Operation exodus, p.5
Operation Exodus, page 5
The United States’ spokesman said his country would admit no more than 23,370 Jews from Germany and Austria in the coming year. Britain’s delegate repeated a familiar argument that ‘reluctantly we possess no territory suitable for the resettlement of large groups’.
Australia’s delegate declared, ‘As we have no real racial problems, we are not desirous of importing one.’
New Zealand concurred. Canada, Colombia, Uruguay and Venezuela agreed to accept only farmers. Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama jointly announced they could not accept ‘traders or intellectuals’.
Peru’s spokesman devoted his minute on the podium to praising the United States for ‘its caution and wisdom in strictly limiting the number of Jews’.
Only Denmark and Holland agreed to open their borders without qualification.
A few days after the synagogue meeting a prematurely bald man with protruding eyes arrived in Vienna’s Jewish quarter. His name was Moshe Bar-Gilad and he had come in response to a call for help from the city’s Jewish elders after the Evian conference. From all the ghettos of Europe, similar pleas came. Bar-Gilad had been assigned to handle the plight of Austrian Jews.
At his first meeting with Vienna’s Jewish community, its leaders made no secret they had expected someone more worldly, not this slow-speaking farmer who had rented a room in a cheap hotel and answered their questions about what he would do, what he could achieve, with the polite request to be patient. He had his own question: could someone recommend a tailor where he could buy a new suit, nothing too expensive?
Three days later Bar-Gilad, dressed in a dark business suit, walked into Vienna’s Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. Until three months ago the imposing mansion halfway along the tree-lined avenue had been the home of Leopold Rothschild, another member of the banking family. The Anschluss – Hitler’s takeover of the country – had added over nine million Austrians to the Reich, as well as incorporating vast industrial and material resources.
Hanging over the mansion’s entrance was a huge swastika and fixed to the door was a polished brass plate bearing the words: ‘Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration’. When Bar-Gilad started to walk up the mansion’s steps, an SS guard barred his way.
Bar-Gilad handed over a document. It was typed on the headed notepaper of the headquarters in Berlin of the Supreme Reich Agency that combined the SS and the Gestapo. It confirmed the bearer had a permit to travel around the Reich as the representative of the Union of Communal Settlements in Palestine for the sole purpose of arranging the departure from the Reich of Jews approved by the agency. The document bore the stamp of Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler.
The astonished sentry politely motioned Bar-Gilad to follow him into the building.
His arrival at the centre of where the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to be decided had been planned with meticulous care by the three members of Aliyah Bet in Paris, Yehudi Ragin, Ze’ev Shind and Zvi Yeheli. Each had taken turns to brief him, and warned that if he was not believed he risked almost certain death. He had calmly said that he was ready to do what they asked.
Bar-Gilad travelled to Berlin and walked into Gestapo headquarters, where he was thrown into a basement cell and brutally interrogated. He had stoically stuck to his story that he wanted to discuss a proposal of benefit to the Reich: allowing an unlimited number of Jews to go to Palestine would not only seriously disrupt the Mandate, but also provide Germany with a powerful propaganda victory, one that Dr Goebbels would know how to maximise.
For 24 hours Bar-Gilad had been closely questioned by a number of increasingly senior members of the Gestapo. How could he guarantee what he promised? What would it all cost? If his fellow Jews were allowed to leave, how would they get to Palestine? Supposing they remained in Europe, in Denmark and Holland, the two countries which had welcomed them at the Evian Conference? Where was the value to Germany in having hordes of Jews promoting trouble close to the Reich borders? The questions had been endlessly repeated. Each time Bar-Gilad had answered in his slow, measured voice: only Jews willing to go to Palestine would be allowed to travel. Finally, he was given his document bearing Himmler’s stamp and told to go to Vienna to discuss his plans with the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration. Moshe Bar-Gilad had cleared the first hurdle in his extraordinary mission.
