by Helen Fry
THE SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS
Before Nuremberg, Howard had three unfinished tasks: to find his parents, make enquiries about relatives whom he suspected had been deported to Theresienstadt and visit his sister Margot whom he now knew had survived and was living with the Adlers in Zurich.
While in Pilsen, Howard discovered that a Czech intelligence officer was about to bring Czech survivors out of the camp at Theresienstadt. He handed the officer a list of relatives whom he suspected had been transported there in 1942. Two days later, he received a message from one of the guards at the gates of the American military compound. An elderly woman was asking for him.
Howard left his temporary office and crossed the compound. The skeletal, but unmistakable figure, of his seventy year old grandmother, Rosa, stood at the gates. The Czech intelligence officer had discovered her in the camp and brought her to the American compound.
During her three year incarceration in Theresienstadt, Rosa had lost 60 lbs. Howard says today that he will never forget the haunted look in her eyes as he approached her. Yet, he has trouble recalling the rest of that first meeting after so many years of separation. What he does recall is that he brought her into the army camp and gave her the officer’s guest room for the night. Then he swiftly found lodgings for her with a local family until he could personally drive her home to Munich, the city she had been taken from by the Nazis in 1942.
On 7 May 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender. War was over, but the peace had yet to be won. As Allied forces swept across Germany, the most wanted Nazi war criminals went into hiding and assumed false identities and disguises. The main priority for the Allies was to capture them alive and bring them to trial. Adolf Hitler was said to have committed suicide with his new wife Eva Braun in his bunker on 30 April, escaping any accountability for his evil and murderous regime. The irony of Howard’s own survival and Hitler’s death was not lost on him:
‘Now Hitler was dead; I was still alive. It was a great feeling of triumph which was soon tempered by the discovery of the full extent of what the Nazis had done to Jews in concentration camps and to my own family. I had seen something of this when we liberated Buchenwald, but the world was beginning to learn the full horror.’
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and wife committed suicide the day after Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Now the remaining echelons of Nazi government were on the run – fleeing from justice. Concentration camp guards and perpetrators of crimes against humanity were also in hiding, though some successfully fled the country in coming months via the “Odessa” escape network to South America and beyond. Capturing them and bringing them to justice was to prove one of the greatest challenges facing the Allied forces.
It was widely anticipated that Allied success in the denazification process hinged on bringing named war criminals to justice. Teams of ex-German refugees like Howard, now serving in the Allied forces, were sent out to scour the countryside for high-ranking Nazi war criminals whose names were on the ‘most wanted’ list. There was some measure of success, although in some cases it would take up to a year to investigate, track down the last known movements of a war criminal and find their secret location. Their fluency in German meant they were ideal for this undercover work. Himmler, for example, was finally eventually arrested and brought to Fallingbostel camp where he committed suicide by taking a cyanide pill whilst in British custody.
RETURN TO MUNICH
With Germany’s unconditional surrender a satisfying reality, Howard took a jeep to Munich. Beside him, his grandmother in an overcoat with the stripes of a US Lieutenant, given to her by Howard to enable her to pass unchecked through the American zone of Allied-occupied Germany. In a moving gesture, she was saluted by military personnel all the way into Munich. As Howard drove along the pot-holed highway towards the centre of Munich, the once vibrant city, the birthplace and capital of Nazism, was a wasteland. Ninety per cent lay in ruins; the destruction almost absolute. Howard bore no guilt or pity for the suffering of the German people. He had seen Buchenwald.
With satisfaction, his eyes scanned the once familiar landscape, now an endless pile of rubble and bombed-out buildings. This was a biblical Apocalypse, an appropriate retribution for Nazi crimes against humanity. The local people stared with bewildered faces, stopping momentarily from scavenging the ruins in search of remnants of their belongings. How did they feel about the occupying forces?
As Howard drove on with his skeletal grandmother quietly sat beside him, he was acutely conscious that this was the city of his birth and the place where he grew up. An eon away he had lived a sheltered happy childhood until the Nazis shattered the lives of his family and forced them into poverty. The streets of Munich breathed the memories of extremes. The knock on the door from a woman, merely delivering bread, echoed the frantic bang of the Gestapo and SS men searching for Jewish males after Kristallnacht.
Howard finally pulled up outside 53 Reitmorstrasse, his childhood home for fifteen years. The apartment had suffered minor damage from Allied bombing and was now occupied by non-Jewish Germans who looked with curiosity, part fear, at the American sergeant standing in the doorway. Howard enquired after his parents but they shook their heads in ignorance. He politely said goodbye and turned back to his grandmother waiting in the jeep. He noticed two former neighbours walking down the street towards the jeep. They recognized him immediately in spite of his American army uniform.
A little awkward at first, they were quick to ask about his well-being and other family members. Did they even give him a second thought during the war? News of the atrocities in the concentration camps had already broken to the German nation. They realized their error. Howard noticed a flash of awareness cross their faces that his parents have probably suffered the same fate as the rest of Munich’s Jews. Very quickly they were at pains to excuse the situation and said that they were not Nazis. They had no choice but to follow the political flow.
