Now free to undertake his personal mission, Martin drove fifteen miles north to Niederstetten, a town of five thousand residents where his aunt Gitta—the widowed sister of his late father—had moved with her three children in 1938 after they were picked up by the Nazis during Kristallnacht on the same night as Martin, and released the next day. He had no idea what had happened to them after he left Germany in 1939. Growing up, Martin had been very close to his aunt and cousins, who had lived on a neighboring farm in Lehrberg.
Wearing his army officer’s uniform and still packing the .45 sidearm he had carried throughout the war, Martin went to the town hall for information. The mayor was friendly and overflowing with helpfulness, although he said he knew nothing about the fate of the deported Jews beyond what was on an official list with the heading SHIPPED EAST. When Martin read the list, he found the names of his aunt Gitta, her daughter, Kaethe, and her sons, Bernhard and Ignatz. The mayor said none of the town’s Jews had yet returned from “the east.”
A few days later, Martin took another road trip, this time to Lehrberg, thirty miles away. He had not been back to his hometown since being arrested during Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau. Now he was returning as an American officer, riding in an army jeep driven by his sergeant. They stopped at the home of one of Martin’s former neighbors, and soon the living room was filled with other neighbors as word spread of his return. Martin noticed there was not a Jew among them. They told him they didn’t know what happened to his aunt and cousins after they had moved away, or any of the other local Jews after they were taken away in 1942.
One of Martin’s father’s closest friends was a butcher whom his father helped to become a cattle trader. The friend had become quite successful and brought in his two sons as partners. After the older man died, the sons had broken off all contact with Martin’s family and became vocal, influential anti-Semites. Now, in the neighbor’s living room, one of the sons approached Martin with his hand outstretched to the American officer if not the Jew. Martin refused to shake his hand, a rebuff that was noticed by everyone in the room. Before leaving town, Martin told some people where he was stationed in case any of his relatives showed up.
Three days later, his cousins Kaethe and Ignatz hopped off a slow-moving freight train as it rolled through Lehrberg. They were excited to learn that Martin had just been there and was stationed nearby. Ignatz, who was now eighteen, borrowed a bicycle and pedaled thirty miles to Martin’s base. He was exhausted by the time he found Martin, and the cousins warmly embraced. Even before Martin could ask about the rest of the family, Ignatz started telling what had happened to his family.
He said they had all been transported to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland in the summer of 1942. Upon arriving, everyone over thirty-five years of age, including their mother, was separated out, taken into a nearby wooded area, and shot. The younger ones had to strip the clothes off the dead and bury the naked bodies in a mass grave. Then they were put to hard labor. Bernhard’s skills as an auto mechanic got him assigned to take care of the camp commandant’s car, while Ignatz was put in a work gang. When the starving Ignatz was caught stealing bread a few months later, he was condemned to death. Bernhard was able to save him from the gas chamber by telling the commandant that if they killed Ignatz, they would have to kill him, too. Apparently Ignatz’s mechanical abilities were highly valued by the commandant, because from then on, Ignatz had served as Bernhard’s assistant.
Ignatz told Martin all of this dispassionately, seemingly unaware of the horror etched on Martin’s face. But now Ignatz paused and took a deep breath before continuing. Bernhard was dead, he told Martin. He had succumbed to typhoid only a day before the guards abandoned the camp as the Russians approached. “Eines Tages.” (One day.) “Eines Tages,” he repeated sadly.
Ignatz had walked out of the camp and wandered back to Germany, hopping one freight train after another. In the Berlin rail yard, he had found his sister sitting atop a flatbed car loaded with lumber on a train pulling out for Leipzig. He hoisted himself aboard, and they had been together since.
Martin had always known Ignatz as the young daredevil in his family, but he had grown from a tousle-haired boy pulling pranks into a serious young man responsible for watching out for his sister now that their mother and older brother were dead and they were all alone. Martin knew it was a miracle that Ignatz and Kaethe had survived the concentration camp and a second miracle that they had found each other, something that was eluding countless other families in the chaos of postwar Europe.
