ever had to run for their lives. Stephan, fast and athletic, excelled in the sports.
Château Chabannes, Jewish children’s home near Limoges, France, where Stephan Lewy lived for nearly two years, 1941. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
There were enjoyable times for the children at Chabannes, too. Music was played every Saturday night after Shabbat, and young and old alike danced; the lively songs were performed by teenagers, with Jean-Pierre Marcuse on guitar, Armand Chochenbaum on drums, Walter Herzig at the piano, and Marjan Sztrum on banjo. Sztrum, an eighteen-year-old Polish Jew, was also a talented artist; he painted a fresco on the dining room wall depicting a farmer on a tractor.
The newfound security the children and their instructors began to feel at Chabannes vanished when they heard that gendarmes were showing up at other OSE homes, arresting the older Jewish boys, and transporting them to concentration camps. Tipped off by sympathetic locals in the village as a contingent of French police approached, Stephan ran with some other boys into the woods, where they spent the night hiding out.
Sixteen-year-old Stephan Lewy (right) working in the kitchen at Chabannes, 1941. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Throughout unoccupied France, it had become clear that the one-party fascist regime headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain was nothing more than a puppet government of Hitler’s Germany. The Vichy regime became increasingly brazen in carrying out Nazi-ordered pogroms, and in 1940 it began passing its own anti-Semitic laws, banning French Jews from working in certain fields and forcibly expelling foreign-born Jews. The French government gave lists of Jews to Nazis and assisted in identifying and expropriating the assets of wealthy Jewish families. More and more roundups of Jews swept France, and the gendarmes soon became as feared as Nazi storm troopers.
The year after he arrived at Chabannes, Stephan was summoned to the director’s office. Months earlier, he had sought Monsieur Chevrier’s help in trying to contact his parents, whom he had never stopped thinking about during his own flights through wartime France. Were they in danger? Or had something terrible already happened to them? So much had transpired since they had parted in Berlin. Now the Nazis were at war with the world, not just the Jews in Germany. Although he was terribly afraid he might get bad news, Stephan had decided that he needed to know one way or another. Were his parents dead or alive?
Mercifully, on this day, Chevrier was not bearing bad news. He explained that he had just received a wire from the Red Cross in Switzerland, reporting that Stephan’s parents had been located in America.
Stephan wasn’t sure he had heard right. “America?”
“Yes,” Chevrier said, smiling. “You can write to them.”
Stephan was excited and greatly relieved that his parents had found a way to get to America. Would he be able to join them? He hurriedly wrote a letter that same day. Several weeks passed before he heard back. When a return letter arrived, forwarded via Switzerland, it was written in his stepmother’s graceful cursive.
Dearest Stephan,
We were so excited when your letter came we first stared at the envelope before we dared open it . . .
Back in Germany, Arthur had lost weight, lowered his blood pressure, and passed his follow-up physical with ease. In quick order, they had received an affidavit from Johanna’s cousin, Bert Klapper, in Massachusetts, and visas for the United States. They had taken what they believed was their last opportunity to escape the Nazis, departing Germany in May 1940. It had been an agonizing decision for them because they did not know where Stephan was or even if he was still alive.
On their third day at sea, aboard a ship that left from Rotterdam, they heard news of the German invasion of Holland and Belgium. By the time they arrived in the U.S., France was at war, and the organizations they contacted were unable to find out anything about Stephan. There was more, much more, in the letter: their excitement at locating him, their love for him, how they were determined to find a way to bring him to America, too. Stephan read the letter again, and then, for the first time in a long time, he cried.
Over the next several months, and after some bureaucratic hitches, the paperwork for Stephan’s entry into the United States was finished. Johanna’s cousin signed an affidavit for him, as did his parents’ employer, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and become very successful in business. Arthur and Johanna Lewy were working as butler and maid at his mansion in Boston, Massachusetts. Their employer even gave them five hundred dollars to pay for their son’s ship passage.
