12. That is, Sophie de Vries had a guarantor who was willing to vouch for her financial security in the United States.
13. This refers to the British government ministry administering security, public order, and immigration issues.
14. German citizens living in Britain following the outbreak of hostilities, including German-Jewish refugees, were often interned as enemy aliens.
Always,
Your devoted, fat Papa!
[P.S.] My intended, Ms. Sophie de Vries, sends her warm greetings. She will write you soon. I’ll write too. Papa.
On May 13, 1939, the Hamburg-America transatlantic liner MS St. Louis left the German port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. The vast majority of her 938 passengers were refugees, fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. Most were Jews who had applied for visas to reside in the United States and purchased transit visas that would allow them to remain in Cuba until their quota number came up, granting them U.S. entry. The ship’s passengers were not aware that, even before they sailed, Cuban president Federico Laredo Bru (1875–1950) had invalidated all recently issued landing certificates, in part because the director of Cuba’s immigration office had come under scrutiny for selling such certificates illegally. When the St. Louis docked in Havana harbor, immigration officials admitted twenty-eight passengers with legitimate landing cards. Cuban authorities, however, refused to honor the landing certificates of the remaining 908 passengers15 and denied them entry into the country. Thus began the drama of the St. Louis, played out in the international press before millions of readers in Europe and the Americas.16 Representatives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint, or JDC) at once began desperate negotiations with President Bru to convince him to take in the refugees, without success. Aboard the St. Louis, German attorney Josef Joseph and several of his fellow passengers formed an onboard committee to help aid the Joint in their efforts and to lift the morale of the refugees. Sailing so close to the U.S. mainland that they could see the coast of Florida, the passenger committee cabled President Franklin Roosevelt, appealing for refuge in the United States. The U.S. State Department, however, declined to undertake special measures that might allow the refugees admittance to a U.S. port, informing the passenger committee that “refugees must wait their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas” before they could enter the United States.17
15. Concerning the fate of the two remaining individuals from the original passenger list, one desperate immigrant aboard the St. Louis was evacuated to a hospital in Havana after attempting suicide when the ship anchored in Cuba; another passenger died of natural causes during the voyage.
16. For further discussion of the St. Louis incident, see Sarah A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller, Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006); Diane Afoumado, Exil impossible: l’errance des Juifs du paquebot St-Louis (Paris: Harmattan, 2005).
17. A. M. Warren, State Department Visa Division, quoted in the Congressional Record, Senate Resolution 111, “Seventieth Anniversary of the Tragedy of the MS Saint Louis,” May 19, 2009, S5646; Ogilvie and Miller, Refuge Denied, 25.
Barred from safe haven in the Americas, the St. Louis was forced to sail back to Europe. Of course the terrified passengers did not wish to return to Nazi Germany. In the end, several Jewish organizations, most significantly the Joint under its European director, Morris C. Troper (1892–1962), secured entry for the refugees into four European countries: France, Belgium, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. This St. Louis story did not end, however, when the steamship docked in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939. While all but one of the refugees admitted to Great Britain survived the war,18 532 St. Louis passengers who remained in France and the Low Countries following the German invasion of May 1940 fell again within the Nazi dragnet. Just over half of these people lived through the war years, while 254 of their number perished in the Holocaust.
18. One of the former St. Louis passengers admitted to Britain died in an air raid in 1940.
On June 17, 1939, the day on which the St. Louis arrived in Antwerp, Liesel Joseph, the daughter of passenger committee chairman Josef Joseph, was celebrating her eleventh birthday.19 Upon learning that she and her parents would find refuge in England, Liesel wrote a note thanking Morris C. Troper on behalf of all the children aboard the vessel. In the following month, Troper received dozens of letters from young passengers recounting their adventures aboard the MS St. Louis.
19. Liesel Joseph, later Loeb (1928–), spent the first year of the war in England. The youngster lived with her mother in London during this time, while her father, Josef, was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. In September 1940, the family reunited and emigrated to the United States. In 1947, Liesel married fellow German-Jewish refugee Hans Loeb, who had served with the American army during World War II.
Document 3-5. Letter of Liesel Joseph to Morris C. Troper, European director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, June 17, 1939, USHMMA, Acc. 1997.36.12, Betty Troper Yaeger Collection (translated from the German).
