Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  Strangers in a Strange Land: Emigration

  The antisemitic policies pursued by the National Socialist government in the 1930s drove more than half of Germany’s Jewish population into exile. From the time of the Nazi rise to power in January 1933 until October 23, 1941, when Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler imposed a ban on further Jewish emigration from Reich territory, some 340,000 Jews left Germany and German-annexed Austria.1 The impetus to flee Nazi Germany began with the first major discriminatory measures imposed by Nazi authorities in the spring of 1933. Pressure to leave mounted with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935 and reached its climax with the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. Desperate to find a safe haven from Nazi persecution, many German Jews hoped to emigrate overseas—to the United States, Great Britain, or Palestine.2

  1. For further discussion of German-Jewish emigration during the Nazi period, see Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin and Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Heimat und Exil: Emigration der Deutschen Juden nach 1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006); Marion Berghahn, Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006); Herbert Strauss, ed., Jewish Immigrants of the Nazi Period in the USA (New York: Saur, 1978); Jim Tobias, “Und wir waren Deutsche!”: Jüdische Emigranten erinnern sich (Nuremberg: Antogo, 2009).

  2. Palestine, then under a British mandate, was a favored destination of many European Jews, but British authorities sharply curtailed Jewish immigration in the mid-1930s. In 1939, the famous White Paper further restricted such immigration and the purchase of land in Palestine by Jews.

  Document 3-1. Youth Aliyah immigrants pose for photographer Dr. Franz Ziss upon their arrival at Kibbutz Ben Shemen agricultural school in Palestine, 1940, USHMMPA WS# 07152, courtesy of the Keren Kayemet Archives.

  Thea Gersten was thirteen years old when she left her home in Leipzig in eastern Germany. Her father, Chaim Lazar Gersten, a Polish Jew, had settled in Berlin before World War I. He and his German-born wife, Rosa, owned a successful fur business; they were prosperous and devoutly Orthodox and shared a comfortable home with their two young children, Thea and Adi. But the events of Kristallnacht shattered the family’s quiet existence. On the night of November 9, 1938, local Nazi activists plundered and destroyed their residence and store. Fleeing arrest, Thea’s father, still a Polish citizen, perhaps unwisely made his way to Warsaw, where he worked to establish a new furrier trade and to make preparations for his family’s immigration to America. While her fortunate brother had secured emigration papers and settled with a host family in England, Thea, with Rosa, joined her father in Warsaw in July 1939. On the eve of World War II, mother and daughter traveled to London to visit Adi and to set up temporary quarters until the family’s quota number came up, allowing the Gerstens entry into the United States. Waiting for a shipment of furs with which he could finance his family’s voyage to America, Chaim Gersten remained behind in Warsaw to settle his business affairs.

  In the chaotic months before her emigration, Thea Gersten began to keep a diary. Deprived of her closest friend, Lolo, who had recently left Germany, she found in her journal a tool to restructure her perplexing circumstances and a confidante for her disquieting thoughts and memories. After a first unsettling month in London, Thea wrote her first diary entry since her arrival in Britain. In it she reflected upon the sudden loss of her childhood. “For what does childhood mean?” she later wrote. “Is it not the sensation of being rooted and safe, sheltered and needed?”3 Thea’s reflections mirrored the feelings and concerns of thousands of children in similar circumstances: the isolation and loneliness, the loss of familiar surroundings and native language, the uncertainty of life in a new land, the absence of friends and family members. Shortly before leaving Germany, she had had her first kiss; now, despite the crises of war and fears for her young Jewish associates back home, the future of her new romance dominated her thoughts. The safety of her father was another source of abiding anxiety and concern, one that would only grow as the war progressed. Unable to join his family in Poland when war broke out in September 1939, Chaim Lazar Gersten was swept up in the Nazi dragnet. Interned in the Warsaw ghetto, he was deported on January 20, 1943, to the Treblinka killing center, where he perished.4

  3. Thea Gersten Hurst, Das Tagebuch der Thea Gersten: Aufzeichnungen aus Leipzig, Warschau und London, 1939–1947 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 11.