Martin drove Ignatz back to Niederstetten and made sure his cousins had extra food and clothing. Kaethe looked pale and unhealthy, so Martin took her to a local doctor for a checkup. Hanging around for a few days, he reintroduced himself to the mayor and made a point of flashing his uniform around town, hoping it would mean any survivors returning from the camps might be cared for a little better knowing that the U.S. Army took an interest in them. He also filed a legal claim that ultimately led to his cousins getting back their mother’s house, which had been sold by the Nazis. Martin also contacted their older sister, Martha, who had immigrated to America in the 1930s as a domestic servant and now lived in New York. Eventually, Ignatz and Kaethe joined her in America.
Soon Martin was on a Victory ship heading to the United States.
Years later, when he wrote and privately published a memoir of his life before and during the war, the book’s dedication read: “To Nemesis, the Goddess of Fate and Retribution, and to the United States Army, which enabled me to repay in a small way all the miscreants and their henchmen who unleashed the brutality and malevolence.”
Guy Stern had had no strong feelings when he first set foot on German soil during the war; they emerged only after the war ended and he returned to his hometown of Hildesheim, where he felt the agony of being awakened to a new reality.
Ritchie Boys Guy Stern, Walter Sears, and Fred Howard (left to right) celebrating the end of the war on V-E Day (May 8, 1945) in the town of Bad Hersfeld, located in the heart of Germany. (Family photograph)
For much of the war, Hildesheim, population sixty-five thousand, was overlooked by Allied bombers because the military potential of its industry had been underestimated. However, a metal works in town produced components that were used in aircraft, such as constant-speed propellers, landing gears, and engines, while other nearby plants made tank parts, torpedoes, and rubber products such as life jackets and inflatable dinghies. In the forest southwest of the city, an engineering company manufactured starters, generators, and other components for truck and tank engines.
The war caught up with Hildesheim late—six weeks before it ended—but, ironically, not because the Allies discovered it was an industrial hub, but rather because a new Allied bombing directive targeted the northern German city as part of a broad initiative to undermine the morale of the German people. At 2 A.M. on March 22, 1945, British and Canadian bombers commenced their attack, dropping a total of nearly five hundred tons of high explosives and more than six hundred incendiary bombs. Nearly two-thirds of the buildings in the city were destroyed or damaged, and the bombs leveled much of the historic district that had long retained its medieval character. Left in ruins was the Hildesheim Cathedral, on the outside of whose apse grew the world’s oldest living rosebush, which local legend had long claimed ensured the town’s prosperity. Fifteen hundred civilians were killed.
Guy arrived in Hildesheim a few weeks after the war ended. It was his first time back since he left at age fifteen nearly eight years ago. Now stationed in Koblenz, 250 miles to the south, he had gotten approval for the trip from the British command, since Hildesheim was in the British sector of a newly divided Germany.
As his jeep rolled into town, Guy was struck with an eerie sensation of knowing a place that held so many memories and yet barely recognizing it at all. Some buildings that he knew still stood, but they were standing alone in a ruined cityscape like a few teeth in an otherwise toothless mouth. Th
ere was the soccer stadium, now destroyed. There was the building that housed his youth gym club, flattened. Guy was required to report to the British commander of the city, and with trembling hands on the steering wheel, he found his way. A British major looked at Guy’s papers, announced “all’s in order,” and assigned a city policeman to accompany Guy while he was in town. The cop was a young newcomer to the force, as many veteran policemen, loyal members of the Nazi Party, had fled or been fired.
