Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Two Gestapo agents had come to pick him up the other night, Arthur said, when he was out taking tobacco orders from his customers. Jewish men were being arrested in their own homes for no reason, he explained; the Nazis would show up late at night, when they thought people would be in bed. When they came for Arthur, Johanna told the men she didn’t know when he would be back. They waited for an hour before leaving. When would they return? Afraid even to be home, Arthur had begun leaving in the early evening and walking the streets most of the night. He and Johanna had worked out a signal. If men were waiting, she would place the parakeet’s cage in the window, and Arthur would keep walking. If he didn’t see the cage, it was safe to come up.

  They had decided it was time to get out of Germany, he told his son. Johanna had a distant cousin living in Boston. Though they had never met, she had written him to see if he would be able to sponsor the three of them for entry into America. Stephan’s father explained that they would be submitting visa applications to the U.S. State Department. It was still possible for Jews to leave Germany as long as they didn’t take any money or other assets. But the emigration doors could slam shut at any time; America’s policy could change as well. Adding to these uncertainties, the German government had recently started civilian rationing of meat, coffee, and butter. Arthur took that as a sign that all-out war was imminent. If they didn’t leave soon, he feared that they might never be able to get out.

  Part of the visa process involved an appointment at the U.S. consulate for medical exams to ensure the applicants were not carriers of infectious diseases and were otherwise in good health. Johanna and Stephan passed, but Arthur was notified that he had failed because of his high blood pressure. He would go on medication, change his diet, and try again to pass the exam, but it would take time.

  Arthur and Johanna broke the news to Stephan during his next Sunday visit. Though he was disappointed to hear that they would not be leaving Germany any time soon, the thought that they would not all be together made Stephan feel even worse. He had thought a lot about what it would be like to be part of a family again, to live at home with parents instead of at the orphanage. Emigration to the United States had offered more than safety—it was a chance to again live under the same roof with his parents at long last.

  “You know how concerned we are for your safety?” asked Johanna.

  Yes, Stephan did know.

  It had become increasingly dangerous for Jews to remain in Germany, Arthur said. He and Johanna had decided to send Stephan out of the country ahead of them. “We are taking advantage of a plan offered through the orphanage,” he said.

  “What kind of plan?” Stephan asked.

  His father explained that European countries like England, Denmark, Holland, and France were admitting unaccompanied Jewish children as refugees. He had learned from Auerbach administrators of arrangements they were making to send some children to Paris, where they would be cared for by a Jewish rescue organization. He had already signed Stephan up. It would be safer for him in France, said his father.

  “Leave Germany without you?”

  Stephan realized his dream of reuniting with his parents was lost.

  His father promised that they would join him as soon as possible in France—or possibly in America. “We’ll see. We will write each other.”

  On July 4, 1939, Arthur and Johanna took Stephan to Berlin’s cavernous Anhalter Bahnhof railroad station. There, they found a group of about forty boys and their chaperons off in one corner. Stephan knew about a dozen of the children from the orphanage. As relatives said their good-byes, many of the younger boys were laughing, joking with each other about the great adventure they would soon embark on. Aware of the trip’s implications, Stephan stayed silent.

  None of the adults present, including Arthur and Johanna, revealed to their children any foreboding that they might not ever see each other again. Of course, as the situation in Germany worsened daily, the grown-ups knew this was a possibility. Arthur had had to sign a conservatorship document assigning the legal responsibility for Stephan’s welfare to the rescue organization until he was eighteen. Even without parental permission, the organization would be free to take Stephan to wherever they felt he would be safe.

  As the group moved toward the train platform, Stephan heard his father calling out to him: “Be sure to behave.”

  Stephan went back to the last car as the train pulled out of the station, and looked out a frost-covered window at Berlin, fading into the distance behind him. With his finger, he drew three X’s in the condensation on the pane. The triple X was a well-known German sign of displeasure. It would be left, for instance, by a customer on the check at a restaurant after a bad meal, signifying that he would not come back.