Standing in the entrance hall of the Rothschild mansion, its silk wallpaper hung with framed paintings the family had been ordered not to remove when they were evicted, he waited to meet Adolf Eichmann, the bureau’s director.
Eichmann’s office had once been Leopold Rothschild’s library and contained hundreds of leather-bound books. A furled swastika on a stand was placed to one side of the desk behind which Eichmann sat in his immaculate SS uniform. At another desk sat a woman in SS uniform, a note taker.
It took two weeks to complete the arrangements. Two million Reich marks were transferred from the Rothschild Bank in Paris to the Reich Central Bank in Berlin. The money was described as a ‘facility fee’. Farms confiscated by the bureau would become training camps for Jews to learn agricultural skills. Bar-Gilad had been given a letter signed by Eichmann, and a senior SS officer accompanied him to the concentration camps to select those he wanted. For Bar-Gilad, ‘It was the most difficult part of my mission, refusing all the other prisoners’ families and the elderly, who deserved to go. But the deal I had made with Eichmann did not allow them to be included. To break his terms would be the end of everything.’
Eichmann insisted that every Jew who went to the farms would have their spartan accommodation, food and farming equipment paid for by the Rothschild Fund, as well as covering the cost of the SS guards who would ‘protect’ the camps. Finally each exit visa would be a ‘special one’ and double the already hefty price charged.
Substantial further sums of money were transferred into the Reich Central Bank. Eichmann demanded a minimum of 400 Jews should be ready to sail to Palestine every week on ships that the Aliyah Bet must provide. Shind led the search for boats around the Mediterranean ports.
News of the training camps had reached the Jewish communities across the Reich and applications to go there poured into the Zionist office in Vienna. Meanwhile, those selected by Bar-Gilad had to report to their local Gestapo headquarters three times a week to provide progress reports on their departure.
In August 1938, Bar-Gilad was summoned to Eichmann’s office and told that the number of emigrants had to be increased to at least 1,000 a week, otherwise twice that number of Jews would be sent to the concentration camps.
Sacked from his hospital post, Dr Hermann Levi had found employment as an office cleaner, then as a gravedigger in a Christian cemetery. Both times he was dismissed because of his religion. Helena had found a job as a laundry delivery girl. One day the door to a house on her round had been answered by a former classmate. The girl shouted for her mother and said, ‘There’s a dirty Jew here.’ Helena lost her job.
Shortly afterwards, her mother had contracted pneumonia and Dr Levi had gone to his old hospital to ask if they would admit her. The administrator refused. A former colleague had given Dr Levi medicine to treat his wife at home, in the room they now rented in the area of Hamburg designated by the city authorities for Jews. When Helena’s mother died, she was buried in the Jewish cemetery near the synagogue where the family still worshipped. Dr Levi found another job, this time with the city’s refuse-collecting department. Once more he was sacked after one of his former patients had informed the authorities. A new law forbade any public body to employ Jews.
All over the Grossdeutsche Reich, Greater Germany, Jews were facing increasing discrimination, humiliation and often violence. As Helena later recalled: ‘A Jew had no rights. The average German didn’t care: the more Jews they could drive out, the more of our assets they could take from us. Long ago our home had been sold and we were now living off anything we could sell.’
For weeks she and her father had searched for work, knocking on doors of houses in the wealthiest area of the city only to be turned away with a familiar refrain: ‘We don’t employ dirty Jews.’
One Sunday in the autumn of 1938, when they cycled into the countryside, they came across an old farmer struggling to replace a wheel on his hay cart. After they helped push the cart into the farmyard, he invited them to tea and by the end of the afternoon they learned he was a childless widower. Now in his late seventies, it was all he could do to manage his small herd of cows. He asked them no questions about themselves. Helena would remember how he finally stood up from his armchair by the fireplace and looked at them.
‘He said he knew we were Jews but our religion did not concern him. All he wanted to know was could we work hard. My father then told him our story. When he had finished, the old man shook his head. “Mein Gott,” he said.’
