Steven Karras

by The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military

  I received the following citations: European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign ribbon with five battle stars, Good Conduct Medal, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Presidential Unit Citation, World War II Victory Medal, Expert Infantry Badge, and Combat Infantry Badge. The Jubilee of Liberty Medal was given to all soldiers who participated in the Normandy campaign.

  When I returned home, I was told that I had become a different person. My brother, who said I had always been the joker of the family, noticed that now I couldn’t joke anymore. Whenever I heard loud sounds like in war movies or a car backfiring, I jumped, but I got better over time.

  When I think back, the 3rd Armored Division became a second family to me; we all lived together day and night and had been through and survived the most trying of circumstances to which few people can relate. Whenever I see them at reunions, it is like we have never been separated.

  Ed Schloss was an optical executive for House of Vision Inc. for thirty-five years and moved with his wife, Elfriede, to San Diego, where he lives today.

  Chapter 16

  WALTER REED

  MAINSTOCKHEIM, GERMANY

  95th Infantry Division

  Walter Reed was born Werner Rindsberg in the town of Mainstockheim. After Kristallnacht, he was sent to an orphanage in La Hille, France, where he remained until 1941. He arrived in the United States just three months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He served in the 95th Infantry Division, Counter Intelligence Corps. He was the only member of his immediate family to escape Germany and survive the war. He is pictured above in 1944.

  I’ve been able to trace the Rindsberg family origin to the mid 1700s. Since my father and mother were third-cousin Rindsbergs, it all goes back to one Feist Rindsberg, who lived in Uehlfeld in the mid to late 1700s (on Mid-Franconia in the Nuremberg area), a small farm village with a typical 8 to 10 percent Jewish population. So far I have never found any Rindsbergs in the world who did not descend from him.

  As a young boy from seven to twelve years old, I always spent my summer vacations in Uehlfeld at my maternal grandfather’s house with then unmarried aunts and uncles all living together, so I have many recollections of that village and its Jewish families. I have returned there regularly in the past fifteen years and know some contemporary families and the mayor.

  My family lived in Mainstockheim, a similar Franconian farm village some fifty miles away near Wuerzburg. Mainstockheim was a typical small farming village where all of the non-Jews were small farmers, day laborers, and tradesmen like butchers, bakers, and haulers—no rich folks or intellectuals. Many of the Jewish heads of household were cattle dealers, some were wine merchants who traveled over a whole region to sell their wine to professional people and business owners, and others were small tradesmen.

  My paternal grandfather Moritz Rindsberg (born in Uehlfeld) started a small wine making/selling business in Mainstockheim in the late 1890s, which my father, Siegfried, continued after Moritz died in the early 1920s. My father also cofounded the local adult soccer team around that same time and married my mother, Rika (from Uehlfeld), in 1923. I was born the next year and had two younger brothers, Herbert and Kurt. My father had two siblings who died in infancy, while my mother had four sisters and two brothers who all lived in Uehlfeld or two other communities, Gunzenhausen and Ellingen. All three villages were viciously anti-Semitic in the early Nazi years and therefore these relatives all immigrated to the United States before 1937, when it was still relatively easy, and survived the war.

  Mainstockheim had a population just under one thousand, including some twenty-five Jewish families. Many of these were orthodox, including my immediate family, yet they were fully integrated into the community and were not subjected to visible discrimination before 1933. Although there had been a history of discrimination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in all of Central Europe, that discrimination changed over time. Thus Mainstockheim once was a refuge for Jews from the nearby county seat of Kitzingen, where Jews were not allowed to live in the early 1800s. In Mainstockheim, Jewish residents had to pay protection taxes to the nobleman landlord family in the 1700s. (A few years ago, a nearby nobleman descendant showed me the tax collection book of his ancestors.)

  My grade school was a separate Jewish one-room elementary school and our teacher was Siegbert Friedman, who also was the cantor (quasi-rabbi) in the local synagogue. Additionally, he was the Schochet who came to family homes to perform ritual slaughter of congregation members’ chickens and geese, since there was no kosher butcher shop in the village and Jews there would not buy meat from the regular butcher. Friedman’s family members were my father’s very close friends. His wife, Ida, was the sister of Henry Kissinger’s father and Henry was said to have come to visit us at times. When he did, I apparently played soccer with him, which I do not remember (and I bet that he doesn’t either). Friedman installed a keen desire for learning in me, and I probably was better educated by the age of ten than most of my contemporaries at the local public school.

  At about age eleven or twelve, I transferred to the Realschule (middle school) in nearby Kitzingen, where I also did well and was on the soccer team. By then in 1935–1936, some teachers had become Nazis and showed it in the classroom in their pronouncements. Others, however, were still friendly to Jewish students, especially my French teacher. There was much name-calling and bullying of the Jewish students by our peers. By 1938, Jews could no longer attend public schools, and I was forced to commute to Wuerzburg, a twenty-minute train ride to the nearby larger city, to attend a Jewish seminary, which I did not like (too much religion).

