Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Going to school became even more uncomfortable for Werner after January 30, 1933. On that cold, rainy Monday, he rode his bicycle home past the newsstand at the Botanical Garden train station and saw blaring headlines announcing that Hitler had been appointed chancellor. On the same day, three hundred miles away in the hamlet of Josbach, Manfred Steinfeld was hearing the “wonderful” news from the physician treating his sick grandmother.

  When Werner reached the apartment, he was surprised to see his father home early from work. A friend of his father’s was visiting, and both men, along with Werner’s mother, were in the living room, cracking jokes about Hitler.

  “Hitler was running back and forth in the state chancery opening all the desk drawers and cabinets,” said Werner’s father. “When asked what he was looking for, Hitler answered, ‘My government program.’”

  Ernst added confidently, “He won’t last two weeks,” expressing a point of view about Hitler that many Germans held at that time.

  His mother said she had heard a good one at the fish store. “Know what a Hitler herring is? You take a herring, remove its brain, tear its mouth wide open, and you have a Hitler herring.”

  This was the last time Werner heard his parents joke about Hitler.

  When Werner stepped into the room, his father asked how the kids at school had reacted to the news. Werner said they had not known before school let out. Uninterested in any further discussion of politics, he went to his room.

  The next day at school, Werner could feel the tension as soon as he walked into the classroom. His teacher hadn’t shown up yet, and in his place at the podium was one of the students in his Hitler Youth uniform. When the boy spotted Werner, he instructed the class to shout in unison, “Wake up, Germany! Death to the Jews!” He received a round of applause.

  Werner felt the eyes of his classmates following him as he took his seat, his knees suddenly wobbly, a red-hot blush spreading across his face. With his blond hair and blue eyes, he was accustomed to not being identified as Jewish, and to be singled out was extremely uncomfortable. Like everyone else, he raised his arm to give the obligatory German salute and shout “Heil Hitler!” at the beginning of each class. None of his classmates had ever commented about his doing so; in fact, Werner knew, not doing so would make him a spectacle.

  When the twenty-four-hour boycott of Jewish-owned businesses was staged two months later, Werner’s mother made a point of shopping at a Jewish sewing store for items she didn’t really need. She brought Werner with her, and they passed SA brownshirts taking photos of anyone entering the store. Inside, Henny found a packet of needles and Werner picked out a spool of thread. They left, his mother holding her head high, Werner beside her, hoping none of his friends had seen him in a ladies’ sewing store.

  Later, out of sheer curiosity, Werner went downtown to watch a large Nazi rally. At first, he couldn’t see over the crowd—he was a thirteen-year-old boy among adults—but the next thing he knew a helpful bystander had hoisted him up several rungs of a ladder. From his perch, he easily saw to the front of the rally, where uniformed Nazis were waving torches and flags. He heard their amplified voices yelling hateful slogans, each of which was loudly cheered by the enthusiastic crowd.

  “A bunch of dirty Jews!”

  “Throw them out of our Fatherland!”

  “Send them off to Jerusalem, but first cut off their legs so they can’t come back!”

  Werner climbed down from the ladder and headed home.

  On the first Yom Kippur after the Nazis’ ascent to power, Werner went with his parents to synagogue, which he had attended since age ten. As the worshippers made their way toward the tall, imposing temple, uniformed storm troopers crowded the sidewalks, shouting catcalls and insults as the Jews walked past. Tucked between his mother and father, Werner was frightened not only by the Nazis but by the fear he saw etched on the faces of his parents and the other Jews who walked with them.

  At the synagogue, Werner followed his parents to their seats. Soon he would become a bar mitzvah in this same temple, although he had yet to learn the short prayer he had to recite, let alone the passage he was to read in Hebrew from the Torah.

  That night, two Nazis sat behind the congregation to monitor the sermon. The young rabbi, Dr. Manfred Swarsensky, spoke explicitly about the political turmoil taking place across Germany. Condemning the outrages being committed daily by the Nazis, he quoted, in conclusion, the New Testament and the dying words of Christ on the crucifix.