  Stephan was a German, but he was also a Jew. And after what he had already lived through in his young life, he never wanted to return to Germany.

  2

  ESCAPING THE NAZIS

  By January 1939, hundreds of the Jews interned at Dachau concentration camp after the Kristallnacht roundups two months earlier had already died, casualties of SS brutality or the vile conditions. After being forced by camp officials to sign over title to his mother’s home, Martin Selling didn’t think he would leave alive. He had every reason to believe the rumors he heard that the crematories in Munich were working day and night to process the corpses from Dachau, a result of the major influx of Jews into the camp beginning in November 1938.*

  But some Jewish prisoners were luckier—about half of those brought in after the roundups had been released to ease overcrowding, with priority given to those who could prove they had a way to get out of Germany. The population decrease in the camp meant there were now enough thin blankets to go around; each inmate could have his own during the frigid nights. Martin found some sewing kits and put his tailoring skills to work, repairing the straw mattresses and prison uniforms. He also gathered some of the cleaning cloths used to prepare the barracks for inspections and sewed them together into a long-sleeved undershirt. Wearing his new shirt under the lightweight prisoner garb helped cut the chill. When the other prisoners saw what he had done, they asked him to make undershirts for them, too. The guards began to notice the shortage. Word spread that at the next inspection, the guards would be looking for the missing cloths, and anyone found with them would be punished. Martin collected all the undershirts he had made, took out the seams, and folded them so as to hide the alterations. When the guards searched, they found only neat piles of cleaning rags, which had somehow reappeared.

  The highlight of each day came after the evening meal, when the guards posted a list of the prisoners who would be processed for release the next day. Every day Martin hoped his name would be on the list, and every day he was disappointed. By the time his name appeared—January 27, 1939—he was the last of the nine men who had come in with him on the transport from Nuremberg still at Dachau. His friend Ernst Dingfelder, who had tried so hard to stay kosher in Dachau, had been let out a few days earlier.

  Martin didn’t sleep at all that night. Each day had been spent just trying to survive. What lay ahead now? he wondered. As he lay awake, he thought about other inmates, men whose names might never appear on the list.

  Another friend he had made at Dachau, Alois Stangl, had been a deckhand on a Danube river barge. He was thirty-five years old, but after five years at Dachau, he looked fifty. Although Stangl was a German Aryan, he had been an outspoken member of the Socialist Party, which meant the Nazis considered him an enemy of the regime. His sister was married to a fervent Nazi official, who had denounced Stangl to the party, leading to his arrest. His release would be an embarrassment to the man who had put him there, he told Martin. Alois Stangl saw no chance of ever getting out of Dachau alive.

  The next morning, Martin and the fifty other men being released that day were taken to the communal shower room, where they stripped and showered. Next, they went for a medical examination with a singular purpose: anyone with evidence of ma
ltreatment or injury had to wait until their wounds healed, else they be used to corroborate claims of physical abuse. Martin was pulled aside because of a long scar on his right knee, which he explained to the doctor was an old injury. The SS physician seemed skeptical. Martin had to show he had full range of motion in his knee before he was allowed to continue on.

  To the surprise of Martin and the others, the prisoners were handed bags marked with their names; inside were the clothes they had been wearing upon arrival. After they dressed, an SS officer lectured them about the threat of reincarceration if they spoke publicly about Dachau. He also reminded them that they were Jews, not Germans, a refrain that had been drilled into them daily, often while they were being beaten by the guards.

  Martin had grown up with Judaism as his religion and German as his nationality. His family celebrated Jewish religious holidays as well as German national holidays. Their ancestral roots in the country went back centuries, and the family included men such as his mother’s brothers, Hugo and Julius Laub, who had fought for the German empire in the trenches of World War I and were proud, patriotic Germans. As Manfred Steinfeld’s uncles, Solomon and Arthur, had also once believed, Martin’s uncles held on to the hope even after Hitler rose to power that their country would not turn on its veterans. But for Germany’s Jewish veterans that was not to be. It had been forcefully impressed upon Martin and his uncles, as well as Manfred and his uncles, and thousands like them, in countless insidious ways, that they were no longer Germans.