  As mentioned before, my family was orthodox Jewish, as were most Jews in our village, and we observed all the rituals, such as regular synagogue attendance and strict observation of the Sabbath and all the many holiday special practices. This included strict adherence to kosher food, not driving or riding a bicycle on the Sabbath, separate dairy and meat dishes/silverware, the complete cleaning of the house for Passover, building and using a Sukkoh, and on and on. Jewish men even wore a Zylinder (top hat) in the streets going to the synagogue for the high holidays. Herr Friedman instructed me for Bar Mitzvah, which took place in 1937. Unlike in America, it was a strictly religious ceremony, with no fancy party or lavish presents.

  Until 1933 there was a close and normal relationship between Jews and other residents, especially through commercial transactions such as buying groceries and helping farmers with the harvest. There was also much community interaction; one Jew sat on the village council, my father was active in the local football club, and we employed local co-residents in the Jewish businesses and households and bought things from each other without really thinking about it.

  As mentioned, my father was both a wine merchant and maker, though his business was small. He used a cellar in our house and one he rented from a local resident to process and bottle wine that he imported from outside (as Franconian wines were not the greatest). Since few people ever ate in restaurants in that time, he sold wine by the case to professional and business customers over a fairly wide region, which he covered by train as he never owned a car or truck. By today’s standards, it was a very primitive business but many Jewish men in our region were competing with each other, though I do not recall much competitive friction. In fact, many of the Jews in our area were close or distant relatives of one sort or another.

  The Nazi presence in our community began before 1933, in about 1930, with Stormtroopers parading on the village streets, swastika flags aloft, and singing militant songs, including those attacking Jews as “the enemy.” By 1933 and after the Hitler takeover, few dared to show or voice opposition, as that would easily result in denunciation by ardent Nazi fellow residents and, from the beginning, the threat of being sent to Dachau. In fact our neighbor Sigmund Stern, the most prominent village Jew, was sent to Dachau “for protective custody” early on. This actually saved his life because it caused him to quickly immigrate with his family to the United States, where he
survived in Pittsburgh.

  In the first few years after 1933, the most disturbing anti-Jewish events were the constant nationwide vilification of Jews as criminals, bloodsuckers, inferior racial beings, and other propaganda. By 1935 racial laws, boycotts of Jewish businesses, and similar actions began to make life miserable, even in small villages like ours. Many other towns vowed to become Judenrein (free of Jews). This was true of Uehlfeld, and it saved my relatives’ lives by making them speed up their emigration.

  Much of the Nazi movement was based on evil, but skillfully manipulative and continuous, propaganda. Thus even young children were aware of the hassling of the Jews or the concepts of the “master race” and the drive to conquer the world under the scheme of the Third Reich. With radio as the main mass medium, Hitler and his principal cohorts were constantly shouting and preaching their skewed ideology on radio programs, and there were innumerable local parades and festivities, always draped in the Nazi and national flags. Sadly, the whole folderol of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, with its attacks, lies, and emotional hullaballoo (on both sides), is strangely reminiscent of the never-ceasing Nazi propaganda machine—and it truly worked!

  I was nine to fourteen years old during that period and fully aware of these manifestations. It extended to the fact that many of my prior local friends and playmates had become members of the Hitler Youth and Bund Deutscher Maedchen (BDM, the female counterpart). They wore uniforms, camped out, and marched in parades. We were excluded, of course, but I am sure that had the Nazis not been enemies of the Jews, I probably would have been one of the most ardent Hitler Youths. It was the thing to do, unfortunately, and people fell for it. I was kind of a performer as a kid, and my parents expected me to work hard. If the Germans had not chosen the Jews as people to be put down and eliminated, I would have been one of the most active and enthusiastic Hitler Youth members in my community—I have no doubt about it. I would have marched, saluted, worn the uniform of the Fatherland, and probably would have been killed as a German soldier.

  In our small village, interaction among kids was natural and without any special distinction between us and them. All of that changed quickly after 1933 and the Jewish kids in our village soon were bullied, attacked, and vilified by many of our contemporaries, usually three or four on one, as is customary in all bullying situations. It got worse, of course, as the Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda was intensified in the mid- 1930s.

  I never witnessed attacks on adults, though they occurred in many places. However, as stated, kids often threatened or actually tried to beat up Jewish kids. While I do not remember specific attacks, a few years ago a retired German octogenarian dentist in nearby Kitzingen asked whether I recalled being attacked by two students in the Kitzingen Realschule (middle school), when he came to my aid. I said no, but when he mentioned the two attackers’ names, I suddenly remembered them as bullies. The attack obviously occurred, but I had forgotten the incident. Until I met him by accident on a recent visit, I had also totally forgotten that I ever knew my dentist protector. Thus for me, time heals wounds and memories.

  I believe that by 1933, all Jewish families and individuals “thought” about how to escape the Nazi persecution. The smart and lucky ones made quick decisions. Others, such as my parents, feared giving up their hard-earned possessions, businesses, and careers. In our village, few if any Jews had gone to college, and many only had elementary school educations. This meant that functioning in a foreign country with only German language knowledge was a daunting prospect, for they would have a hard time earning a living. There were also those, like my father, had aging parents (his invalid mother) living with them. They could not face leaving them behind and moving them out of the country seemed impossible.

