Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  With more than a hundred soldiers occupying the château as well as the annex building, the boys and instructors moved some cots into the basement. The occupying Germans shared little of the meat, dairy, and produce that was delivered to the château, and the boys were constantly hungry. They sneaked out at night and foraged for fruit and potatoes in nearby fields.

  Two weeks after they returned, it was announced on the radio—now tuned to German broadcasts, full of Nazi propaganda—that Germany and France had signed an armistice, resulting in the division of France. The Germans would occupy the north and coastal areas, including Paris and Normandy, while newly appointed French leaders would govern the unoccupied southern part from the new capital of Vichy.

  One of Stephan’s jobs was to do the soldiers’ laundry. He put the dirty clothes into a huge pot of water on the stove, added soap, and boiled everything for an hour. When it cooled down, he carried the pot to the sink, poured out the soapy water, and added water to rinse the clothes before hanging them up outside.

  As he did the wash one day, Stephan saw dark specks floating to the surface of the boiling water. They appeared to be food particles. Thinking that they must have been left on the table linens after meals, he began scooping them out of the pot, rinsing, and eating them. He had learned how to share growing up at the orphanage, so he split his bounty with some other hungry boys, and they all agreed that the soggy crumbs tasted delicious. Their snacking ended when one of the instructors caught them in the act, and showed the boys that they were actually eating pieces of army T-shirts that had disintegrated in the boiling water and shredded into tiny pieces.

  In early October 1940, their instructors awakened the boys in the middle of the night and told them to quickly pack a few essentials. Quietly, they filed out of the basement into the courtyard. Two covered trucks were waiting, engines idling. They pulled out of the darkened courtyard and drove until midday. At the border between occupied and unoccupied France, the trucks stopped, and everyone got out.

  When they realized they would be walking into unoccupied France, out of reach of Nazi troops, the Jewish boys became very excited. Their gait increased still more when they saw that the German soldiers guarding the border were not going to stop them. By the time they were on the other side, where the French gendarmes (police) stood at the crossing, the boys were running and cheering. They found their ride waiting nearby: a dilapidated old bus that didn’t have enough seats for everyone, so they took turns standing.

  They pulled into the village of Chabannes three hours later. This was a remote and unspoiled region of central France, 120 miles west of Vichy, whose residents had a spirit of independence and justice carried over from the earliest days of the French Republic.

  The boys’ new home was another rambling château, one that had passed through many hands. The aristocratic d’Anrémont family acquired the estate in the 1870s, but it was rundown by the time OSE took it over in 1939 to serve as one of its fourteen children’s homes in unoccupied France. (OSE could not operate in German-occupied France.)*

  The director at Chabannes was former journalist Félix Chevrier, an imposing man of fifty-six who came off as gruff but understood that many of the children laughed by day and cried by night. Chevrier reminded the dedicated staff, which included cooks, nurses, janitors, and teachers, that they were to provide the children, all of whom had known exile and separation, not just shelter and sustenance but a sense of normalcy in abnormal times.

  At Chabannes, Stephan and the other boys from Berlin joined more than one hundred other Jewish children—mostly Germans, along with some Austrian and French refugees—ranging from eight to eighteen years of age.

  Given his age, now fifteen, and the overcrowding at the village school, Stephan started learning the leather trade in a well-equipped shop sponsored by the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT). ORT helped refugees immigrate to other countries as skilled workers. Stephan learned to use all of the machines and cutting tables; soon he was crafting handsome pocketbooks, wallets, and comb holders that were sold in the village, with the proceeds going back to ORT.

  Sports and physical education were an important part of each day, and there were spirited regular basketball and soccer games. Georges Loinger, a former engineer who coached gymnastics and track and field, often drove the boys to the point of exhaustion. He told them he wanted them fit in case they ever had to run for their lives. Stephan, fast and athletic, excelled in the sports.

  There were enjoyable times for the children at Chabannes, too. Music was played every Saturday night after Shabbat, and young and old alike danced; the lively songs were performed by teenagers, with Jean-Pierre Marcuse on guitar, Armand Chochenbaum on drums, Walter Herzig at the piano, and Marjan Sztrum on banjo. Sztrum, an eighteen-year-old Polish Jew, was also a talented artist; he painted a fresco on the dining room wall depicting a farmer on a tractor.

  Château Chabannes, Jewish children’s home near Limoges, France, where Stephan Lewy lived for nearly two years, 1941. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  Sixteen-year-old Stephan Lewy (right) working in the kitchen at Chabannes, 1941. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  The newfound security the children and their instructors began to feel at Chabannes vanished when they heard that gendarmes were showing up at other OSE homes, arresting the older Jewish boys, and transporting them to concentration camps. Tipped off by sympathetic locals in the village as a contingent of French police approached, Stephan ran with some other boys into the woods, where they spent the night hiding out.