  Calling the prisoners about to be released verdammte Saujuden (damn dirty Jews), the SS officer warned, “After you leave Germany, the louder you complain abroad, the less likely will you be believed.”

  The prisoners boarded the train at the same platform from which they had arrived. A number of armed SS guards boarded with them. Although they were told that they were no longer in custody, but were merely being escorted to Munich, Martin and the others were afraid to show relief or any other emotion. They remained silent. Lulled by the rhythmic sound of the train on the tracks, an exhausted Martin, who had not slept in forty-eight hours, struggled to keep his eyes open. He was about to lose the battle and drift off when a prisoner sitting across from him let out a sharp cry. Martin’s bleary eyes darted open. The man was holding his bloodied nose. The SS had to get in a last lick.

  “No one falls asleep in my presence!” hollered the guard who had struck the sleeping man with the butt of his rifle. “So you thought you were already rid of us?”

  After that, no one dared to close his eyes. Even after the released prisoners had been turned over to the reception committee from the Jewish Community Council at the Munich station, even after the guards had long since departed, Martin kept looking over his shoulder to see if they were being followed by SS or Gestapo goons.

  The next day, Martin took a train to Nuremberg, where he was met by his mother’s sister, Isa Laub. He learned it was Aunt Isa who had secured his release from Dachau; she had sent to the authorities documentation showing he had been accepted to a large, newly formed Jewish refugee camp in England and could emigrate immediately. She told Martin he would be allowed to remain in England until he was able to secure a visa to the United States.

  Shortly after his mother’s death in 1936, Martin had applied for a visa to the United States and had begun learning English at a private language institute. The other students were all Jews, who hoped similarly to reach America. With so many wanting to flee Germany, his name was still on a long waiting list for America.

  Aunt Isa, who invited Martin to stay with her until he left for England, had some tragic family news. Martin’s father’s brother, Siegfried Selling, a bachelor in his fifties, had been arrested in Nuremberg on Kristallnacht and kept for two days at Gestapo headquarters. There, he had been questioned about his non-Jewish housekeeper, a violation of one of the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited Jews from employing non-Jews, and badly beaten. When Uncle Siegfried was released, he returned to his apartment and took his own life by hanging. Aunt Isa had also heard about her late sister’s house in Lehrberg being sold. Martin told her about the papers he had been forced to sign in Dachau.

  Martin had a picture taken, which showed his telltale concentration camp haircut, and took it to the passport office in Nuremberg. On the visa application form, he wrote his full name, Martin Ignatz Selling, and checked the box for Jude. The passport clerk rejected his form, explaining that under the Nuremberg Laws, his middle name must be recognizable as Jewish. The clerk did not think Ignatz qualified. In the absence of such a middle name, he said, all Jewish males must use “Israel,” and all females “Sarah.”

  Martin had not been overly alarmed when the Nuremberg Laws were first enacted in 1935. At the time, he was leading an unobtrusive, simple life working for a Munich tailor, and had no interest in politics. He was terribly wrong, he knew now. These dangerous laws declared Jews and other non-Aryans racially inferior and robbed them of their German citizenship. The laws were designed by the Nazis not only to discriminate against Jews; they were meant to keep the Aryan race pure by outlawing racially mixed marriages between Germans and Jews. Martin had seen the disastrous results of the prejudice and hatred they bred, both in and out of Dachau. He had seen the brutality of the Nazis close up, witnessing innocents being killed for no reason except that they were Jews or other “enemies” whom Hitler and his henchmen considered inferior and undesirable. At Dachau, he had believed he would end up a victim, too. Even though he had been among the lucky ones to make it out of the concentration camp alive, he knew he was still not safe.