  “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

  Nearly everyone in the congregation was weeping. Werner kept a steady gaze on the rabbi, this holy man who had dared to speak up publicly before the Nazis when so many others remained silent. Werner knew he was hearing something special from a very brave man. He watched to see if the young rabbi was arrested by the two Nazis after his sermon, but to the boy’s relief he wasn’t.

  When the 1933–34 school year began, a substitute teacher in Werner’s biology class paused the lesson to advocate for the superiority of an Aryan master race. To demonstrate what he meant, he tried to show how different skull shapes dictated various racial characteristics. At one point, he pointed to Werner, who always sat in front of the class because he was nearsighted and didn’t want to wear glasses.

  “This boy has a typical Aryan skull. Just look at its shape. Exactly the same sort of head as Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels.”

  Uproarious laughter erupted from the students, who knew that the visiting teacher had picked out the one Jew in the class. Several of the kids came up to Werner after class, not to make fun of him but to ridicule the teacher and the nonsense they were being fed by Nazi teachers.

  After Hitler came to power, most Jewish children and teenagers attending German public schools eventually transferred to private Jewish schools. Werner did not. Instead, his education stopped at age sixteen. No one considered Werner too slow witted for higher education, least of all his parents, but he was simply not motivated. He had seldom been challenged; at school, his unimaginative teachers had seemed more concerned with going through the prescribed curriculum than with getting students interested in the material.

  Werner told his father he wanted to leave school and learn a trade. Ernst knew that, based on his grades, Werner would not be attending university, and he agreed that there was thus little reason for him to continue in school. He encouraged Werner to look for a field not barred to Jews, which he could enter after he finished the term in spring 1936.

  Werner wasn’t interested in working in retail, but he liked animals and hit upon the idea of working at a zoo. Perhaps, he thought, with the optimism characteristic of youth, he might one day lead an expedition to darkest Africa and capture exotic creatures.

  Rather than dismiss the idea out of hand, his father helped him write a letter to the director of the Berlin zoo, inquiring about an apprenticeship. The director wrote a polite letter in return, thanking Werner for his interest but pointing out that, under the Nuremberg Laws, he was prohibited from hiring non-Aryans to work at the zoo.

  “You see,” said Ernst, “even the chimpanzees are anti-Semitic now.”

  One Sunday afternoon, Ernst invited him out on a walk. Werner knew this was how his father liked to have serious talks; out of earshot of the two younger boys—Fritz, thirteen, and Hans, eight—as well as his wife, he could speak more freely.

  They strolled down Willdenowstraße, beside the botanical gardens, under old trees, and past the sprawling villa of Reichsminister Walther Darré, a member of Hitler’s cabinet. Black-uniformed SS soldiers stood on guard outside. Other well-known Berlin neighbors were Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who had once lived above a delicatessen on Reichskanzlerplatz, and Hermann Goering, whose old apartment was in a nondescript building on the corner of Kaiserdamm, but none had been as interesting to the neighborhood children as boxer Max Schmeling’s mother, whom Werner once talked into giving him a signed picture of her famous son.

  On their wa
lk, in a voice trembling with emotion, Ernst told his son that he could not stay in Germany. The Nazis, he said, had taken away their rights and honor. He was convinced that the younger generation of Jews to which Werner and his brothers belonged no longer had a future there, and must make a life elsewhere. His own generation, his father said, would likely have to stick it out in Germany; resettling at their age and position in life was difficult. He told Werner to keep looking for a trade he wanted to learn, and promised to help him find some practical training, preferably abroad. Werner loved the sound of going “abroad” and looked forward to having an adventure.

  Two weeks later, Werner’s father showed him an item in a Jewish newspaper announcing the start of a training farm for prospective Jewish emigrants. Located in western Poland, the farm trained boys and girls over the age of sixteen in agricultural, animal husbandry, and teaching crafts in preparation for emigration to other countries. The sound of working outside and with animals was to Werner’s liking, and he applied. On April 1, 1936, days after finishing the school term, he was called in for an interview with Curt Bondy, the forty-two-year-old psychologist and social educator who headed the program.