They located the street where Guy had lived with his mother and father, his younger brother, Werner, and little sister, Eleonore, but when they reached the building where they had lived in a high-ceilinged third-floor apartment abutting his father’s small fabric store, they saw that it was only rubble. Steel beams protruded from heaps of debris and everything else was flattened or incinerated. There had once been stores at street level, but they had been pancaked by the wrecked building. Former residents had chalk-marked their names and new addresses on girders in front of their ruined residences. In front of the collapsed optical store, a message on a beam told customers that the optician Kleinschmidt was conducting business from his home outside the town and gave the address. He was one of the lucky ones, the policeman told Guy, because half the residents of the city were now homeless.
Hildesheim in ruins, 1945. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)
They drove down Lappenberg street, once the town’s most scenic neighborhood, past the vacant lot that had once held the Moorish-style synagogue he had first visited at age six on a High Holiday. The lot was barren, as it had been since the Nazis burned down the synagogue in 1938 during Kristallnacht, one year after Guy left Hildesheim and Germany for America.
With the policeman’s help, Guy found the temporary quarters of the Ebeling family. Gerhard Ebeling had been among Guy’s few gentile classmates to remain friendly with him after the Nazis came to power. His father was the customs official who had done the Sterns a favor by coming to the house to seal with his official stamp Guy’s trunk—without even glancing inside—for his trip to America.
When Mrs. Ebeling opened the door and saw Guy, she burst out crying. She threw her arms around him, holding him tightly.
Guy had brought coffee, canned foods, and chocolates, which were difficult to come by and much appreciated by Mrs. Ebeling. When Herr Ebeling appeared, he came over and shook Guy’s hand warmly. A subdued and aloof man whom Guy did not know well, the older man was smiling, clearly glad to see his son’s boyhood friend.
When Guy asked about Gerhard, they said he had been drafted into the Wehrmacht and had been captured by the British. Guy was relieved to hear that Gerhard had survived the war. He assured them their son was surely being processed along with the hundreds of thousands of former German soldiers and would be home soon.
After that, there was an uncomfortable silence because Guy couldn’t find his voice to ask what had really brought him here. Herr Ebeling saw it on his face and stepped in, volunteering what he knew about Guy’s family. He described how they, like all the Jewish families in town, had been forced from their home and lived for a time in an overcrowded collective house, one of eight so-called “Jews’ Houses” in town. This concentrated housing was mandated by the local Gestapo as a way to control the Jewish population and facilitate their deportation.
The Jews of Hildesheim were soon sent away in several group transports, he explained. Each family was allowed one hundred pounds of luggage, with men, women, and boys carrying suitcases and wearing backpacks. They were told to bring their cash, securities, savings books, and jewelry with them, but when they were strip-searched inside the old riding hall, the SS and other Nazi functionaries confiscated their valuables. From there they walked to tram line #11 to ride to Hanover.
Herr Ebeling said he heard that they had stayed for a few days in a fenced-in transit camp, then were put on a train to Warsaw, a journey which, according to documents that surfaced some years after the war, took place on March 31, 1942.
Guy told the Ebelings about his mother’s letter in the summer of 1942 from Warsaw, where she’d told him they were living in a single room. This was the last he had heard from her, and he told the Ebelings how much he had hoped to find them when he joined the U.S. Army and returned to Europe. If not during the war, then after it was over.
Throughout the story Herr Ebeling was telling Guy, his wife, who had known Guy’s mother quite well, had been unable to stop crying. Guy recalled his mother telling him that the Ebelings had long been appalled at the brutalities of the Third Reich, though Herr Ebeling had to be careful not to offend the Nazis in order to keep his job at the customs office.
Now Herr Ebeling shook his head sadly. None have come back from Warsaw, he said quietly. Then: Günther, I fear your family will not return.
There was much Guy still did not know about the Nazi extermination camps in Poland. He did not yet know that the Warsaw ghetto was the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, with more than four hundred thousand Jews from Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia forced into an area slightly larger than one square mile. Or that the first of more than a quarter million men, women, and children from the ghetto were transported by cattle cars to Treblinka the same summer he received his mother’s last letter, in which she wrote, “We hope for better days.”