(Insignia of the Hamburg-America Line)
On Board: The St. Louis
Date: June 17, 1939
Dear Mr. Troper!
The children of the St. Louis thank you with their whole heart for rescuing us from deepest despair. We entreat G-d’s blessing upon you. Unfortunately, no flowers grow here on shipboard; we would have liked to have sent you a bouquet.
Liesel Joseph, born June 17, 1928
Document 3-6. Letter of unidentified young St. Louis passenger to Morris C. Troper, July 1939, USHMMA, Acc. 1997.36.12, Betty Troper Yaeger Collection (translated from the German).
(Boy, fifteen years old)July 1939
My Experiences aboard the St. Louis
When, on May 13, 1939, the MS St. Louis lifted anchor in Hamburg, a thousand passengers breathed more easily to be leaving Germany, land of unhappiness and oppression. Everyone said that now we would finally come to a free land, Cuba.
When I came onto the ship, I first went to the cabin, and then I explored the whole ship.
After two days, we arrived at the French harbor at Cherbourg in order to take on passengers from France and Holland.
Everyone was happy. During the day, we played on the sports deck. In the evening there was the cinema, dancing, or some type of party. The captain and the entire crew treated the people very well, and the service was first-rate.
After a merry voyage of fourteen days, we landed in Havana. Then a physician and a commission came on board. The physician examined us, and the commission looked at our passports. All at once, we heard that negotiations about our landing were still in progress. We waited a few days; the boats with relatives, parents, and children who were already in Havana sailed in circles around our steamer and yelled to us that we would soon be coming ashore. Fifty men from the harbor police came on board. After five days some of the people had already lost their nerve. One man slit his wrists and jumped into the water. A sailor rescued him, and he was taken to a hospital in Havana, where his life was saved.
After eight days the captain was forced to leave Havana with his ship, and us. After a few days we sailed by Florida, saw Miami, and then the ship set course towards Europe. We thought at first that we would come back to Havana; once we were supposed to be able to land on the island of Pinosa, but the ship sailed on an unaltered course towards Europe.
One day there came a telegram from Paris from Mr. Troper, the head of the European [wing of the] American Joint Distribution Committee, telling us that our landing outside of Germany was secured and that in thirty-six hours we would learn something more definite. The telegram of salvation came punctually. Mr. Troper had secured us landings in England, Holland, France, and Belgium.
20. This is an acronym for the Hamburg-American Passenger Line.
Document 3-7. German émigré scientist Albert Einstein welcomes a group of Jewish children newly immigrated to the United States from Germany, c. 1945, USHMMPA WS# 71763, courtesy of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Victims of Einsatzgruppen Activity
The infamous Einsatzgruppen operated in Soviet territory as mobile killing units composed primarily of German Schutzstaffel (SS) and police personnel. Under the command of the German Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or Sipo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), the Einsatzgruppen had among their tasks the murder of perceived racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union. These “enemies” included Jewish civilians, Roma (Gypsies), and officials of the Soviet Communist Party. The Einsatzgruppen also murdered thousands of residents of institutions for the mentally and physically disabled. Many scholars believe that the systematic killing of Jews by these forces represented the first step of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi policy to murder all European Jews.21
21. See Christopher Browning, “A Reply to Martin Broszat Regarding the Origins of the Final Solution,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984), 113–29.
During the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army as it advanced deep into Soviet territory. The mobile units, often drawing on indigenous auxiliary support, carried out mass killing operations. In contrast to the methods employed later, in which Jews were deported from their towns and cities to ghettos and killing centers, Einsatzgruppen came directly to the home communities of Jews and murdered them there. With the aid of local informants, Jews in a given locality were identified and received instructions to report to collection points. Thereafter they were marched or transported by truck to the execution site, where trenches had been prepared; in some cases the captive victims had to dig their own graves. After the victims had surrendered their valuables and undressed, men, women, and children were shot, either “military style,” standing before an open trench, or lying face down in a prepared pit, in a manner that came to be known irreverently as “sardine packing.” Shooting was the most common form of killing used by the Einsatzgruppen. Yet, in the late summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, noting the psychological burden that mass shootings produced on his men, requested that a more convenient mode of killing be developed. The result was the gas van, a mobile gas chamber mounted on the chassis of a cargo truck that employed carbon monoxide from the truck’s exhaust to kill its victims. Gas vans made their first appearance on the eastern front in late fall 1941 and were eventually used, along with shooting, to murder Jews and other targets in most areas where the Einsatzgruppen operated.22 By the spring of 1943, Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions had killed over 1 million Soviet Jews and tens of thousands of Soviet political commissars, partisans, Roma, and institutionalized disabled patients. The mobile killing methods, particularly shooting, proved inefficient and psychologically burdensome to the killers. Even as Einsatzgruppen units carried out their operations, the German authorities planned and began construction of special stationary gassing facilities at centralized killing centers in order to murder vast numbers of Jews.23
