Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  His first class was geometry, and after being warmly welcomed by the teacher—“our new student from Germany!”—he discovered that the class had just started taking a test. Mrs. Carmody, the geometry teacher, encouraged him to take it, too, in order to “show what you can do.” Günther sat down and read through the questions. Approaching the teacher’s desk, he asked softly, “Please, what is ‘isosceles triangle’?”

  She went to the blackboard and drew one.

  “Ah, yes,” Günther said. “Ein gleichschenkliges Dreieck.”

  He took the test, and received a G for good.

  Before long, his natural curiosity led to his becoming a reporter for the school paper, Scrippage, whose name was borrowed from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Günther got a job in the cafeteria, working for free hot lunches, and in the spring became the number-three breaststroker on the varsity swim team. By then, he had his first girlfriend, Idamae Schwartzberg, an energetic, attractive brunette. They went to free summer musicals, such as the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat, performed outdoors at Forest Park.

  Even though she had a rather improbable name of her own, Idamae had little patience for Günther’s name, which she termed a “German tongue twister.” She decided he should retain the first two letters and add a “y.” Happy to assimilate, Günther became Guy. It caught on; everyone agreed that the name suited his upbeat personality well.

  And his transformation was not in name only. The past several years in Germany, during which he had been required to be endlessly unobtrusive, had led to an inevitable loss of confidence, even feelings of worthlessness. Guy’s climb back to self-assurance and self-worth in his country of refuge came faster than anyone, even he, would have thought possible. His kind heart, winning smile, and playful sense of humor won him a legion of new friends.

  Guy’s two biggest stories for the school paper, which earned him the nickname “Scoop,” were interviews with bandleader Benny Goodman backstage at the Fox Theater in midtown St. Louis—they discussed jazz and swing for half an hour—and the German novelist Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1929), who came to town for a lecture at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.

  Mann, who wrote in German, was accompanied by his daughter, Erika, an actress and writer who translated his books and speeches into English. With a heavy German accent, he read his speech, “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” in precise but at times uncertain English, to a capacity crowd of three thousand. He damned the Munich Agreement of 1938 as a “betrayal” by England and France for permitting Germany to annex the Sudetenland portions of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler proclaimed as German territory. He criticized British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler and warned that Hitler’s thirst to expand Germany’s borders at the expense of other nations could not be quenched.

  Afterward, some twenty chairs were set up in another room for a press conference. Mann arrived before his daughter, who had earlier interpreted some questions from the audience for her father. Mann would answer in German, and she would report: “My father believes . . .” Now, rather than await Mann’s interpreter, a Time correspondent asked a convoluted question in English, which stumped the novelist. Guy piped up, repeating the query in German and then translating Mann’s answer into English.

  With Mann looking directly at him, Guy summoned the courage to ask his own question—also in German. Even in such august company, Guy’s inquiry revealed his own sharp intellect and grasp of current events. Did Mann, a well-known anti-Nazi advocate since his exile from Germany after Hitler came to power, think that the German dictator and Stalin could find common cause? Mann vigorously denied the possibility. “Dictators can never be appeased,” Mann told Guy, “because they will never be satisfied with their territorial gains.”

  In what amounted to an exclusive interview for Guy, the German novelist went on to discuss his advocacy for national health insurance in the United States in his native tongue. Guy took notes in shorthand, which he had learned in school in Germany, as Mann explained that a democracy is only strong if every citizen is guaranteed his own social well-being, which must include affordable medical treatment, a chance for an education, and a pension.

  Erika Mann’s arrival at the podium ended Guy’s exclusive. But before taking questions from the other reporters, Mann looked squarely at Guy and said in German, “I wish for young people like you to have a tuition-free college education.” The next edition of the school newspaper raved: “Believe it or not, a Scrippage reporter scooped a Time magazine interviewer!”

