Someday You Will Understand

by Nina Wolff Feld

  CHAPTER 4

  No Exit: Marseille, Fascist Spain, and the Nightmare Ocean Crossing

  In December 1940, after six months in Lyon, the Wolff family left and made their way to Marseille. Finally, after months of frustrating negotiations with American embassy officials in Marseille and the help of relatives in the United States, they were granted visas to America. There are no details about where they lived during that time, but we had relatives in Marseille. By then, Mr. Kresser had returned to the United States. They kept in touch, and my father occasionally wrote to him while he was in the army.

  In order to be granted a visa to the United States, they must have had to go through the Joint—the Joint Distribution Committee, created to help Jews in distress overseas, whose European office was headed by Joseph Schwartz—or through Varian Fry, the American journalist who ran a rescue network in Marseille during the war. His heroic efforts alone helped save the lives of thousands of Jews otherwise destined for the death camps. In August 1941, my father along with his sister and my grandparents boarded a train heading southwest from Marseille to Seville, Spain, a distance of 1,600 kilometers, in the blazing heat of summer with no air conditioning. My grandmother wore the same suit and carried the same alligator handbag that she left Brussels with the year before. The trains were patrolled by armed German soldiers, who were checking papers very carefully. If there had been any kind of delay on the train, for any reason, their visas could have expired and they would not have reached Spain in time to buy passage on the SS Navemar, leaving from the port of Cádiz. The Joint chartered as many ships sailing to the United States as possible and bought all available berths on regular passenger ships. My father’s family bribed the Navemar’s captain, who was asking for $2,000 per head for as many people willing to pay the exorbitant fee to fit into his quarters, one of the few spaces on board with a port hole. They were four among seven who secured a cabin on this famed voyage to America. The incredible story of the Navemar was told by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Herbert Agar in his book The Saving Remnant. He described the ship as:

  an ancient freighter with no facilities for passengers, not even toilets. Tiers of bunks had been fitted into the airless holds. Passengers took turns on the meager deck for a breath of air. There they found themselves in competition with five live oxen, the commissariat for the voyage. . . . By the time Navemar sailed, the American visas of the passengers . . . expired. . . . Joseph Schwartz in Lisbon cabled New York to ask the Department of State to extend the visas, and told Navemar to drop anchor in the River Tagus, the Joint paying the demurrage. Mr. Schwartz then induced a reluctant Portuguese government to allow the passengers on shore, so long as the Joint was responsible. . . . But when he boarded Navemar, and pointed out that no one could live in such conditions, and to take care of anyone who went ashore until the next regular sailing to the United States, nobody would leave ship. The Joint, as they well knew, could not possibly promise that another vessel would ever sail from Lisbon with a passenger list, which had not been vetted by the Gestapo. . . . The Department of State had generously sent word to the American consulate at Lisbon to extend the visas. But this proved impossible because the consulate did not have enough typewriters to make out the new forms in time. Navemar, with slave-ship conditions below decks, could not lie indefinitely off Lisbon. Yet the passengers were still too frightened to disembark. Here is a problem which no government is equipped to solve. If you do not have typewriters you cannot do the necessary paperwork for hundreds of new visas. A pity, but, come what may, the forms must be completed.

  What happened next is phenomenal. There were hundreds of refugees still in Seville whose visas were expiring. The American consulate was willing to extend them, but due to the shortage of typewriters they were incapable of helping. In a decisive act that saved hundreds of lives, the Joint in Lisbon sent two Portuguese Jews with enough funds to acquire as many typewriters as they needed to fill out the new forms. Money was no object.

  The only story that I ever heard my father tell of his final escape aboard the Navemar was that when the ship came to port in Bermuda, before continuing on to Cuba and then New York, he noticed the way the Bermudan men were dressed and thought to himself that he had long shorts and knee socks. He changed his clothes and snuck off the freighter in search of oranges to prevent scurvy. According to him, he snuck back on board minutes before the ship pulled out of port. The extremely long and arduous journey to Brooklyn Harbor was anything but enjoyable. Varying reports say that the freighter could accommodate between fifteen to twenty-eight passengers but was crammed with anywhere from a thousand to more than eleven hundred passengers in its cargo holds.

  In an article on his website, Jeff King wrote this about the Navemar:

  The Spanish freighter, equipped to carry 28 passengers, crammed 1,000 people into its cargo holds. The conditions were so horrible when it arrived in Cuba in 1941 that Manuel Siegel of the Joint Relief Committee in Havana wrote to the JDC that “everyone seemed to be fighting everyone else for the privilege of living. The relationships seemed more animalistic than human.” Victor Bienstock, a writer for the International Jewish Press Bureau, gave this grim report: “It was a nightmare spectacle—Hollywood could have used it for a setting in a new production of Dante’s Inferno. The great, gloomy caverns, the tiers of bunks rising on all sides. Old men and women gasping for breath in the insufferable heat, lying motionless on their bunks, while children tossed and cried. Everyone hungry, everyone thirsty, everyone dirty. . . . The captains on the old slave ships saw that their human cargoes got better treatment than this—and over a half-million dollars in passage money was paid on this ship.” The overcrowding was so dangerous that the Navemar was labeled “a flowing Gurs,” referring to the Gurs concentration camp in France. Six Jews died on the voyage. Many were stricken by food poisoning. The only relief came when the Navemar, nicknamed the Nevermore by passengers, reached New York in 1941. Dr. Joseph J. Schwartz, the JDC’s European chief, admitted that the agency knew about the condition of the ship before it set sail, but that it was under pressure to get the refugees out at any cost. “Several thousand people in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia held U.S. visas which were about to expire. Unless the people left prior to the date of expiration of those visas, the chances for renewal were remote,” he wrote in a memorandum on the Navemar. “We tried to clean the ship up as much as possible, but try as we did, it was impossible to make the Navemar a decent ship, and we knew when the ship left the harbor that there would be much suffering and privation.” Schwartz said the urgency was a result of the “fear which exists all over Europe today, of the horror of remaining behind, of the almost certain doom that people expect unless they are able to emigrate.”

  The New York Times of September 13, 1941, quoted passengers as saying: “[A]s freight we were treated satisfactorily, but just freight not passengers. . . . [W]e could only stand this trip because it meant our salvation.” No words could have been spoken with more truth than those uttered by the passengers aboard.

  During the six weeks of their voyage, the danger for the Jews and other people at grave risk increased drastically. The Nazi siege on Leningrad began, all Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars, and preparations for the Final Solution were put into effect to eradicate the Jews. Experiments with the use of gas chambers started at Auschwitz, and the industrialized mass slaughter was put into effect with the issuing of the infamous letter from Göring to Heydrich dated July 31, 1941, while the Navemar was crossing the waters, escaping the war and leaving behind the many who would soon perish at the hands of Hitler’s armies.

  Berlin, July 31, 1941

  To: Gruppenführer Heydrich:

  . . . I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.

  Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, thes
e organizations are to collaborate.

  I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish question.

  Göring

  Time magazine of September 22, 1941, shows a photograph of people crammed into the lifeboat wrapped in blankets and as close together as sardines in a can. The ship arrived on a typically hot and humid twelfth of September, almost three months to the day before Pearl Harbor. Waiting on the dock at Brooklyn Harbor, amid the chaos of government officials, police, families, friends, journalists, and photographers, were my grandmother’s sisters and their children. Once my father’s family disembarked and passed through customs and on to a safe welcome on American soil, they stayed in Brooklyn for a short time before moving to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Incredibly, my father and his family were staying a half a block away from where my mother and her family were living on Ocean Avenue, but their paths would not cross again until one afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art fifteen years later when they met and fell in love.

  After Brooklyn, my grandparents lived in various hotels and never resettled in an apartment or home. My grandmother lived at the Park Royal Hotel on West 73rd Street around the corner from the Dakota until her death in 1980. My father resumed his formal education after a two-year hiatus and was enrolled first at the Rhodes School, where he met Monroe Rosenthal, his best friend and, as we often teased, significant other. Together, they switched to the Dwight School and graduated in June of 1942.

  On January 23, 1942, an enemy U-boat attacked the Navemar. It sank somewhere in the Madeira archipelago off the coast of Portugal. The German propaganda machine claimed a British submarine sank it, which only underscores the acute danger the refugees were in during their harrowing journey across the Atlantic four months earlier. In a race against time, they won their freedom while the fast-moving tsunami of organized genocide enveloped and annihilated 17 million other souls. Although exact figures are impossible to determine, upwards of 56 million people, civilian and military included, died during the course of World War II. The world had never imagined such a catastrophe could become a reality.

  CHAPTER 5

  Unraveling the Chaos: A Kid at the Dwight School

  On February 27, 1942, just six months after arriving in New York, my father presented his essay, “A Survey of the Military Situation,” to members of the faculty and his fellow students at the Dwight School. Having been swept into the vortex of history, he used his paper to impose order on the chaos of his past by analyzing the machinations of the enemy as the Allied Forces pushed forth to crush the Axis. What is remarkable about the paper is an eloquence that can be earned only through experience, and the depth of his knowledge of geopolitics. Worthy of a seasoned journalist, it was delivered by a boy of seventeen, whose third language was English, only five and half months into his new American life. He used the only sources he had: the radio, American newspapers, and those around him who had survived the same circumstances he had and who had some perspective to offer. This is the speech he delivered, with his grammar and punctuation intact:

  February 27, 1942 4:30 PM

  Members of the faculty, fellow students:

  It is very difficult nowadays to be accurately informed. Through a continuous barrage of false news, sent out by hundreds of radio stations, we must detect the facts. But, with a little study of propaganda methods we are, most of the time, able to obtain a fairly accurate picture of the war.

  This war is very different from previous wars, because it is not merely being fought between armies. . . . [E]verybody is involved, civilians as well as soldiers. We can even go so far as to say that civilians are just as much in it as the soldiers are. Here in the United States, naturally, this does not apply literally, as it does in England and in Russia, China and in Serbia. But we too are affected.