  Throughout unoccupied France, it had become clear that the one-party fascist regime headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain was nothing more than a puppet government of Hitler’s Germany. The Vichy regime became increasingly brazen in carrying out Nazi-ordered pogroms, and in 1940 it began passing its own anti-Semitic laws, banning French Jews from working in certain fields and forcibly expelling foreign-born Jews. The French government gave lists of Jews to Nazis and assisted in identifying and expropriating the assets of wealthy Jewish families. More and more roundups of Jews swept France, and the gendarmes soon became as feared as Nazi storm troopers.*

  The year after he arrived at Chabannes, Stephan was summoned to the director’s office. Months earlier, he had sought Monsieur Chevrier’s help in trying to contact his parents, whom he had never stopped thinking about during his own flights through wartime France. Were they in danger? Or had something terrible already happened to them? So much had transpired since they had parted in Berlin. Now the Nazis were at war with the world, not just the Jews in Germany. Although he was terribly afraid he might get bad news, Stephan had decided that he needed to know one way or another. Were his parents dead or alive?

  Mercifully, on this day, Chevrier was not bearing bad news. He explained that he had just received a wire from the Red Cross in Switzerland, reporting that Stephan’s parents had been located in America.

  Stephan wasn’t sure he had heard right. “America?”

  “Yes,” Chevrier said, smiling. “You can write to them.”

  Stephan was excited and greatly relieved that his parents had found a way to get to America. Would he be able to join them? He hurriedly wrote a letter that same day. Several weeks passed before he heard back. When a return letter arrived, forwarded via Switzerland, it was written in his stepmother’s graceful cursive.

  Dearest Stephan,

  We were so excited when your letter came we first stared at the envelope before we dared open it . . .

  Back in Germany, Arthur had lost weight, lowered his blood pressure, and passed his follow-up physical with ease. In quick order, they had received an affidavit from Johanna’s cousin, Bert Klapper, in Massachusetts, and visas for the United States. They had taken what they believed was their last opportunity to escape the Nazis, departing Germany in May 1940. It had been an agonizing decision for them because they did not know where Stephan was or even if he was still alive.

  On their third day
at sea, aboard a ship that left from Rotterdam, they heard news of the German invasion of Holland and Belgium. By the time they arrived in the U.S., France was at war, and the organizations they contacted were unable to find out anything about Stephan. There was more, much more, in the letter: their excitement at locating him, their love for him, how they were determined to find a way to bring him to America, too. Stephan read the letter again, and then, for the first time in a long time, he cried.

  Over the next several months, and after some bureaucratic hitches, the paperwork for Stephan’s entry into the United States was finished. Johanna’s cousin signed an affidavit for him, as did his parents’ employer, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and become very successful in business. Arthur and Johanna Lewy were working as butler and maid at his mansion in Boston, Massachusetts. Their employer even gave them five hundred dollars to pay for their son’s ship passage.

  In April 1942, Stephan said good-bye to everyone at Chabannes and took the train to Lyon, where he picked up his visa at the U.S. consul’s office. He then traveled two hundred miles by rail to Marseille, France’s southernmost Mediterranean port, and boarded a French passenger ship. Once on board, the captain gathered everyone together and explained the circuitous route he planned to take.

  “If we leave here and head straight out into the Mediterranean toward North Africa,” he said, “we’ll probably get torpedoed by a German U-boat and no one will ever know what happened to us.” Instead, he was going to hug the coastline, slipping in and out of every inlet. “If we get torpedoed, I can at least scuttle the ship near land and maybe save our lives.”

  They reached Barcelona and took on fifty Spanish refugees. Continuing along the eastern and southern coast of Spain, they crossed the seven-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, heading toward North Africa. Not forgetting the captain’s dire U-boat warning, everyone on board was relieved to finally arrive in Rabat, Morocco.

  Stephan took a bus to Casablanca, where he waited several weeks for the ship that would take him across the Atlantic: the Portuguese steamship Serpa Pinto, a six-thousand-ton vessel chartered by the U.S.-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to take seven hundred Jewish refugees to America. Because it flew under the flag of a neutral country, the Serpa Pinto was one of the few passenger ships still making transatlantic voyages despite the U-boat menace. It departed Casablanca on June 7, 1942.

  As the five-hundred-foot ship sped across the Atlantic at near top speed, Stephan found himself unnerved by the ship’s running lights, which were left blazing all night. The ship stood out like a beacon in the inky darkness. One morning, Stephan questioned a ship’s officer about all the lights. With all the U-boats, wasn’t it dangerous to be so lit up at night?

  “We are neutral,” said the officer. “That is why we fly an extra-large Portuguese flag so prominently with the lights glowing. Any vessel can see we are a neutral ship.”

  The flag, clearly visible at the stern and lit by flood lighting at night, was a huge green-and-red wooden one that did not crumple or ruffle in the wind. The officer’s explanation seemed plausible to Stephan—up until a few hours later, when the vibration of the engines ceased. He joined the other passengers in a rush to the railings and saw a low-slung submarine with a swastika painted on its conning tower.

  Several German sailors from the U-boat climbed into a small, motorized launch, which they took to the ship. When they reached the Serpa Pinto, a rope ladder was thrown over the hull for them to climb up. On deck, there was no chatter from the refugees, only deathly silence. Stephan felt sick to his stomach. He knew there was no place to hide.