  Most of all, until 1938, there was always hope—foolish and wishful thinking, as it turned out—that the Nazis would not last. As friends, neighbors, and relatives left the country, emigration was a constant and urgent consideration, but unfortunately not acted upon by many. Finally, immigration was opposed by many countries and their citizens, the United States foremost among them. My parents simply waited too long, mostly, I believe, for the above-stated reasons.

  I do not recall when my parents first took steps to obtain the required affidavits and U.S. visa applications, probably on or after Kristallnacht in 1938. On November 9, 1938, at seven o’clock or so, there was a loud knock on the door of our house and a truck outside with a whole bunch of Brownshirts yelling “Raus raus!” As it turned out, they wanted my father and me. I was fourteen years old. They arrested and hauled us, along with all of the other Jewish men and boys from our village, out of our houses to the county jail. We had no idea why, but we knew that things had really got bad because they arrested us and we thought they were going to shoot us. I had not broken any laws, smoked, violated traffic laws (because we didn’t own a car), or stolen anything other than hazel nuts off a neighbor’s bush. So, I really shouldn’t have been arrested. I was in jail for three days.

  When you’re being persecuted, the main mental and psychological reaction is fear. You don’t think of the things that people nowadays find easy to discuss, like “Why didn’t you resist?” or “Why didn’t you get a gun and shoot them?” That kind of thing, I think, was completely remote from our consciousness. Plus if you were in one of the twenty-seven Jewish families in a town of nine hundred, and all the other people had weapons and the law on their side, you would know there was absolutely nothing you could do. Unless you were revolutionaries, who nobody I lived with was, you were no different than the people who are currently fleeing Afghanistan for Pakistan because their lives are being threatened. Fear was the main emotion and nothing else.

  The upshot was that all the boys were released after three days and all the men were all sent to Dachau. I remember the impact it had when my father came home five to six weeks later; he was in such bad health and horrible looking. He was told if he ever talked about what he saw or what went on in Dachau, they would bring him back in. This experience determined my parents’ attempt to do what they could to save at least one of their children, which was me in this case, because I was the oldest at fifteen years old. They found out about the so-called Kindertransport, and in 1939 I was sent out alone.

  By that time, my parents had a very high waiting list number at the U.S. consulate in Stuttgart (some of that record is actually in its Gestapo files, which I’ve managed to obtain), and they just never made it. They had, unfortunately, much company with those high waitlist numbers. I have learned that my relatives had provided the required affidavits, promising financial support to my family, but by late 1941 emigration was no longer permitted by the Nazis.

  I actually remember nothing about leaving home or discussing the decision of my parents to send me to Belgium in June 1939. Of the journey I only recall changing trains in Cologne for Brussels, but nothing about my arrival in Belgium. In correspondence between my parents and my relatives in New York (which came into my possession after the relatives died), I found that my father wrote in May/June 1939: “We have been able to persuade Werner that he should leave.” So apparently I was not eager to leave home, but I do not recall any of that.

  I do, however, have a very clear recollection that coming to Belgium was, for me, like going to Disneyland. Coming from a small village to the Belgian capital, with its large and attractive buildings, cars, streetcars, museums, and parks, was indeed a big and exciting change. So, I was living in a boys’ group home of about forty boys, even though at first everyone was a stranger. Most of all, being no longer the persecuted Jewish boy felt like breathing fresh air and coming out from under a dark cloud.

  The good life in Belgium came to an abrupt halt in May 1940, when the German invasion put all of us once again in a jeopardy, which was so well known to all of us. Briefly put, the fifty or so boys from Home Speyer and a group of forty refugee girls from a similar girls’ group home escaped to southern France on a freight train two days before the Germans marched into
Brussels.

  Life in the tiny village of Seyre, near Toulouse, in an unoccupied barn was very precarious, especially in the frigid cold during the winter of 1940 and worsened by food shortage, disease, and the increasingly hostile attitude of the Vichy French government toward Jews. Luckily, one of the Belgian woman protectors who had also fled to Vichy France persuaded a Swiss Red Cross affiliate, Secours Suisse aux Enfants, to take over our colony in October 1940. In the spring of 1941, these new Swiss protectors moved us into the Chateau de La Hille, a rundown property in a very remote location sixty miles from the Spanish border. By a stroke of luck my U.S. relatives’ efforts to extricate me from France resulted in an immigration visa from the U.S. consulate in Marseille. I arrived in New York, via Spain and Lisbon, on September 2, 1941, just in the nick of time, for there were only a few more ships crossing the Atlantic with refugees after my arrival.

  I like to say that when I’ve been to Las Vegas and to Reno, I’ve never lost a lot of money, but I’ve never won anything either. When I came to the United States, however, I won the lottery big time.

  Getting to New York was the aspiration of all of us at La Hille, so naturally, I was extremely happy to have achieved that goal. More than that, America had always been considered in Europe as das Land der unbegrenzten Moeglichkeiten (the land of unlimited opportunities). I looked at the New York skyscrapers, the cars, the hustle and bustle, and especially the abundance of food and comforts, and saw a world totally different from the one in my recent past. It was indeed like a dream come true.