In April 1942, Stephan said good-bye to everyone at Chabannes and took the train to Lyon, where he picked up his visa at the U.S. consul’s office. He then traveled two hundred miles by rail to Marseille, France’s southernmost Mediterranean port, and boarded a French passenger ship. Once on board, the captain gathered everyone together and explained the circuitous route he planned to take.
“If we leave here and head straight out into the Mediterranean toward North Africa,” he said, “we’ll probably get torpedoed by a German U-boat and no one will ever know what happened to us.” Instead, he was going to hug the coastline, slipping in and out of every inlet. “If we get torpedoed, I can at least scuttle the ship near land and maybe save our lives.”
They reached Barcelona and took on fifty Spanish refugees. Continuing along the eastern and southern coast of Spain, they crossed the seven-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, heading toward North Africa. Not forgetting the captain’s dire U-boat warning, everyone on board was relieved to finally arrive in Rabat, Morocco.
Stephan took a bus to Casablanca, where he waited several weeks for the ship that would take him across the Atlantic: the Portuguese steamship Serpa Pinto, a six-thousand-ton vessel chartered by the U.S.-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to take seven hundred Jewish refugees to America. Because it flew under the flag of a neutral country, the Serpa Pinto was one of the few passenger ships still making transatlantic voyages despite the U-boat menace. It departed Casablanca on June 7, 1942.
As the five-hundred-foot ship sped across the Atlantic at near top speed, Stephan found himself unnerved by the ship’s running lights, which were left blazing all night. The ship stood out like a beacon in the inky darkness. One morning, Stephan questioned a ship’s officer about all the lights. With all the U-boats, wasn’t it dangerous to be so lit up at night?
“We are neutral,” said the officer. “That is why we fly an extra-large Portuguese flag so prominently with the lights glowing. Any vessel can see we are a neutral ship.”
The flag, clearly visible at the stern and lit by flood lighting at night, was a huge green-and-red wooden one that did not crumple or ruffle in the wind. The officer’s explanation seemed plausible to Stephan—up until a few hours later, when the vibration of the engines ceased. He joined the other passengers in a rush to the railings and saw a low-slung submarine with a swastika painted on its conning tower.
Several German sailors from the U-boat climbed into a small, motorized launch, which they took to the ship. When they reached the Serpa Pinto, a rope ladder was thrown over the hull for them to climb up. On deck, there was no chatter from the refugees, only deathly silence. Stephan felt sick to his stomach. He knew there was no place to hide.
For three hours, the armed boarding party searched all the compartments on the ship, apparently looking for contraband. When they found none, they had the crew collect the passengers’ passports and went through them one at a time. Nearly all carried the red “J.”
At last, the boarding party left and returned to the submarine. The passengers remained on deck, watching to see what would happen next. “Habt keine Angst,” said a multilingual ship’s officer. He circled the deck, telling the mostly German-speaking passengers not to be afraid.
But every one of them was scared to death. Would the U-boat turn toward them, launch a torpedo, and sink them? Hoping he hadn’t come this far only to drown in the middle of the ocean, Stephan joined the others on deck who were praying in German and Hebrew; they continued until they could no longer see the submarine in the distance.
On June 25, 1942, the Serpa Pinto arrived in New York harbor. The ship slowed as it passed the Statue of Liberty, allowing the passengers a good look at the three-hundred-foot sculpture of the Roman goddess Libertas. She held high the copper torch, lighting the path to freedom from tyranny and suffering for oppressed immigrants from other shores. Some on the boat were smiling and laughing; others were struck speechless.
Stephan Lewy, who had been an orphan for more than half his lifetime, knew his father and loving new mother were waiting for him dockside. He breathed deeply, and his eyes filled with tears. He had made it.