  For three hours, the armed boarding party searched all the compartments on the ship, apparently looking for contraband. When they found none, they had the crew collect the passengers’ passports and went through them one at a time. Nearly all carried the red “J.”

  At last, the boarding party left and returned to the submarine. The passengers remained on deck, watching to see what would happen next. “Habt keine Angst,” said a multilingual ship’s officer. He circled the deck, telling the mostly German-speaking passengers not to be afraid.

  But every one of them was scared to death. Would the U-boat turn toward them, launch a torpedo, and sink them? Hoping he hadn’t come this far only to drown in the middle of the ocean, Stephan joined the others on deck who were praying in German and Hebrew; they continued until they could no longer see the submarine in the distance.

  On June 25, 1942, the Serpa Pinto arrived in New York harbor. The ship slowed as it passed the Statue of Liberty, allowing the passengers a good look at the three-hundred-foot sculpture of the Roman goddess Libertas. She held high the copper torch, lighting the path to freedom from tyranny and suffering for oppressed immigrants from other shores. Some on the boat were smiling and laughing; others were struck speechless.

  Stephan Lewy, who had been an orphan for more than half his lifetime, knew his father and loving new mother were waiting for him dockside. He breathed deeply, and his eyes filled with tears. He had made it.

  3

  A PLACE TO CALL HOME

  Günther Stern’s father had cautioned him to “be like invisible ink” so as to not draw attention to himself. But soon after they said good-bye at the port of Bremerhaven, where he boarded the SS Hamburg in November 1937, Günther joined in with the other emigrant children on the ship, running around playing hide-and-seek and pulling practical jokes on one another. The Jewish youngsters were eager to be free of the restrictive rules under which they had been living in Nazi Germany, which required them to be better than good in public so as to remain inconspicuous. In fact, Günther was still so wrapped up in his new oceangoing adventure that he hadn’t yet had time to be homesick.

  On deck one sunny day, the children befriended an older American who was traveling alone. When he treated them all to an exotic drink they had never tasted before, called Coca-Cola, they became convinced he must be one of those fabled American millionaires. Near the end of the voyage, he told them he was in fact a mailman who had saved up for years for his first European vacation. The refugee children did not believe him: How could an average American afford such a trip? They decided that their generous millionaire simply wished to remain anonymous.

  When they reached New York, a committee representative decided that Günther, after all his private lessons from Herr Tittel, was fluent enough in English to travel by himself the rest of the way to St. Louis. He would have to change trains in Chicago, however, so someone would meet him there and help him make his connection.

  During his short time in the heart of New York City, Günther was most impressed by the jumble of skyscrapers, the crowded subways, and the curious Automatenrestaurants, or automats, at which busy people inserted coins in machines and instantly received sandwiches and other food items.

  He arrived in Chicago on a Sunday and had a three-hour layover. The woman who met him decided they had time for a quick tour of the Windy City. The excursion included a stroll through the open-air Maxwell Street Market, which occupied several square blocks. Founded in 1912 by newly arrived Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, the market featured booths selling a variety of discounted items: produce, clothes, tools, and all things in between. To Günther, it was a wild mix of cultures and ethnicities; he saw people of all colors and ages, many of them Jews, intermingling easily, talking and joking with each other.

  Günther had never seen anything like this in Germany. If this was what it meant to be in America, the land of the free, his days of trying to disappear in public like invisible ink were over.

  After another long train trip, he arrived in St. Louis. His aunt Ethel and cousin Melvin met him at the station. Uncle Benno, his mother’s brother, was working the night shift at a bakery, and Günther did not meet him until he came home later that night. His uncle’s story was familiar to Günther; as a rebellious youth of fourteen or fiftteen, Benno had been exiled by his strict father, who sent him to America in the
days when it was easier for immigrants to gain entry. Benno was a short, squat man who had been stymied but not defeated by the Depression. The Silberbergs did not live easy lives, but they had never been threatened with eviction or relegated to standing in a breadline for their next meal. Benno did not apologize for the family’s cramped apartment, located in a subdivided mansion on the predominantly Jewish west side, though the accommodations were markedly different from Günther’s family’s spacious, well-appointed home in Hildesheim. Nor was any explanation offered for Günther having to share a small room and a single bed with another refugee boy, Rudy Solomon, whom his aunt had taken in at the request of the Jewish Aid Society.

  Although he quickly began to miss his own family and ache for home, Günther’s youthful dreams of adventure in his new country remained intact, no more so than when he enrolled five days later in Soldan High School, a public school reputed to be the finest in St. Louis. At Soldan, students from affluent families sat next to those in threadbare clothes, and all of them were taught and inspired by dedicated teachers and administrators determined to rival the top college-prep schools in the country. It was America at its best.

  On his first day, Günther was received personally by the principal, who told him he had been assigned to the homeroom of Mrs. Muller, the German language teacher. When the principal asked if he was interested in any extracurricular activities, Günther quickly answered, “Swimming and the school newspaper.”