  4. Gita Conn, “Thea’s Diary,” Manchester Guardian, January 27, 2003. Thea, her mother, and her brother survived the war in Great Britain.

  Document 3-2. Thea Gersten Hurst, Das Tagebuch der Thea Gersten: Aufzeichnungen aus Leipzig, Warschau und London, 1939–1947 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 58 (translated from the German).

  London, August 21, 1939

  It has been so long since I’ve written in my beloved diary. But these four weeks were such a difficult time for me that I had no patience for anything. But I don’t even want to mention it, don’t want to think of it. Now everything has improved a bit. But it is still not entirely better. It can only be better when I have my Lolo again. And there is no prospect of seeing her. Oh, how will I be able to stand it? I miss her more and more each day. I am frantic about her, and [we’ve received] no mail.

  The day is too short for me. I have so much to think about and so much to do that I will never be finished. I don’t stop until 12:30 at night. And still! I have just been reading, and then such a terrible longing for Philipp came over me. But now that has all passed. It always comes in waves. I have even kissed his picture. He would be the only one to completely understand me. But what should I do? I would really like to know if he is still in Grimma.5 He wrote me, “You really cared for me. I still care for you!” But does he still think that?

  5. This is a town in Germany about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from Leipzig. Philipp had been trying to leave Germany aboard a Kindertransport and succeeded in acquiring a place on the last one, on September 1, 1939, the day on which Germany invaded Poland, initiating World War II. Philipp would locate Thea in England, and the childhood romance would develop into a lasting friendship, which continued until Philipp’s death in 2002. See Conn, “Thea’s Diary.”

  We have been living here for almost four weeks. I thought that here I could find contentment. But just the opposite. I am so discontented. I need a friend. But I don’t want to form any new friendships here. I only want to be together with Lolo. Every acquaintance that I make here is only superficial. During the day, all this doesn’t really enter my consciousness, but at nighttime, just like now, one feels it all so keenly. I am so discontented. I look forward to tomorrow afternoon. Most probably I will be all alone here. Then at least I can daydream. Oh, how wonderful! I wish that I could give free reign to my thoughts. But I never have time for this. I am so dissatisfied with myself, and exactly that is the worst thing of all. But what shall I do? I reproach myself that I think so seldom about my father. But then when I do think of him, I do it with my whole heart. I am also displeased that I have not yet accomplished everything I have undertaken. But these are all things that I cannot change.

  For refugees escaping Nazi Germany, the flight from one’s homeland represented a traumatic experience on many levels. The labyrinthine bureaucratic arrangements, the harrowing wait for visas and travel documents, and the financial hardships imposed by emigration all combined to create a limitless number of worries and headaches for adults organizing asylum for their families in a foreign country. Beyond the planning and preparation, prospects for a new life abroad also presented a formidable set of difficulties. Would the family manage to adapt to its new surroundings? Would the household’s breadwinner be able to find work in a new land and in a new language? What would become of friends and family left behind?

  While emigrating abroad may have been a distressing and unsettling time for adults, it could also
represent an adventure for young children, especially those who had been shielded from the direst aspects of Nazi persecution. Fritz Freudenheim was twelve years old when his family left Germany in October 1938. In order to document his family’s flight into exile, young Fritz endeavored to make a colored pencil drawing of their long voyage overseas to their new quarters in South America. He began his sketch, “From Our Old Home to Our New Home” (“Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat”), in Berlin’s Levetzowstrasse, where the Freudenheims lived at the time of Fritz’s birth. In 1927, the household moved to Mühlhausen in Thuringia. The whimsical map illustrates how the family traveled by train to Berlin in March 1938, presumably to arrange the appropriate documents, and then on to the German port at Hamburg, where the Freudenheims boarded the SS Jamaïque on October 23, 1938. Fritz recalls the liner’s many ports of call in Europe and northern Africa before the Freudenheim family arrived at its destination in Montevideo, Uruguay, on November 30, 1938.6

  6. Fritz, later Frederico, Freudenheim grew up in South America and settled in São Paulo, Brazil, with his wife, Irene (née Gebhardt). He died there on March 15, 2008.