22. See Mathias Beer, “Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987): 403–17.
23. For further discussion of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, see Christopher Browning with Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln/Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press/Yad Vashem, 2004); Helmut Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen: Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 1938–1942 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985); Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2005); Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943 (London: Associated University Presses, 1992).
Eyewitness accounts by victims of these massacres are rare because very few survived to tell their stories. Rivka Yoselewska lived with her extended family in the small town of Zagrodski, near Pinsk (in modern Belarus). On the morning of August 15, 1942, mobile killing units attached to Einsatzgruppe B rounded up several hundred Jewish families from the Zagrodski ghetto and marched them to a series of prepared trenches on the outskirts of the village. On that day, unit forces murdered Yoselewska’s entire family before her eyes, including her young daughter, Marka. The young mother herself received a head wound during the shooting, which propelled her into the burial pit. Regaining consciousness, she was able to extricate herself from the tangled bodies of her friends and neighbors and pull herself from the trench. Rivka Yoselewska survived her horrifying ordeal and lived in hiding until the end of the war. Her testimony at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961 presents us with indelible images of that August day and is a poignant reminder of the terrible fate that awaited children on the killing fields of the Soviet Union.
Document 3-8. Testimony of Rivka Yoselewska, May 8, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995), 1:516–17.
Witness Yoselewska: [. . .] Children began screaming [at the assembly point]. They couldn’t help it. They wanted to eat and drink. We were left standing all day. We were used to such things, because more than once they chased us out of the ghetto. [. . .] Then the gate of the ghetto opened and a truck moved in. Those who were strong enough climbed up by themselves, but the weak ones were thrown in. They were piled into the truck like cattle.
Attorney General: Did they count the Jews beforehand?
Witness Yoselewska: They counted all of us. Some were missing. They went back into the ghetto and searched. They tormented us this way until afternoon.
Q: They filled up the truck. What happened to those who had no room on the truck?
A: The rest they made run after the truck.
Q: And you were running with your little girl?
A: I was holding my little girl and running after the truck, too. Many mothers had two or three children. All the way we had to run. When somebody fell down, they wouldn’t let him get up; they shot him on the spot. All my family was there. We arrived at the place. Those who had been on the truck had already got down, undressed and stood in a row. [. . .]
Q: What did you see when you came there?
A: When we arrived at this place, we saw naked people standing there already, so we thought maybe they are being tormented, perhaps there was still hope we would remain alive. To get away was impossible. I was curious to see whether anybody was below that hill where the people had to stand and I made a quick turn. I saw three or four rows, twelve people already killed.
I wish to add that when they lined us up in the ghetto, my little daughter asked, “Mother, why are you wearing your Sabbath dress? They are going to kill us.” Even when we stood near the ditch she said, “What are we waiting for, come, let’s escape.” Some of the younger ones tried to run away. They hardly managed a few steps, they were caught and shot. Then came our turn
. It was difficult to hold the children, they were shaking. We took turns. Parents took the children, took other people’s children. This was to help us to get through it all; to get it over with, and not see the children suffer. Mothers took leave of their children, the mothers, the parents.
Presiding Judge: How did you survive all this killing?
Attorney General: She will tell it all in her own words.
Presiding Judge: Very well, only please lead her somewhat.
Witness Yoselewska: We were lined up in fours. We stood there naked. Our clothing was taken away. My father didn’t want to undress completely and kept on his underwear. When he was lined up for the shooting and was told to undress, he refused; he was beaten. We begged him, “Take off your clothes. Enough of suffering.” No. He insisted on dying in his underwear.
Children during the Holocaust Page 15