As Howard stood in the ruins of the Third Reich, he realized that the German people were already re-writing history. All of a sudden Germany had no Nazis. No one knew about war crimes, even less had anything to do with them. After a few more words, with accepting grace Howard bad farewell to his former neighbours and climbed back in to the jeep. Giving his grandmother a reassuring smile, he started the engine and headed for the place where she was going to live until new permanent accommodation could be found for her.
Then with his grandmother finally settled, Howard left for Switzerland on a week’s compassionate leave.
SIX
DEAR TREASURE,
IT WAS FIVE years since Howard had seen his sister, Margot. He had said goodbye to an eleven year old girl on a station platform in Luxembourg in 1940. Now Margot was sixteen and about to enter womanhood. Howard learnt that she had survived and was lodging with the Adlers in Zurich, the family intermediary in Switzerland who had sent money from relatives in America. The Adlers had been their lifeline during the war. Unlike the last goodbye, the reunion with Margot was an emotional one. Decades later, Margot is still tearful when she recalls their reunion. For her, it was a moment of pride too to see her brother in American army uniform and yet pain that she had to tell him about their parents. Margot’s wartime experience was a very different story…
On 9th May 1940, Berthold, Lina and Margot had left Diekirch in Luxembourg for Holland. They were due to sail from Rotterdam to America the following day and overnight they stayed in a hotel in Antwerp. During that night, they were woken by intense bombing and gunfire. In the confusion, no one in the area knew what was happening. They rose very early the next morning and took a bus to Rotterdam. They soon discovered that German forces had moved at an alarming rate into the Low Countries and occupied them. It was 10th May 1940. The bus did not make it to the port of Rotterdam, only as far as Rosendahl, near the Dutch-Belgian border.
Margot recounted how they had then walked for five hours before being arrested by Dutch police. Their arrest by Dutch p
olice was not because they were Jews but because they were Germans and therefore of enemy nationality. Holland was technically at war with Germany so the Triests were now ‘the enemy’ and no longer treated as refugees fleeing Nazi oppression. Margot recalls:
‘We were herded into a truck with others who had been arrested. As we passed through the small town of Rosendahl, the whole town went up in flames. We just missed the bombs falling behind us. We were taken to an old Armoury where the men were separated from the women and children. The tribunal decided that we were Jewish, not German, and could therefore be released.’
The Triests were eventually released from detention, but they had nowhere to go. They were once again trapped again inside Nazi-occupied Europe. Luftwaffe planes droned overhead, parachuting German soldiers into Holland and Belgium. Nothing could prevent the total German occupation.
CAMP LES MILLES
With chaos all around them Berthold took Lina and Margot across the border into Belgium. But Berthold’s freedom was short lived. He was arrested and would never taste freedom again. Taken first to Camp Gurs in France, he was then transferred to Camp Les Milles, a disused brick factory at Les Milles near Marseilles. There at the factory, hundreds of Europe’s Jewish intellectuals and artists were being held. Conditions were bare, with no water, sanitation or heating throughout the winter months. Internees slept on the hard floor on the second level of a disused building.
After Berthold’s arrest, Lina and Margot remained in Belgium. Lina was determined to see her husband again. With money she had cashed in from an insurance policy and hidden in their belongings, she purchased fake identity papers to take them into France. In an act of betrayal, the man who sold her the forged documents was working for both sides and denounced them to the authorities during their journey to Marseilles. For six months, Lina and Margot endured harsh conditions in a French prison before being unexpectedly released on condition they return to Brussels. Ever resourceful and determined not to desert her husband, Lina decided to make her way with Margot to Marseilles. For nearly another six months, they were able to live in freedom and rent a small room in Marseilles.
At that time, it was possible for internees to apply for weekend release from Camp Les Milles, the only condition that they report back on Sunday evening and not attempt to escape. Berthold was granted leave over several weekends to spend time with Lina and Margot. These were precious moments in such unstable and terrifying times for Europe’s Jews. The Triests settled into this routine for the next year, perhaps little suspecting that their lives would be threatened.
THE ROUND-UP OF THE JEWS
One fateful day in the second week of January 1942, the Vichy Government as collaborators of the Nazis, rounded up all foreign Jews living in the region. Vichy police officers came to arrest Lina and Margot. Given just half an hour to pack their belongings, they were escorted to Camp Les Milles. Now they joined Berthold and nearly two thousand other Jews crammed in the camp. For the young Margot, it was a terrifying time. Her fears surfaced in a nightmare dream one night when she imagined that she was separated from her parents who were killed by the Nazis. Her mother, ever strong and reassuring, comforted her and told her it was only a dream.
The nightmare became reality just days later when members of the French organisation OSE visited Les Milles camp and explained that parents were being given a choice by the authorities of handing over their children to the relief organisation or remaining together in the camp. Either option was risky, but the charity workers implored parents to let their children go and not face the deportations by train which they knew would surely happen soon. The OSE (Organisation to Save the Children) was already working hard to smuggle Jewish children out of Vichy France to the safety of neutral countries. Some were hidden in children’s homes in the French countryside, aided by the French Resistance Movement.