  Guy made his mark elsewhere. His Latin teacher, Rose Kaufman, who was well connected in the local Jewish community, took an interest in him, and in Guy’s senior year, she recommended him for part-time work at the historic Chase Hotel downtown. Hired on as a busboy, Guy took pride in being self-supporting and being able to start paying some rent to his aunt and uncle.

  As he made his way in his new country, Guy did not forget the promise he had made to his parents: to try to find someone who could sign the affidavit required for the whole family to come to America. Unfortunately, he hadn’t yet come across anyone who could help. America was still in the Depression, and most people were out of work or barely getting by. Guy had never dreamed it would take this long. It had been a year since he and his parents had parted at the dock in Germany, and at the time he had believed that they would be reunited in the United States by now. They had kept up their correspondence through twice-monthly letters, but while Guy wrote freely of his life in America, his parents were constrained about conditions inside Germany. These subdued missives did little to soothe Guy’s growing urgency as to how and when his family would get out of Germany.

  He never stopped trying to obtain the critical affidavit needed for the State Department to allow his family into the United States. To save bus fare, Guy regularly hitchhiked to his hotel job. One afternoon in the fall of 1938, a well-dressed Jewish man driving a luxury sedan picked him up. Guy told his now well-rehearsed story of his immigration to America: how he had arrived the previous year; how his parents and two younger siblings were still stuck in Germany. The man listened, nodding sympathetically at times. Then, as if on cue, he asked, “What’s involved in getting them over here?”

  Guy said he had to find someone with the financial means to sign a government document guaranteeing that his family members would not become public charges.

  “Well, I could do that,” the man said breezily.

  It was all Guy could do to keep from reaching over and wildly shaking his benefactor’s hand as they drove through traffic along Delmar Boulevard.

  “But I’m not sure the government will accept me,” the man went on. “I’m a gambler. That’s how I make my money.”

  Guy didn’t think that posed a problem. Money was money.

  “Are you willing to try?” Guy asked.

  “Sure. After all,” the man added, smiling, “life’s a gamble.”

  It took Guy a full week to get an appointment with a lawyer, whom the Jewish Aid Society had recruited to do pro bono work for refugees. The three of them finally met at the lawyer’s office, and the attorney went through a sheaf of forms with Guy and his benefactor, asking a series of routine questions. The process halted abruptly after the lawyer asked the man’s occupation.

  “Gambler?!” the lawyer croaked. “You’re a professional gambler?” He pushed aside the papers he’d been filling out. “We needn’t go any further. The signer of an affidavit for the United States State Department must be a stable citizen with an assured income.”

  “But, sir,” Guy said, “can’t you just put down ‘businessman’?”

  The lawyer shot Guy a withering look. “Circumvent the law to deceive the U.S. government? No, I will not!”

  With that, the gambler cursed the lawyer and stormed out.

  Guy froze, momentarily unable to breathe, as if he had been punched in the stomach. He could not b
elieve what had just happened. A lawyer designated to provide legal assistance to refugees was more concerned with being a stickler on a government form than with the plight of a Jewish family trying to get out of Nazi Germany? That was the last time Guy saw the gambler, and he never again came so close to getting an affidavit signed for his family.

  A few weeks later, Guy had left his aunt and uncle’s to walk to school when he passed a corner newsboy hawking the St. Louis Star Times.

  “Synagogues burning in Germany! Read all about it!”

  It was early November 1938, and the news was about Kristallnacht.

  The family he tried to save: Guy Stern’s parents, brother, and sister in Hildesheim, Germany, circa 1938. (Family photograph)

  When Guy read about the nationwide anti-Semitic campaign in Germany that destroyed hundreds of synagogues and other Jewish properties, he was shocked and outraged. The century-old Hildesheim synagogue he had first attended at age six rose up in his mind; it had not only been a house of worship, but the center of the town’s Jewish community. Now he pictured it in cinders. He remembered the Saturday morning processions down Lappenberg Street, the finely dressed families walking to temple. Guy had begun his education in the one-room school adjacent to the synagogue. Was it destroyed, too? Was it gone? All of it?