  The only question Werner would remember from the fifteen-minute interview was Bondy asking him how he felt about being Jewish. Since Werner knew nothing about Bondy’s own position on the subject, he gave a very cautious answer, attesting mainly to attending temple with his parents on holidays. In truth, he had nothing to worry about; Bondy was Jewish, and had been a university teacher until the Nazis fired him in 1933.

  A few days later, Werner got a call telling him he had been accepted. The next month, his mother took him to the train station. Their parting was quick and painless, as Werner had been assured he would be able to come home for regular visits. Henny was pleased that her son had the opportunity to learn a trade that would help him emigrate, and Werner was filled with thoughts of forthcoming travel and adventures.

  Gross Breesen was a former knight’s manor owned by a Polish Jew who had purchased the property after World War I and was leasing it to Bondy’s group. Upon arrival, Werner found himself in the middle of rolling hills, surrounded by groves of fruit trees and cultivated fields. A large manor stood apart from the livestock barns. The setting looked ideal to Werner; here, he could learn farming and work with animals. He joined more than fifty boys and girls, nearly all of them German Jews, living in the stately manor in the middle of nowhere, with modern conveniences like electric lights, central heating, and bathrooms with hot and cold running water.

  Unlike in school, Werner found a real purpose in what he learned at Gross Breesen. From his first six-week training assignment in the dairy barn—up at 4 A.M. every day to feed the cows, milk them by hand, separate the cream, churn the butter—to training in carpentry, hoeing out the weeds in the potato and turnip fields, harvesting crops, and driving horse teams, the lessons, labors, and camaraderie with instructors and trainees alike suited him. The long workdays ordinarily lasted until 6 P.M., although at harvest time they kept working well past sunset, picking crops in the moonlight.

  The next year and a half went by quickly for Werner. He learned to farm, grew taller and sturdier, and gained new confidence. Then, in October 1937, a few months after his seventeenth birthday, he received an ominous postcard from his father.

  My dear son, I am writing you at this unusual time for a reason. I must speak to you, and ask you to come to Berlin. Don’t ask questions. We will talk about it when you’re here. A big kiss, Papa.

  It sounded serious, though Werner had no idea what it could mean. The next Saturday, he took the train to Berlin and went straight to his family’s apartment on Holsteinische Straße. His mother was there alone; his two brothers were out with friends. Henny was clearly happy to see him, but she seemed nervous and distressed. Werner soon found out why.

  Papa had decided, Henny told her son, that the entire family had to get out of Germany. It was no longer safe for them to stay. Almost breathlessly, she described their escape plan. Werner’s head spun, trying to take it all in. His banker father, always so honorable in his financial dealings, planned to smuggle the family’s money to Amsterdam, thereby violating the strict national currency laws put in place by the Third Reich to stop emigrating Jews from taking their assets with them. If they were caught, the consequences would be severe.

  Werner’s mother said Papa was in Amsterdam that very day, making final arrangements, and he would return to Berlin by Sunday. On the Friday of the following week, she and the two younger boys were to leave Germany, quite legally, as tourists visiting Amsterdam. They would each carry only the allowable ten marks. The next day, Werner was to fly with his father from Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport to Amsterdam, taking only carry-on baggage, so as not to arouse suspicions. A few days later, a Jewish moving company would empty out the apartment and ship their furnishings to them in Holland.

  Werner Angress, sixteen, at Gross Breesen, 1936. (Family photograph)

  Werner’s first inclination was not to join his family on their desperate journey. He had already discussed with Bondy the possibility of settling elsewhere with friends from Gross Breesen—perhaps even in America, where Bondy was talking about setting up a new agricultural training operation. Werner told his mother he didn’t want to wait around for his father to return, that he needed to get back to Gross Breesen. He left soon after for the railroad station, where he caught the next train.