Berthold and Lina made the painful decision to send Margot with the OSE. They felt it would give her more chance of survival. Little did they know then, but only a short time later, parents were no longer given this option by the authorities and Jewish children perished in the death camps alongside their parents.
The pain of separation was too much for Berthold and he broke down. Lina assured her daughter that they would see her again soon. Deep down, and even though she was only eleven, Margot instinctively knew it was the end. She comments: ‘My mother showed no fear when we parted. She was a very strong woman.’
Margot was escorted with other Jewish children to waiting buses outside the camp gates. The pain and scars of that day run deep and continue to haunt her over seventy years later.
The OSE took the children to a safe-house in Marseilles for a few days. Lina Triest were given the address. In the desperate hours before Lina and Berthold’s fate was sealed, and fearing the worst was about to befall them, Lina penned a postcard to Margot in Marseilles and a letter to the Adlers in Switzerland. She kept them safe in her pocket for the day she could post them herself.
On 12 August 1942, the two and a half thousand Jews in Camp Les Milles were rounded-up into groups and herded outside the camp gates to waiting trains. As they climbed into the carriages, with a final glance back at the brick factory, Berthold and Lina were in no doubt about their fate. They were about to be deported to an unknown destination.
Finally, as the freight train sped through the French countryside with its human cargo, and thinking only of her children, Lina slipped the postcard and letter through a tiny crack in a small open window. She had no idea if either would reach their destinations.
Whoever found them at the side of the railway line, perhaps a farmer or someone walking their dog, probably did not suspect the terrible circumstances surrounding them. They picked them up and posted them. Eventually the letter reached the Adlers in Switzerland, and Margot received the postcard in Marseilles a few days later. The last words of her mother were heart wrenching because Lina knew she would never see her daughter again:
Little Treasure,
I am so glad you arrived well. I am sure you have found girlfriends already. Take care of yourself, little one. Always be well and have fun. I will write as often as I can and you my dear child should do the same. Always be my brave little girl and with God’s help, we will see each other again. I send you many thousand kisses.
Your Mummy.
The Jewish children rescued by the OSE were not safe to remain in Marseilles for any length of time. Every few days, they were moved to other safe-houses in remote parts of France. Margot and around a hundred children were taken to a large country estate, Chateau du Couret, near Limoges in the mountains of Eastern France. There they lived in hiding for four months until the Gestapo began intensifying their search for Jewish children.
The OSE decided to move them again, this time across the border into the safety of Switzerland. Margot and the girls were transferred to a secret boarding house in the border town of Annemasse where they spent the first night. Margot was informed that very soon she would be given a group of ten young girls from the age of four to escort over the border in the middle of the night. The route – a remote part of the railway track into Switzerland.
WALK TO FREEDOM
The 19th April 1943 was Margot’s fourteenth birthday and one that she would never forget. That night, she led ten young girls along the railway track towards freedom. Leading from the front, she implored them to keep quiet and not crunch on the gravel between the sleepers so no one from nearby houses betrayed them to Nazi patrols. ‘The children were petrified,’ she says today. ‘I had to calm their fears and not show my own fear.’
The walk to freedom took twenty long minutes. But soon they crossed into Switzerland and were safe. They were the lucky one who had escaped the clutches of the Nazis. Margot travelled on to the Adlers in Zurich where she stayed for the rest of the war.
Talking with Howard after being reunited in 1945, it was clear that Margot was emotionally traumatized by her experiences in Belgium and France. As Howard liste
ned, she suddenly reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope. Tears welled in her eyes as she passed it to him. Howard glanced down and saw his mother’s neatly formed handwriting.
The envelope was postmarked Nimes, the date 13 August 1942, and addressed to the Adlers. The letter had made it all the way from Vichy France to Switzerland. Because of the censorship of mail by the Vichy government, Lina knew that she had to be careful about names contained in the letter, so she often substituted family names for pet-names. In some places, she used real names. Noticeably, she gave Margot several different names to protect her identity because Margot was in hiding somewhere in France at the time the letter was written.
Where coded names were used, Howard today has added the real names in brackets. From the reference in the letter to their friends travelling ‘farther than Rosa’ (the grandmother in Theresienstadt), it is clear that Lina and Berthold knew where they were heading. It was the last letter Lina ever wrote:
My dear friends,
I want to confirm your dear letter of the 5th because I don’t know whether it will still be possible tomorrow. Did you receive Lisa’s [Lina] telegram and card? What do you say about this bad luck? We are quite desperate. Please leave Kurt’s message with Edith [Adler] until you have a new address. Margot had to separate from her parents. The goodbye was terrible but could not be changed. Dodolein [Margot] is presently in a children’s home of the OSE… Poor Heinzl [Howard] will be sad and worried because he does not receive any mail from his parents. I am already with my husband the past 8 days [in Camp Les Milles]; Ellen too was here [Margot]. Many of our friends have already left. I believe they travelled farther than Rosa [Howard’s grandmother in Theresienstadt]. The fact that I have had no news from mother [Rosa] is very depressing… The long trip will be very strenuous for Paps [Howard’s father] and Heddy’s sister [herself] is quite afraid… I will close now. If possible I will always write to you and please try to do the same. And please stay in touch with the children [Howard & Margot].