He offered to employ Helena as a housekeeper and her father as his herdsman. They could live in the loft above the cowshed and in return they would have their meals and a small wage. That night, their belongings piled on the cart and pulled by the farmer’s horse, Dr Levi and Helena left Hamburg.
On 9 November 1938, Kristallnacht exploded into Jacob Kronenberg’s life with a crash as the roof of the nearby synagogue where he and his family had once worshipped collapsed. Christabel, his wife and Freddie still wore their crosses, but Jacob felt such a display of faith was too ostentatious.
He told them to remain indoors while he went to investigate. Firemen were hosing the adjoining buildings to protect them, but making no attempt to save the synagogue despite the pleas of the onlookers. Leather-coated Gestapo men armed with clubs were herding members of the congregation on to trucks. Those who protested were hit. An elderly rabbi emerged from the flames carrying a bundle of documents. An SS officer grabbed the documents and, when the old man protested, he was clubbed senseless. Jacob turned and ran, shocked by what he had seen, terrified of what it could mean for his family.
In Vienna, Moshe Bar-Gilad had gone to bed early in his rented room. The past weeks had left him exhausted from dealing with Eichmann’s office and travelling across the Reich to organise the emigration. He was jerked from sleep by the sound of screams. From his window he saw a group of SS soldiers smashing the door of an apartment block. Minutes later they emerged into the street, dragging a man, a woman and a teenage girl. The soldiers were laughing as they pulled at the nightclothes of the women and began to sexually assault them. Finally all three were thrown on to a truck already half-filled with other Jews. In the distance the sky was reddening from another burning synagogue.
Throughout the Reich, the horror continued.
In all, more than 7,000 Jewish shops were plundered and then set on fire, and 267 synagogues were ransacked. Jewish graveyards were desecrated, including the one where Helena’s mother was buried. Some 30,000 Jews were rounded up in Germany and 20,000 in Austria to be sent to concentration camps.
By dawn on 10 November, 171 Jewish apartment houses were still smouldering in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin after orders from the Gestapo to let them burn to the ground. At noon an order signed by Heinrich Müller, Gestapo Chief, Berlin Headquarters, announced that all those who looted Jewish shops were not to be prosecuted and were entitled to keep their spoils. During the night 36 Jews had been killed and 38 wounded for ‘resisting arrest’ across the Reich.
On 12 November, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering announced that the Jewish population would have to pay a collective billion Reich marks for ‘the damage done by the riots they are responsible for’.
In Room 17 in Tel Aviv Eliyahu Golomb sent an urgent coded message in Hebrew by radio to Aliyah Bet’s Paris office that Bar-Gilad was to organise the immediate transport of all those in the Austrian training camps to the nearest port: ‘Even if the boats are intercepted by British patrols once they reach Palestine waters and are brought into Haifa, they will only be held in detention camps far better than the Nazi concentration camps. Hitler intends to exterminate our race.’
On a spring day in 1939, Chaim Weizmann walked down Whitehall and turned into Downing Street, the narrow road he had come to call his Via Dolorosa, the street in Jerusalem along which Christ had finally made his way to his execution on Golgotha. Weizmann said he felt much the same sense of inevitability as he entered No. 10 to make one final plea to Prime Minister Chamberlain to help the Jews.
Weizmann intended to hand him a document that had been sent to him from the mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, containing a detailed exposé of conditions of Jews in the concentration camps.
When Weizmann was shown into the Cabinet Room, Chamberlain was waiting with the head of the Civil Service, Sir Warren Fisher, who motioned him to sit opposite them at the long table. According to Weizmann, after he handed over Goerdeler’s document to Fisher, ‘The Prime Minister sat before me like a marble statue; his expressionless eyes were fixed on me and he never said a word.’
Five minutes after Weizmann had entered, Fisher rose and escorted him out of the room; Chamberlain had still not said a word. At the door of No. 10, Fisher shook hands with Weizmann and handed back Goerdeler’s document, explaining that there was no chance of the Prime Minister ever reading it.