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A PLACE TO CALL HOME (#ulink_7e9af2b7-f5cc-5c8b-9a03-72e3059c6048)
Günther Stern’s father had cautioned him to “be like invisible ink” so as to not draw attention to himself. But soon after they said good-bye at the port of Bremerhaven, where he boarded the SS Hamburg in November 1937, Günther joined in with the other emigrant children on the ship, running around playing hide-and-seek and pulling practical jokes on one another. The Jewish youngsters were eager to be free of the restrictive rules under which they had been living in Nazi Germany, which required them to be better than good in public so as to remain inconspicuous. In fact, Günther was still so wrapped up in his new oceangoing adventure that he hadn’t yet had time to be homesick.
On deck one sunny day, the children befriended an older American who was traveling alone. When he treated them all to an exotic drink they had never tasted before, called Coca-Cola, they became convinced he must be one of those fabled American millionaires. Near the end of the voyage, he told them he was in fact a mailman who had saved up for years for his first European vacation. The refugee children did not believe him: How could an average American afford such a trip? They decided that their generous millionaire simply wished to remain anonymous.
When they reached New York, a committee representative decided that Günther, after all his private lessons from Herr Tittel, was fluent enough in English to travel by himself the rest of the way to St. Louis. He would have to change trains in Chicago, however, so someone would meet him there and help him make his connection.
During his short time in the heart of New York City, Günther was most impressed by the jumble of skyscrapers, the crowded subways, and the curious Automatenrestaurants, or automats, at which busy people inserted coins in machines and instantly received sandwiches and other food items.
He arrived in Chicago on a Sunday and had a three-hour layover. The woman who met him decided they had time for a quick tour of the Windy City. The excursion included a stroll through the open-air Maxwell Street Market, which occupied several square blocks. Founded in 1912 by newly arrived Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, the market featured booths selling a variety of discounted items: produce, clothes, tools, and all things in between. To Günther, it was a wild mix of cultures and ethnicities; he saw people of all colors and ages, many of them Jews, intermingling easily, talking and joking with each other.
Günther had never seen anything like this in Germany. If this was what it meant to be in America, the land of the free, his days of trying to disappear in public like invisible ink were over.
After another long train trip, he arrived in St. Louis. His aunt Ethel and cousin Melvin met him at the station. Uncle Benno, his mother’s brother, was working the night shift at a bakery, and Günther did not meet him until he came home later that night. His uncle’s story was familiar to Günther; as a rebellious youth of fourteen or fiftteen, Benno had been exiled by his strict father, who sent him to America in the days when it was easier for immigrants to gain entry. Benno was a short, squat man who had been stymied but not defeated by the Depression. The Silberbergs did not live easy lives, but they had never been threatened with eviction or relegated to standing in a breadline for their next meal. Benno did not apologize for the family’s cramped apartment, located in a subdivided mansion on the predominantly Jewish west side, though the accommodations were markedly different from Günther’s family’s spacious, well-appointed home in Hildesheim. Nor was any explanation offered for Günther having to share a small room and a single bed with another refugee boy, Rudy Solomon, whom his aunt had taken in at the request of the Jewish Aid Society.
Although he quickly began to miss his own family and ache for home, Günther’s youthful dreams of adventure in his new country remained intact, no more so than when he enrolled five days later in Soldan High School, a public school reputed to be the finest in St. Louis. At Soldan, students from affluent families sat next to those in threadbare clothes, and all of them were taught and inspired by dedicated teachers and administrators determined to rival the top college-prep schools in the country. It was America at its best.
On his first day, Günther was received personally by the principal, who told him he had been assigned to the homeroom of Mrs. Muller, the German language teacher. When the principal asked if he was interested in any extracurricular activities, Günther quickly answered, “Swimming and the school newspaper.”
His first class was geometry, and after being warmly welcomed by the teacher—“our new student from Germany!”—he discovered that the class had just started taking a test. Mrs. Carmody, the geometry teacher, encouraged him to take it, too, in order to “show what you can do.” Günther sat down and read through the questions. Approaching the teacher’s desk, he asked softly, “Please, what is ‘isosceles triangle’?”
She went to the blackboard and drew one.
“Ah, yes,” Günther said. “Ein gleichschenkliges Dreieck.”
He took the test, and received a G for good.