  Document 3-3. Crayon drawing by Fritz Freudenheim, “From Our Old Home to Our New Home,” c. 1938, in Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin and Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Heimat und Exil: Emigration der deutschen Juden nach 1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006), 155.

  The violent events of Kristallnacht accelerated the emigration of Jews from the Third Reich. The rescue of children became a paramount concern among refugee and children’s aid organizations, both in Germany and abroad. Following the November pogrom, the British government agreed to permit an unspecified number of children under the age of seventeen to enter the United Kingdom from Germany and German-annexed territories. Many public and private organizations, most significantly the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, worked to bring refugee children to Great Britain. These efforts, collectively known as the Kindertransport (children’s transports), rescued some nine to ten thousand children, seventy-five hundred of them Jewish, from Nazi Germany, Austria, and German-occupied Czechoslovakia and Poland.7

  7. For a more comprehensive description of the Kindertransporte, also see chapter 9.

  The first Kindertransport from Germany arrived in Harwich, England, on December 2, 1938. Children chosen for a Kindertransport convoy typically traveled by train to ports in the Netherlands, where they sailed for Great Britain. Private citizens or organizations had to guarantee to pay for each child’s care, education, and eventual emigration from Britain. In return for this guarantee, the British government agreed to allow these unaccompanied refugee children to enter the country on temporary travel visas. It was understood that when the crisis was over, the children would return to their families. Parents or guardians could not accompany them. The few infants included in the program were tended by other children on their transport.

  Cilia Jutta Horwitz, nicknamed Cilly, and her elder brother Max sailed with the first Kindertransport to England. Born in 1926, Cilly had enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence with her family in Harburg, near Hamburg. Her Jewish father, Walter Horwitz, owned a local department store. Although her husband was not deeply religious, Cilly’s Christian mother, Margarete, had converted to Judaism upon her marriage. The Nazi’s rise to power brought the Horwitzes’ happy family life to an end. According to the Nuremberg Laws, Margarete Horwitz was still legally an “Aryan,” but the children of her mixed marriage had been raised in the Jewish faith and were thus regarded as Jews (Geltungsjuden),8 subject to the full range of antisemitic persecution. In 1936, the family moved to Hamburg. Soon thereafter, Cilly’s father lost his business; shattered that he could not find employment, he attempted suicide. In the wake of this incident, Max and Cilly were removed from their home and placed in an orphanage. Desperate to regain their children, the Horwitzes decided to divorce so that Margarete might work.9 Fortunately, after Reichskristallnacht the Horwitz children were chosen to travel with the first Kindertransport to Britain. They lived apart, with different host families, and hoped for a time when their father and his new Jewish wife might join them in England.10

  8. According to the First Supplementary Decree to the Nuremberg Laws from November 14, 1935, children of a mixed marriage who were Mischlinge of the first degree and had been raised in the Jewish religion counted as “full Jews” in the context of Nazi racial laws.

  9. Enormous pressure brought to bear on “Aryan” partners in mixed marriages to divorce their Jewish spouses included restrictions on civil service employment and limited opportunities for private employment.

  10. See “Der Kindertransport nach England,” Hamburger Abendblatt, September 1, 2007.

  A letter from Walter Horwitz to his daughter in February 1939, three months after twelve-year-old Cilly arrived in England, reflects the hardships that both child and parent endured as a result of such a difficult separation. Refugee children found themselves alone in a strange land, far away from family and friends. Although many such children found an affectionate home among English host parents, some foster families found it difficult to integrate the new arrivals into their households, and many youngsters, like Cilly, spent most of the war years in a children’s home, an environment that often intensified feelings of isolation, abandonment, and rootlessness. As time went on, it was often difficult for parents to disguise their increasingly desperate circumstances back in Germany, which added to the children’s anxiety. Cilly and Max Horwitz remained in England for the duration of the war. On November 8, 1941, Walter Horwitz and his second wife, Sophie (née de Vries), were deported from Hamburg to Minsk; both perished in the Holocaust. Although Cilly often visited her mother, who survived in Hamburg, after the war, she herself married an Englishman and as Celia Jane Lee made her home in Great Britain.11

  11. See Reiner Lehberger and Ursula Randt, eds., “Aus Kindern werden Briefe”: Dokumente zum Schicksal jüdischer Kinder und Jugendlicher in der NS-Zeit (Hamburg: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg Behörde für Schule, Jugend und Berufsbildung, 1999), 39–44.