  But let us leave the totalitarian aspect and come to the war between the armies. I think we all realize that there are no separate battlefronts. What happens in the Pacific is closely connected with Libya as we have seen. What happens in Russia is closely related to the problem of whether the Turkish army is to remain passive or not. Consequently, let us begin by examining our own position in the Pacific, now that more is known about what is termed the Pearl Harbor Disaster. I think we can do away with that term. It would be wrong to minimize the damage done and the losses; but Uncle Sam’s fleet is far from destroyed or erased from the map, as the Japanese have loudly proclaimed. The darkest point about the matter is actually . . . that it happened.

  The series of Japanese successes in Asia is incontestable. The Nipponese grabbed Indochina, until then under the control of the so-called Vichy government, swallowed Thailand, knocked out Hong Kong, swept through Malaya, took Singapore, parts of the Netherlands’ Indies, and New Britain as well as part of the Philippines, but only part of the Philippines! There General Mac Arthur, who fully realized how difficult it would be to defend the islands when he accepted such responsibility, is giving Japan a sample of the steel of which America is made! His gallant 20,000 are fighting without either sea or air support, an enemy more than ten times their number, an enemy well provided with tanks, aeroplanes, artillery and ships. Not only are our gallant 20,000 holding their own, they are plugging ahead! The other day we heard the most startling news: General Mac Arthur is counter attacking, advancing 6 miles along the coast of Manila Bay. He is hacking away at the enemy after a sudden slackening of Japanese attacks. Observers believe that the Japanese commander has abandoned temporarily the plan to take Batan peninsula; another Tobruk! Furthermore, the Japanese only occupy the most important of the 700 islands, and as long as the American troops will be there, the Philippine islands will be of absolutely no use as a supply base for the invaders. The price they paid so far is greater than most of us hoped. On the sea, the Japanese knocked out, in addition to the losses at Pearl Harbor, which as I said before were to some extent exaggerated, 2 British battleships and 2 dozen or so United Nations ships of all kinds. We have now reviewed what the Japanese have taken. Let us now consider their losses: official Washington figures published in February show that 112 Japanese troop transports and warships have been sunk or put out of action during the last 3 months by the UN.1 The American Army, Navy and Air Forces alone have shot down 245 enemy planes as compared to 48 US planes lost. These figures do not include the enormous losses inflicted by the US squadrons with the Chinese army.

  This shows that whenever American planes are in action, most often one against six, their crews and pilots are superior in quality. Whenever there has been an equal fight, it has ended in a disaster for the Japanese. On land they suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Chinese at Changsha. With the town and surrounding area they lost about 46,000 men. Then came the battle of Macassar Straights in which Dutch and American surface and under water craft as well as bombers were said to have sunk or badly damaged more than 100 ships, the entire convoy. The enemy not only lost ships, but, what is equally important, great masses of war materiel and thousands of troops. They took Macassar and parts of other islands, but at what price?

  When we look at a map we may see how valiantly and effectively the Dutch were and still are fighting. Not everybody realizes what they have been courageously sacrificing by ruthlessly destroying what they built up in years of toil, sweat and labor, rather than leave it to the invader who wanted to exploit it. At this time, the Japanese are attacking Java, but only after many futile attempts have they made a successful landing. It is there, too, that the US Navy had great victories.

  In Burma, things are not going too well; apparently there is not enough materiel available, and Chinese forces have to be brought over a very long route, it is always the old story: too little, too late and not enough air support. The Burma road itself can be written off as a supply line for the time being at least. This, however, does not necessarily imply the loss of the road pr
oper, but the proximity of the enemy makes the use of the road impracticable. Thus the Allies will have to find another way to supply China. Either to complete new road through India over the Himalaya to China, or through Russia. This latter arrangement seems to be the one agreed upon right now.

  There may even be a way to save Burma by a Chinese counter offensive, a thrust into Thailand, or what would even be better, into Indochina. In the latter, the Allies should not have any scruples concerning Vichy, which in that area has not feigned to keep up its so-called neutrality. Furthermore there would be a fifty-fifty chance that the French garrisons there would join the UN and turn their arms against the enemy. Talking about Vichy, there is another very important spot the Allies should closely watch: Madagascar! Diego-Suarez, a harbor on the northern tip of the island, is the only major naval base left in the Indian Ocean which can accommodate ships up to 26,000 tons. There are excellent dry docks and repair shops. Last week, rumors were circulating already, that the Japanese had demanded naval bases there. What happened through Vichy’s sell out of Indochina ought to be a warning! Furthermore, I don’t think the French would ever fire at the Americans! As to the French fleet and North African Empire and Martinique, the puppet government of Vichy is said to have given assurances to the US not to give aid or support to Germany. But, what are assurances of men under the Nazi heel?! Actually, I have talked with people having seen the German officers’ military missions, economic missions, armistice commission and tourists (or whatever they call themselves), spread all over Dakar, Casablanca, and Tunisia. As for Martinique, there is persistent suspicion that German U-boats are operating from there, the nearest European base being too far away, unless the Germans have built special long range U-boats. So much for Vichy.