Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  After sitting in a neighborhood café for a while, his father suggested they go see a movie. Dragging their bags along, they took a taxi to the cinema and settled into seats for a film, which was preceded by a newsreel entitled “Papi’s Fortieth Birthday.” It turned out that “Papi” was Joseph Goebbels, who had just turned forty. He was shown celebrating with his wife, Magda, and their young children, who presented bouquets of flowers to the beaming Nazi propaganda minister.

  It was all too much for Ernst. He whispered to Werner that he should stay and watch the movie; they could meet afterward at the nearby apartment of his good friend Leo Gerson, to whom he wished to say good-bye.

  Werner decided it was a good thing his father had left. The movie was about police chasing bank robbers in Amsterdam.

  A surprise awaited Werner when he reached Leo Gerson’s apartment. Before he’d even had time to take off his jacket, his father told him there’d been a change of plans. Werner was to take a taxi to the train station and board the sleeping car, on which his father had reserved a private compartment. Once there, he would tip the conductor two Reichmarks and tell him that his father had been delayed in Berlin on business and wouldn’t be making the trip.

  “I am to go to Amsterdam alone? What do you plan to do, Papa?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Ernst answered.

  His father said only that they would meet up in Amsterdam, and hurriedly sent Werner on his way with money for expenses. Shortly after Werner left, Ernst went to the same railway station, but to a different platform, and took a train heading in the opposite direction. He had a plan, of course, but had thought it was best for them both if he kept Werner in the dark. Ernst had also decided it was safer for them to travel apart. As he’d expected them to be on that morning’s flight to Amsterdam, he had advised his longtime secretary, Else Radinowsky, and the bank’s owner, Leo Königsberger, to report the missing funds to police that afternoon, so they wouldn’t be suspected as co-conspirators. When the flight to Amsterdam was canceled, Ernst had decided against contacting either his secretary or the bank’s owner, for fear of their becoming entangled in his crime. By now, they had likely notified police that the missing Jewish director of the Königsberger and Lichtenhein Bank had withdrawn all of his personal capital and was apparently fleeing the country. If that was the case, the authorities would try anything they could to stop him.

  Ernst’s fears were justified. By that afternoon, his colleagues had reported the missing money, and the police in turn had notified customs officials, who sent out telegrams to all border crossing stations reading: “Family of five named Angress to be arrested.”

  As he boarded the midnight train, Werner didn’t know any of this. He followed his father’s detailed instructions: he tipped the conductor and said his father would not be joining him as originally planned. The conductor asked for his passport, and Werner handed it over. In the sleeping compartment, Werner undressed and lay down on the lower bunk. Exhausted, he fell asleep before the train had even left the station.

  A few hours later, the train stopped in the dark at Bentheim-Grenze, the last station in Germany before the Dutch border. Werner was still asleep when the light came on in the compartment; he awakened to three men standing next to his bunk. One was the conductor he had tipped. The other two wore trench coats and derbies—one of them held Werner’s passport, which he was studying intently.

  Your last name is Angress? he asked in German.

  A groggy Werner said yes.

  Where is your father?

  Without hesitating, Werner coolly lied as his father had instructed him and said he was in Berlin.

  After further questioning, the Gestapo left the compartment and went into the corridor for a short conversation. They had been advised to be on the lookout for a family of five, not a teenage boy traveling alone. They handed Werner’s passport back to the conductor and left.

  The train soon started rolling again. Werner dressed quickly and was given back his passport by the conductor, who said his shift was about to end.

  In a few minutes, the train stopped at Oldenzaal, the first station in Holland. Only when the new conductor, speaking German with a Dutch accent, greeted Werner did it register on him that he was out of Germany and traveling in a free country. His mother and brothers were also safe; his one remaining concern was his father. Werner hoped that whatever plan his father had come up with yesterday would also bring him safely to Holland, and that they would find his mother and brothers waiting for them there and be reunited.

  In Amsterdam, Werner went directly from the station to the Pension Rosengarten on Beethovenstraat, using directions his father had made him memorize. When he found the address, he saw that it was an old, dark apartment building, filled with newly arrived German Jews who were also waiting to make connections to someplace else. The owner, who was the head of the currency-smuggling ring, had just received a telegram from Ernst, asking if “Werner and Minna” had made it to Amsterdam. “Minna” was code for the briefcase filled with money. The owner was now able to wire Ernst that both Werner and Minna had indeed arrived safely.

  It took Ernst another week to reach Amsterdam. To avoid arrest, he followed an agonizingly circuitous route. From Berlin, he had taken the train to Prague. When he arrived at the Czech border, he exited on the wrong side of the train and walked across the tracks, avoiding the German border guards. Entering Czechoslovakia, he identified himself as a Jewish refugee from Germany. He assured the Czech border guards that he was en route to Holland via Austria, Switzerland, and France—a path German refugees called the “Jewish Southern Loop”—and thus avoided being sent back.