  Document 3-4. Letter of Walter Horwitz to his daughter Cilia (Cilly) Horwitz, February 15, 1939, in Reiner Lehberger and Ursula Randt, eds., “Aus Kindern werden Briefe”: Dokumente zum Schicksal jüdischer Kinder und Jugendlicher in der NS-Zeit (Hamburg: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg Behörde für Schule, Jugend und Berufsbildung, 1999), 39–40 (translated from the German).

  Air Mail

  Hamburg 13, February 15, 1939

  Grindelallee 79, 3rd floor

  My dear, sweet Cilly!

  Very many thanks for your dear card, which made me very happy. And so too for the kind words and greetings from your dear [host] parents, Mr. and Mrs. Watts. I return them with all my heart and send them my very best greetings. In the next few days I will write them personally; please let them know that. Now you are in good hands, my child, and are being properly spoiled. I am delighted for your sake. Do you often meet with Max? What is he up to? Children, I am so happy that everything has come together so well for you. My thoughts linger often with you. My fiancée sent a package with chocolates for you to Selsey, but it came back, “delivery refused”; customs probably should have been paid on it. Tonight I’m eating the last piece and thinking of you, Cilly. Be good and nice to your host parents, but don’t completely forget your Papa. You asked me in your last letter how things are going with my emigration. Right now, very badly. I don’t know what to do. My fiancée has a sponsorship for the U.S.12 and will try through relatives who hold an influential position in New York to arrange for me also to have a sponsor. [One of them] is a patent lawyer. However, [my fiancée] falls under the Polish quota, which comes up only in July, and probably has to wait until the end of the year. She wants to go to England to work as a housemaid in the interim; she is already in communication with a family, who has already requested a p
ermit for her from the Home Office.13 [She] would like to have me out along with her, even wants to put her income at my disposal. You know why. Think of the time before your departure. I don’t have any salary or income anymore. We have written Max at length about this; read the letter that we wrote to him. Perhaps your [host] family can do something for me. You two must get in touch with Aunt Johanna. She must get involved now and help, together with Robert. Today I heard that [even] if one has a guarantor there, one can end up in a camp.14 Perhaps, dear children, you can do a favor for me. I want to come to England only for the short-term and from there go on to the United States. I don’t want to become a burden or exploit anyone. I would like to move forward, but I want to have my peace of mind again. My intended bride is very sweet and nice and has grown so fond of you, has heard so many good things about you, and I am very happy. She has become good friends with Mommy, which would also interest you. I hope now to get a detailed answer from Max concerning my last letter. Be good, my child, work very hard in school. Just this Friday, an acquaintance of mine will be in London, just a day before his departure for America. A Mr. Behr from Hamburg, the brother of my landlord, will bring you both greetings from me. You can reach the gentleman in London under the name Martin Behr from Hamburg, Endsleigh Hotel, Endsleigh Garden, London. Perhaps Mr. Watts will drive you and Max to see the gentlemen if you ask very nicely, and then write me about it. You could also call ahead to the hotel and make an appointment with him, because the gentleman has much to do. He can tell you all about Papa, also knows my fiancée, and will also meet our relatives in New York. I am hoping for the best. I have also written to my cousin Waldemar Horwitz in New York. Well, now my child, I have related to you everything that’s worth knowing. I hope that you are doing very well. Continue to stay healthy and cheerful. Hold me dear. Greet the Watts family and their daughter Betty for me. For you, my child, I am sending a thousand tender greetings and kisses.