He did not know that the first train carrying five thousand Jews from Warsaw arrived at Treblinka on July 23, 1942, with a daily train continuing to bring the same number. Or that upon arrival at Treblinka, which was built for the express purpose of killing all the innocent and defenseless human beings sent there by the Third Reich (more Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other extermination camp other than Auschwitz), they were herded into dressing sheds and made to strip, supposedly to take showers. The men were usually killed first, inside three closed-off, interconnected barracks, each twenty-six by thirteen feet with double walls insulated with packed earth. The interior walls were covered with small orange terra-cotta tiles with metal faucets set into the ceiling, giving it the appearance of a regular shower room.
Unlike victims at Auschwitz and Majdanek, who were gassed by hydrogen cyanide in the form of Zyklon B, Treblinka’s inmates were systematically killed using the exhaust fumes from the engine of a dismantled Soviet armored tank captured during Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941. The tank engine was housed in a room with a generator that supplied the camp with electricity. The engine’s exhaust was pumped through inflow pipes that opened into all three death chambers, each of which held some four hundred people. For twenty minutes, the women and children waiting outside heard the men’s sounds of suffering. Then the bodies of the men, who died from suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning, were placed onto carts and wheeled away, and the women and children were herded inside, destined for the same fate.
Within a few months, a new building housing ten gas chambers was constructed, equipped with more fume-producing engines, which made the extermination process more efficient. Soon a train transport of three thousand people could be killed in three hours; in a busy fourteen-hour workday, twelve thousand to fifteen thousand people were murdered.
Guy did not know the full extent of this horror as he drove away from Hildesheim the next day. But his journey home had erased whatever hope he had that he would be reunited with his family. The truth was inescapable.
As he left the town of his youth, Guy Stern had no intention of ever returning.
As soon as the war ended, Werner Angress asked General Gavin for a few days’ leave and the use of a jeep to drive 350 miles to Amsterdam, where he hoped to find his family. Just a year ago he had personally asked the general for permission to jump on D-Day even though he’d had no parachute training. Gavin had said yes then, and he approved Werner’s request again.
On Gavin’s instructions, Werner was provided with an official pass that stated he was traveling to the Netherlands on 82nd Airborne business. There was no firm date for his return or any limitations listed for the trip, a sign o
f the general’s generosity and trust. Once Werner’s personal mission was concluded, he was to return to Ludwigslust, where the division was still stationed.
Before leaving, Werner asked his buddies for their latest issue of cigarettes, which everyone received weekly, as well as any extra K-rations. It was well known that the winter of 1944–45 had been a hungry one for the Dutch, and there were still severe food shortages. The cigarettes were used by smokers and nonsmokers alike as currency, and with enough of them, one could buy anything that was available.
In a jeep packed with food, coffee, and cartons of cigarettes, Werner left Ludwigslust on the morning of May 12 and drove west on the autobahns. Although slowed by detours around some destroyed bridges, he made the trip in a single day, arriving in Amsterdam that night. Exhausted, he decided to find a hotel and start his search in the daylight. He got a room for a carton of cigarettes at the elegant Amstel Hotel, which was packed with Canadian officers whose units had liberated Amsterdam a week earlier. There was still no hot water or electricity in the rooms, but the clean sheets, towels, mattress, and pillows were luxury enough after some of the holes in which Werner had spent his nights since parachuting into Normandy on D-Day.
Early the next morning, he drove to Cliostraat 39 in south Amsterdam, where his parents and brothers were living when he left for the United States in 1939. He had heard nothing from any of them since their last letters in December 1941, shortly before America entered the war against Germany, after which his letters to the address had gone unanswered. He parked, found the apartment, and pressed the bell. He waited, not knowing for what. Would the next face he saw be his dear mother’s? Or his father’s? One of his brothers’? Or the face of a stranger?
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