  And what of his family? The worst part for Guy was not knowing if they were all right. He had to wait until he received their next letter for news that they were okay, and to have confirmed what he had feared: the town’s synagogue was no more. In their correspondence, his parents, worried about censors, had developed a kind of code, which Guy could now easily decipher. When they wrote, “If one way doesn’t turn out, try always a new way of proceeding,” or “Hope you can realize all your plans,” he knew it meant “Keep trying to secure the papers for our immigration.”

  Guy graduated from high school in June 1939 and worked full-time for a year to save money for his college tuition. In fall 1940, he enrolled at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit university known for its high academic standards. Guy found a part-time job at a hotel restaurant only a block from school. It was so convenient, he often dashed back and forth from work to classes still dressed in his waiter uniform.

  In the summer of 1942, he received a short, ominous letter from his mother that bore a Warsaw postmark. It read, in part:

  Eighteen-year-old Guy Stern (right), busboy at the Melbourne Hotel, St. Louis, spring 1940. (Family photograph)

  We have a room here in the ghetto and we are managing. We hope for better days. As we told you when you left, do the best you can.

  Guy knew her words, again, had been chosen more for the censors than for him. The envelope had clearly been opened; the flap had been resealed with an official Nazi stamp bearing a swastika. His mother obviously couldn’t divulge their full situation. Had they been forcibly moved from their home? They would never have chosen to leave Hildesheim, and she had never mentioned that possibility in previous letters. And why Warsaw? Guy knew his European geography: Warsaw was five hundred miles east of Hildesheim.

  Nonetheless, the meaning of “do the best you can” was clear; though she knew he was still looking for someone, anyone, who could help them get to America, she was absolving him of blame if he failed to do so. Guy held his mother’s note in trembling hands, his mind tumbling with terrible thoughts of her and his family’s despair. And there was that strange postmark—

  Why were the Nazis sending Jewish families to Poland?

  Manfred Steinfeld left his sobbing mother on the railroad platform in July 1938. When his train arrived in Hamburg, 250 miles away, an HIAS representative was waiting for him at the station and she took him home for the night. The next morning, with a dozen other Jewish refugee children, he boarded the SS New York, owned by the Hamburg-America Line, Germany’s oldest and largest steamship company.

  Traveling third class, in what was commonly known as steerage, Manfred and another boy his age shared a small cabin with an upper and lower bunk. The communal bathroom was down the corridor; meals were served in the third-class dining room. Heeding his mother’s warning to keep quiet and not draw attention to himself, Manfred refrained from speaking to other passengers or crew members, nearly all of whom were Germans. He spent most of his time in his bunk and only came out at mealtimes. For the entire trip he was inundated by fear and anxiety at the prospect of never seeing his family again. Having never traveled far from home before, he also worried about what his life would be like in America.

  After eleven long, tedious days at sea, several of them stormy, the ship entered New York Harbor at 5 A.M. and slid past the fog-draped Statue of Liberty. Manfred, who had gone up on deck for their arrival, stood at the railing. The sight was both inspiring and comforting. He didn’t move for the hour it took the ship to reach the dock. He began to think that everything would be all right. In fact, he felt safer than he had since leaving home. Another representative of HIAS met the children at the dock and placed identification tags around their necks. Manfred and another boy were the only ones heading to Chicago; the rest were destined for other parts of the country. The two boys were taken to Grand Central Terminal, handed box lunches, and put aboard the overnight train.

  Manfred was met the next evening at Chicago’s Union Station by Aunt Minna, his mother’s sister. He was elated to see someone he recognized, but his relief faded as they stepped outside the station into bustling city streets filled with pedestrians and automobiles. For a boy from rural Josbach, population four hundred, the harshness of big-city sights and sounds was a bit overwhelming.