  In Amsterdam, the family was finally reunited. Yet, for weeks after they had moved into a rented apartment, Ernst struggled to put the ordeal behind him. He had done things in an effort to get his family out of Germany that he had never thought he was capable of doing. He had not only broken the law for the first time in his life, but in doing so, he had subjected his wife and sons to dangers as well. Adding to these deep blows to his self-esteem, Ernst had to reckon with all that the family had left behind in the city and country of their birth. There was their home and all their belongings, which Ernst heard had been seized by the Gestapo, and the respectable reputation he had built in his profession. There were also their extended families and ancestral burial sites, all left behind. No matter how safe they were outside Germany, there were so many things they could not replace or replicate elsewhere.

  Werner was nearly inconsolable, too. He’d left all his friends in such a hurry that he hadn’t even been able to say good-byes. After the financial crimes his father had committed, he would never be able to return to Gross Breesen or Germany. Like it or not, he was in exile, too. He talked about this with his father, who understood how he felt. He had always been a German patriot, Ernst told his son. When he was in the army in the last war, he had volunteered to go to the front to take part in the fighting, and had been disappointed when he was assigned to military base duty because of a hearing disorder. But now—

  “Hitler and the Nazis aren’t letting us be Germans anymore,” Ernst said bitterly. “They have humiliated and degraded Jews to second-class citizens. For that reason, Werner, Germany is no longer our homeland. I’ll take up a gun against those crooks anytime!”

  His own heart made heavier by his father’s sorrow and deep sense of betrayal, Werner had no idea how soon the day would come when he, rather than his father, would be taking up arms in just that fight.

  Stephan Lewy’s train ride out of Germany landed him and the other Jewish orphans from Berlin on the outskirts of Quincy-sous-Sénart, a French village of fifteen hundred residents about twenty miles south of Paris. The boys were awestruck as they approached their new home, a majestic old château owned by Count Hubert Conquéré de Monbrison. The count and his wife, Princess Irina Paley, a cousin of the last Russian czar, had for years opened the château to refugee girls from the Russian and Spanish civil wars, and they
had recently been asked by a board member of a Paris-based Jewish children’s aid society, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), to take in German Jewish refugee children, whom the group had been rescuing after Kristallnacht.

  When the forty boys arrived from Berlin in July 1939, there were no rooms available in the château; most were already occupied by Spanish girls. For the first several months, while the girls waited to be taken in by local families, the boys had to stay in an annex building, along with instructors and other staff, most of whom were also Jewish refugees.

  The boys were enrolled in the village school across the road. Since Stephan and the others didn’t speak French, they were placed in the first grade. Stephan, who was already fourteen years old, picked up the language quickly. And given how good he was at mathematics and geography, he was soon advanced to his grade level.

  One of the things he learned in his French history class was that France, a country of forty million, had lost two million men in the last war with Germany. It was a crushing loss, one that still lingered in recent memory. And yet, in spite of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and the rearming of Germany, there existed among the French a cheerful optimism and a strong sense of safety and security. The newly constructed Maginot Line, which consisted of miles of concrete walls, obstacles, and fortifications on the French side of the border with Germany, was believed to be impenetrable. Built to replicate the static defensive combat of the first war, French military experts thought it would protect their country from future German invasions.

  From their own experiences with the Nazis, and after the military buildup they had seen in Germany, Stephan and the other Berlin boys did not share the locals’ sense of well-being. Stephan’s father, Arthur, had predicted that Hitler would wage war in the fall, “after the crops are in the barn,” so as to feed his army. This was the same timing Germany had employed in the last war, his father had explained to Stephan before he left Germany. Now Stephan worried about what would happen to his parents, still in Germany, and to himself in France in the event of war.

  On September 1, 1939, everyone in the château gathered around the console radio to hear the BBC bulletins about Germany’s invasion of Poland. Columns of horse-mounted Polish cavalry were reported to be charging armored tanks. Two days later, France and England, allies of Poland, declared war on Germany. With the Germans unleashing a new type of modern, highly mobile warfare tactics that became known as blitzkrieg (lightning war), the battle in Poland lasted just weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 27, and a week later the nation of Poland ceased to exist, subjugating thirty-five million Poles, including more than three million Jews, to Nazi rule.

  After the fall of Poland, news reports indicated that the warring nations had found themselves in a defensive stalemate, with French and Allied troops manning the Maginot Line and Germans holding the fortified Siegfried Line on their side of the border. In what the British press and politicians labeled the “Phoney War” for its lack of major fighting, for months only minor skirmishes took place. But Stephan was unable to send mail to Berlin or to receive it, and as a result, he lost all contact with his parents after fall 1939.

  In May 1940, German troops invaded Belgium and Holland. Deftly bypassing the Maginot Line to the north, the Germans split the French-British-Belgian defensive front and drove Allied forces back to the coast at Dunkirk, where hundreds of small boats ferried more than three hundred thousand evacuees across the English Channel. In the south, German forces broke through the suddenly obsolete Maginot Line, and the blitzkrieg steamrolled into France, headed for Paris and the Normandy coast.

  Early one morning, Stephan and the other boys were awakened by the sound of several large vehicles pulling up in front of the château. Jumping from their beds, they ran to the windows and looked out. The large courtyard was filling up with French military trucks and artillery pieces. Within an hour, the French soldiers had set up their big guns, pointing in the direction of their country’s capital. The soldiers waited, ready to try to halt the anticipated German advance after it rolled through Paris. One played an accordion; others idly smoked cigarettes.