  The wait to pick up his passport grew nerve-racking as his scheduled departure date inched closer. Less than two weeks before he was to leave, Martin was finally able to pick up his new passport. His name was listed as “Martin Israel Selling,” and there was a big red “J” stamped next to his grim picture. Also stamped on the passport: “Gut nur für Auswanderung!” (Good For Emigration Only!) Martin hurried to the foreign consulates to get visas to transit Belgium and enter England.

  In late June 1939, Martin joined a group of eighty German Jews assembled in Cologne by an international relief agency. Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, spread along both banks of the Rhine less than fifty miles from the border with Belgium. The plan was for the men to travel together in a special passenger rail car attached to an express train, cross into Belgium, and head directly to the coastal city of Ostend, where they would take a ferry across the English Channel to Dover. A bus would then take them to the refugee camp in Kent, England.

  But when the train was halted at the border with Belgium, the German authorities ordered that the rail car with the Jews be detached and pushed onto a siding. Soon, it was swarming with Gestapo agents in black leather coats and helmeted SS soldiers, who ordered everyone out. Martin and the other men were taken into a nearby warehouse and subjected to thorough body searches; their luggage was opened and rifled through. While this was happening, the interior of the rail car was checked for hidden contraband.

  This went on for close to six hours. At last, they were allowed to reboard, and the rail car was coupled to another train about to depart. Within minutes, they had crossed the border into the lush, rolling countryside of eastern Belgium. Their destination, the port of Ostend, lay three hundred miles to the west.

  Only now did Martin allow himself to believe he was out of danger. At the border, he had been dead certain he and the others were about to be taken into custody. Since his arrest on November 10, 1938, he had been trapped in an unending nightmare. His release from Dachau had not relieved the tension and anxiety he felt living in the country he had once thought of as his homeland. But now that he had finally made it out of Nazi Germany, he was both relieved and exhausted.

  Mesmerized by the clickety-clacking of the tracks, his body went limp. He fell into a stupor, the deepest sleep he had enjoyed in months. He stayed sprawled across the seat until the conductor gently shook him awake; the man wanted to know, strang
ely, whether he was all right.

  “I am now,” said a groggy Martin, who then went back to sleep.

  Growing up in Berlin, Werner Angress often wondered why he was blond and blue eyed and the other Jewish boys were not. And why did he do well in athletics but not academics, like so many of them?

  Born in 1920, Werner was the oldest of three boys. His brother Fritz was younger by three years, and Hans by eight. His parents, Ernst and Henny Angress, were third-generation Berliners whose forebears had been bourgeois Prussians. They had married relatively late, at thirty-six and twenty-seven, respectively, and were solidly middle class with little formal education. In other ways, they were a study in contrasts. Henny was outgoing and fun to be around. She loved to give parties, dance the polka, and sing Schubert songs at the grand piano in their apartment. A brunette with dark brown eyes, she was always well dressed and coiffed. In contrast, Ernst was balding and rotund, the managing director of a bank. He favored conservative three-piece suits and was a conscientious businessman who espoused Old World virtues and demanded precise accounting, even of household expenditures. Though he could be upset by something as small as the cost of dinner ingredients, he was incapable of denying his attractive wife a new dress or sweater.

  At the same time, he managed to teach his sons the value of money. When Werner was ten years old, he asked what it meant to be Prussian. His father didn’t hesitate. Responsibility, he told his son. Honor. Thrift.

  For young Werner, who wanted so much to please his father by striving for those upstanding qualities, meeting them in his schoolwork did not come easily. Though he earned high marks in reading, writing, and gymnastics—even leading his school squad to a regional championship—he earned Ds and Fs in geometry, algebra, physics, and chemistry. In middle school, he was barely promoted to the next grade, and his parents received a letter warning that he would have to repeat eighth grade if his work didn’t improve.