  When he arrived back at the farm, Werner told Bondy of his father’s audacious escape plan and his own desire to stay at Gross Breesen. Bondy didn’t say anything as Werner spoke. When he finished, Bondy explained that he was going to Berlin the next day, and that they would speak upon his return.

  Two days later, Bondy called Werner into his office. He had spoken with colleagues in Berlin, and they had all agreed it would not be possible for Werner to stay at Gross Breesen after his parents fled Germany. The authorities would soon learn that his father had taken their money out of the country; they would most likely arrest Werner and hold him until his father returned to face criminal charges. That could put the entire Gross Breesen program in danger.

  Bondy’s next news sent a jolt of surprise through Werner. He had met with Ernst while in Berlin, Bondy said. He advised the conflicted young man to do what his father expected of him. Ernst understood Werner’s feelings about Gross Breesen and promised to consider any future settlement plans. Given all that was happening, Bondy said Werner could hardly expect more generosity from his father. For his part, Bondy promised to include Werner in any plans for a new agricultural settlement in the United States or elsewhere.

  Werner realized that Bondy was right. He had reacted like an impetuous teenager. If his father felt so strongly that the family needed to get out of Germany, the danger must be great indeed. In such perilous times, he belonged with his family.

  On Friday, October 29, 1937, Werner took an overnight train to Berlin, where he met his father at the station café. They embraced warmly, and over a quick breakfast, his father calmly explained that Mutti and the two boys, Fritz and Hans, had left the day before and were now safely out of the country.

  What Ernst did not tell his son—for Werner’s own good, in the event that he was questioned—was that a young German woman had arrived that morning at their apartment with an empty briefcase. She was there to pick up the currency Ernst had brought home from the bank the night before and hidden under his mattress. Together, they packed a hundred thousand bundled-up Reichmarks (then worth about forty thousand U.S. dollars) into the briefcase.

  Ernst had offered the young woman money for a taxi, but she demurred; taxis, she told him, could get into traffic accidents. It would be better if she took a streetcar to the train station. And then she was gone. After turning over his family’s entire life savings to a complete stranger, Ernst wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. But it was done; there was no turning back. The money-smuggling operation, which was based in Amsterdam, would receive 1
0 percent of whatever currency made it there. True to his upstanding character, Ernst had withdrawn only his own money and left the bank’s other deposits untouched.

  From the café, Werner and his father took a taxi to Tempelhof Airport in south Berlin. Werner had all his clothes and about a dozen books stuffed into two suitcases, while his father carried a small bag suitable for a short trip. At the airport, which had four or five departure gates, Werner followed his father. At their gate, his father showed their airplane tickets to two men wearing long trench coats and derby hats, which everyone knew was the favorite attire of Gestapo agents, who were now closely monitoring all modes of transportation out of Germany.

  Asked the purpose of their trip to Holland—they both had valid passports that bore the red “J”—Ernst said he was taking his son to Amsterdam, where Werner was to enroll in special agricultural training. The Gestapo men searched his bag, then allowed Ernst to pass through. After Werner’s bags were searched, he joined his father in the waiting area.

  Before they sat down, they heard an announcement over the terminal’s loudspeaker: the plane for Amsterdam had been unable to take off from Dresden due to heavy fog. Passengers bound for Amsterdam could either wait until the next day’s flight or take the train that night.

  Flights were departing from other gates for Copenhagen and Paris. Ernst knew it would look suspicious if they suddenly changed their destination to Denmark or France. They had given the Gestapo agents a specific reason why they were traveling to Holland.

  “We’ll take the night train to Amsterdam,” he told Werner.

  Since the train did not leave until midnight and it was now only noontime, they had a long wait. During their time together, Werner learned more about what had finally compelled his father to get the family out of Germany. New restrictions on Jews were being enacted all the time, he said, including the confiscation of their properties and assets. Germany was witnessing the “gradual strangulation of Jewish businesses.” Ernst feared that sooner or later there would be no opportunity for carrying on business and no way for him to make a living. Under the Nazis, he feared the family would eventually end up paupers with no place to go.