For Chaim Weizmann the shadow over the fate of the Jews in Europe was growing darker by the day.
While the number of Jewish emigrants had increased to some 34,000 a year, there were many thousands more still in Germany whose freedom Moshe Bar-Gilad could now buy, not only through Eichmann’s bureau, but through the Gestapo Visa Office in Berlin.
The newly formed department was run by Angelo Metossiani, an Italian-born former policeman who was having an affair with a Berlin Jewess. He told Bar-Gilad, ‘In a “Greater Germany”, my conscience is also affected by the anti-Jewish policy of our leader.’
Over dinner in a Berlin restaurant, Metossiani introduced a member of his staff, Stefan Karthaus, an Austrian, who said, ‘If it is a matter of providing your Jews with visas we will gladly so do.’
It was an astonishing offer, not least because they asked for no money.
Since early morning on a fine June day in 1939, Bar-Gilad had stood on a platform at the Nordbahnhof, Vienna’s railway station, watching tearful Jewish children whose families were trying to reassure them through their own tears.
David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann had successfully used their political skills to bring out children from Nazi Germany. It was the birth of what became known as the Kindertransport.
In London, Churchill had led the public campaign to help bring this about and his call had echoed in Washington, DC and European capitals. In Berlin, Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop found himself daily lobbied by foreign diplomats. The turning point came when Magda Goebbels, the wife of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and mother of their six children, convinced her husband to persuade the Führer that letting the children go would show the ‘caring side’ of the Reich. Hitler finally agreed and 10,000 children would be allowed to travel to Britain.
On that June morning, the older boys wore their best suits and the younger ones were in shorts and sweaters; the girls wore dresses and knee-high socks and many held their favourite doll. Each child carried a small suitcase or a travel bag containing all the clothes and toiletries they were allowed to take, together with 20 Reich marks. Pinned to their clothes was one of the visas which had been signed by Karthaus and stamped over Metossiani’s signature. Each document bore a bold red ‘J’.
Bar-Gilad had collected the permits from Gestapo headquarters on Berlinerstrasse. Back in Vienna he had begun the difficult task of selecting the names of the children who would board the train waiting in the station. Goebbels had sent a film crew to record its departure and cameramen moved among the milling crowd, handing out candy bars to the children and urging the families to smile. As the platform clock drew closer to the departure hour, the children clung to their parents and the sound of the engine building up steam created further tension.
To Monika Levenson’s embarrassment, ‘My mother insisted on checking my new suitcase to make sure she had packed all my best clothes, because she had read that people in England liked foreigners to look tidy.’
Another mother held her daughter in her arms until an SS trooper standing guard at a carriage door grabbed the child and dumped her on board. The little girl burst into tears and an older one led her to a compartment. The mother screamed she wanted to say goodbye. The trooper pushed her back into the crowd.
Johann Goldman, 15 years old, would remember his moment of separation: ‘My father kissed me, tears in his eyes, and kept saying how proud he was to have a son like me, and my mother clung to me and repeated she would love me more for every day until we met again. Then my elder brother, Henri, who was 24 and did not qualify to go, put his arms around me and said it was not too late for me to change my mind. One of the troopers separated us and shoved me on the train. Above the calls of “Einsteigen, all aboard”, I heard my father shouting he would see me soon.’
Johann would never see his parents and brother again. It was years before he learned they had died in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
As the train pulled out of the station, Monika Levenson saw her mother trying to press her face against the compartment window, tears streaming from her eyes and mouthing, ‘Ich liebe Dich,’ over and over. Monika was another child who would never see her mother again.
Most of the children were going to foster parents in Britain in Jewish homes, others went to children’s homes and non-Jewish families. But for those waiting on the European side of the Channel for a ship to take them to America, it was often more difficult. Long-settled Jewish families in Holland and France were fearful of what could happen to them as they saw the spread of Judenrein, ethnic cleansing. They became increasingly concerned for their own futures and they did not find it easy to absorb children from the Kindertransport into their families.