  At 10 A.M., a clearly distressed Count Monbrison gathered the boys and their instructors. He told them that the Germans were approaching Paris; and he could not guarantee the refugees’ safety. They needed to escape, and he had arranged for two trucks to take them to Limoges, 250 miles to the south. The boys went to their rooms, rolled up their blankets, put a single change of clothes in their backpacks, and went outside to the waiting trucks. They and several instructors piled into the canvas-covered back of the bigger truck; the smaller truck was loaded with their belongings and several bicycles.

  Not long after leaving the château, the trucks joined a long line of stalled traffic. The German invasion had set off a mass exodus of civilians in cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, and carts, clogging the highways and secondary roads leading south. After four hours, the two trucks had made it just six miles—to the town of Corbeil, where boats and barges of varying sizes and power were motoring westward on the Seine. One instructor left to find a vessel to take them to the coast, in the hope that the waterways would be less congested than the roads. He returned an hour later and took the boys to a nearby péniche, a steel motorized river barge built for moving cargo. The vessel was about a hundred feet long, but just fifteen feet wide; it had limited space above deck for the boys and their instructors. The only available space below deck was a cargo hold half filled with coal. The boys packed into the unlit space atop the coal, and the hatch was closed. The air, thick with coal dust, was nearly unbreathable.

  At dawn, the hatch was opened; the boys, blackened with soot from head to toe, came out into daylight. Stephan was surprised to discover that the barge had traveled only a short distance on the river; now it was held up in a line of traffic at a floodgate. It took a few more hours for the barge to pass through. When they finally came to a village, they docked to find food and water.

  By about noon, they were back aboard the barge, ready to get underway. Suddenly, gunfire sounded all around them, and they heard people screaming on shore. Stephan had never heard gunfire before, and he had not pictured how loud it would be. The shots sounded very close. The boys had no choice but to rush back down into the darkened cargo hold, and the hatch was slammed shut after them. The barge slowly pulled out into the middle of the river. A short time later, no more than a half hour, they heard shouted orders in German, followed by the sound of the barge’s motor shutting down.

  The staccato clicking of heavy boots sounded across the deck, and the cargo hold’s hatch flew open. The Jewish boys looked up to see German soldiers pointing guns down into the cargo hold.

  “Juden!”

  One soldier spat, “Ein Haufen schmutziger Juden!” (A bunch of dirty Jews!)

  The soldiers laughed, then slammed down the hatch.

  After the soldiers left, the instructors let the terrified boys out and huddled for a tense meeting. They decided to get everyone off the barge. Traffic on the river was moving too slowly, and in any case, the German army had overtaken them. The last thing they wanted to do was wind up near the front lines of a battle between the German and French armies. The instructors told the boys it would be best to return to Quincy, now some twenty miles in the opposite direction.

  They found a big wooden pushcart, pulled by two long handles, and loaded their belongings. The trek back was against the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which still poured forth out of Paris as the mass evacuation of civilians continued southward.

  After sunset, far-off fires and explosions turned the sky bloodred, and the boys heard the muffled explosions of distant bombs. In the dark, they walked into a checkpoint manned by French paratroopers. Wary of the group of young Germans, the soldiers questioned them closely. Where had they come from? Where were they going? Had they seen any German soldiers? Finally, they were allowed to pass. They found a barn in which to spend the night, but heard gunshots around midnight—
very close. Few of the boys slept, and they were back on the move at sunrise.

  As the morning dew settled on the ground, the group found themselves surrounded by an eerie, profound silence. It was difficult to believe they were in the midst of a shooting war. When the boys stopped for lunch, the instructors passed out small chocolate bars, crackers, and three sardines in oil apiece. They ate, watching as a billowing white parachute floated down into a nearby field. As soon as the German paratrooper hit the ground, he was cut down by sniper fire. For most of the boys, Stephan included, it was the first person they had ever seen killed. But there was no time for reflection or discussion. They quickly got back on the road and continued on.

  A short time later, a German soldier passed them, speeding by on a motorcycle. The sound of nearby machine gun fire caused the boys and their instructors to scramble for cover. Several planes dove out of the clouds, dropping bombs that landed close enough for the buys to feel the concussive waves from the blasts. The planes had the red, white, and blue circular markings of the French military. Booming antiaircraft guns fired somewhere in the distance, and the boys saw in the sky the trailing dark smoke of a plane that within seconds crashed in a ball of fire.

  After a second full day of walking, they reached the château. A sentry halted them in the courtyard; to their alarm, he was not French. The German army had taken over. Two older boys accompanied the instructors inside to speak with the officer in charge. When they returned, they reported that the German colonel had given them two choices: be sent back to Germany, or work at Quincy. They opted to stay. Henceforth, the boys would do the soldiers’ laundry, clean vehicles and equipment, serve meals, polish boots, and do anything else required. If anyone refused to work or caused trouble, they were warned, the entire group would be deported.