  SS New York, which took fourteen-year-old Manfred Steinfeld away from Nazi Germany to America in 1938. (Family photograph)

  His aunt was warm and welcoming, but Manfred could tell that his uncle was not as happy to have him there. Like many of Chicago’s German Jews, Morris Rosenbusch worked in the stockyards, earning about fifteen dollars a week. The family of eight (now nine) lived in a cramped three-bedroom apartment with one bathroom at 5409 South University Avenue. The twenty-five dollars a month the Jewish Charities of Chicago paid them for taking in their nephew was much needed. Nonetheless, due to the lack of space, there was no bed available for Manfred, and he would sleep on the living room sofa for the next four years.

  Held back because he knew only a few words of English, Manfred attended grammar school for several months before entering Hyde Park High School in January 1939. A fast learner, he made strides in the language, relying in part on his circle of new friends in the heavily Jewish Hyde Park neighborhood. These same friends quickly Americanized his name. Manfred Steinfeld of Josbach, Germany, became Manny Steinfeld of Chicago, U.S.A.

  As no one gave him an allowance, Manny had to work to earn his own money. He soon picked up a paper route, which paid him $1.50 a week. He had to wake up at 5 A.M. to deliver the Chicago Tribune before going to school; in the afternoon, he delivered the Herald-American and Daily News. He also got a second job at a local drugstore, where he delivered prescriptions and worked the soda fountain. In time, he was able to buy a secondhand bicycle and occasionally spend a dime to go to cowboy movies, which he loved. He also saved up to buy cocoa and coffee, luxuries in Josbach, which he mailed to his mother in Germany.

  Mother and son wrote one another often, and through her letters, he learned that shortly after he had left, she had sent his brother, Herbert, to a kibbutz training center in Frankfurt. In November 1938, twelve-year-old Herbert was one of thirty-five students selected to emigrate to Palestine, where they settled in a children’s village near Pardes Hanna, outside of Tel Aviv. Soon after arriving, Herbert began writing regularly to his brother in Chicago and sending snapshots. Herbert adopted his Hebrew name, Naftali, and his long letters—he was a much better letter writer than Manny—were filled with colorful stories about life in Palestine. Manny was elated with each new letter, attesting to his little brother’s safety now that he was out of the reach of the Nazis.

  Manny Steinfeld’s sister, Irma,
and his mother, Paula. (Family photograph)

  With two of her three children safely out of Germany, Paula Steinfeld focused on her daughter, Irma. In the summer of 1939, with the help of a Jewish rescue organization, Paula succeeded in securing a visa for Irma to emigrate to England. But two days before Irma’s ship was scheduled to depart, Germany invaded Poland. England immediately declared war on Germany, and all commercial ship traffic between the countries was suspended. Irma had no choice but to return to Josbach.

  Manny learned all this from his mother’s letters. She also wrote that Jewish properties were being confiscated, and that she had been forced to sell the family home to a gentile family. For the time being, the new owners were allowing Paula and Irma to stay in the upstairs bedroom above the store, but Paula continued to explore their escape options. For a while, the most promising route seemed to be through the Soviet Union, but in June 1941, Germany invaded that country, and that option closed as well.

  Several months later, his mother wrote about a new batch of disturbing rumors, which were circulating hotly. It seemed Josbach’s Jewish families were to be moved out of Germany, although they had no idea where they would end up or why they were being moved.

  Alarmed, Manny wrote right back. He did not receive a reply.

  Born to Russian-Jewish émigré parents in 1923, Victor Brombert spent the first ten days of his life in Berlin, where his mother was the patient of a famous gynecologist who had helped her conceive and attended the delivery. Victor’s parents returned with their new baby to their home in Leipzig, in eastern Germany.

  Jacob and Vera Brombert had met while attending law school in Russia. Both came from families that had attained the level of social and financial standing one needed to be able to live in Moscow and St. Petersburg, places in which few Jews were then able to afford. It was also not a common occurrence in those days for a woman, particularly a Jewess, to be admitted to a Russian law school, but it was not so unusual in well-to-do and socially prominent families.