The Holocaust (11 page)

In March 1939, Eric Lucas was still trying to find a foreign embassy in London willing to give his parents a visa:

‘Months passed,’ Lucas added, ‘and hope vanished.’
³⁰

Eric Lucas was one of more than fifty thousand German Jews who found safety in Britain. His parents, unable to obtain the necessary papers and permits, perished three years later.

The persecutions which in November 1938 had aroused so much sympathy were now arousing fear, and even hostility. In February 1939 the Baldwin Fund, set up to help Jewish refugees, was said by a Foreign Office official to ‘feel that they are being blackmailed by the threat that if they do not take over this or that individual, he will be beaten to death in a camp’.
³¹

Immigration regulations were far more stringent in the United States than in Britain. More than ten thousand German Jewish children were admitted to Britain in 1938 and 1939, but less than five hundred to the United States.

On March 15 German forces occupied the Bohemian and Moravian provinces of Czechoslovakia. Slovakia declared its independence. Bohemia and Moravia became a German Protectorate. In the capital, Prague, lived fifty-six thousand Jews, of whom twenty-five thousand were refugees from Germany and Austria. Eight days later, German forces occupied the autonomous city of Memel, on the Baltic coast, and nine thousand more Jews came within the Nazi orbit. Most of them were able to flee, to neighbouring Lithuania. Some of Prague’s Jews were able to flee northwards to Poland, or
southwards to Hungary. Others went to France, a few to Britain. But those who sought to enter Britain, by air, without permits, were put on the next plane back to Europe.

Now even Britain was hesitating, afraid, as one minister, Lord Winterton, told a deputation of German Jews on May 18, that there were limits, occasioned by ‘anti-Semitism and anti-alienism’ beyond which ‘it was dangerous to go’.
³²

As Nazi rule was imposed on Bohemia and Moravia, the Hungarian government took a further step towards isolating its own five hundred thousand Jews, and those tens of thousands of Jews brought within its borders by the annexation of southern Slovakia and Ruthenia, both formerly parts of post-1918 Czechoslovakia. On May 3 a second ‘Jewish Law’, issued in Budapest, forbade any Hungarian Jew from becoming a judge, a lawyer, a schoolteacher or a member of the Hungarian parliament.

On May 17, two weeks after this new Hungarian law, the British government issued a Palestine White Paper fixing an upper limit of seventy-five thousand Jews to be admitted to Palestine over the next five years. Of these, twenty-five thousand could be refugees. There were still over two hundred thousand Jews trapped in Germany, at least fifty-five thousand in what had formerly been Austria, and tens of thousands more seeking refuge from the Protectorate and from the newly independent, viciously anti-Semitic Slovakia, as well as Polish Jews seeking to leave for Palestine at a rate of more than thirty thousand a year.

To enforce its new immigration restrictions, the British government began to put diplomatic pressure on the governments of Yugoslavia, Rumania, Turkey and Greece, not to allow boats with ‘illegal’ immigrants on board to proceed towards Palestine. On May 26 an inter-departmental conference in London discussed the possibility of paying the Rumanian government fifteen days’ worth of food for each ‘illegal’ refugee, in order to encourage the Rumanians to detain these Jewish emigrants and then send them back to Poland, central Europe and Germany.
³³

Despite the growing restrictions and pressures, Jews still sought escape to Palestine; those who set out without valid certificates travelled down the Danube, and crossed the Black Sea in small boats, often hardly seaworthy. Among these ‘illegals’ in the summer of 1939 was the seventeen-year-old Julius Lowenthal, from Vienna.
Earlier, he had managed to cross the border from Germany into Holland, hoping to find refuge in England. But he had been arrested by the Dutch police in Amsterdam, and deported back across the German border. From Germany he then made his way, by train and boat, through central Europe to Rumania, and down to the Black Sea coast. From there, he travelled on board a cattle boat, the
Liesel
, whose several hundred other ‘illegal’ refugees reached the Palestine shore on May 29. Intercepted by a British warship, they were nevertheless allowed to land.
³⁴

While Lowenthal’s cattle boat was approaching the shores of Palestine, an ocean liner, the
St Louis
, was anchored off the coast of Cuba, with 1128 German Jewish refugees on board. More than seven hundred of these refugees held United States immigration quota numbers, permitting them entry, but in three years’ time. Despite long negotiations with Cuba, the United States, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay and the Argentine, only twenty-two of the refugees were allowed to land at Havana. In mid-June 1939, the rest were forced back across the Atlantic, their voyage on the
St Louis
followed by the world’s press and newsreel cameras: 288 found haven in Britain, while 619 were admitted by Holland, Belgium and France. Few of those refugees who returned on the
St Louis
to continental Europe were to survive the war years. But in June 1939, as they found new homes in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, no one in those three capitals, whether refugees or inhabitants, had any reason to fear for their freedom. France, Belgium and Holland were, after all, independent states. The immediate threat to the Jews seemed primarily an internal German one, spread chiefly to those countries which Germany had already annexed: the newly designated ‘province’ of Austria, with Vienna as its principal city; the so-called ‘Protectorate’ of Bohemia and Moravia, with its capital in Prague; and Memel.

From the first days of the German occupation of Prague, thousands of Czech Jews had appealed for asylum in Western Europe, Britain and the United States. Most of them realized that the permitted places were so few that, if fortunate, they might gain admittance only for their children. One such parent was Charles Wessely, Secretary of the Prague Produce Exchange, and a Judge at the Arbitration Court. He was forty-three years old, his wife, thirty-eight, their son Rudolf, fourteen. Charles Wessely’s appeal
was sent from Prague to Britain on 11 March 1939. His son was found a home in Britain, arriving in London on July 1. But despite the offers of the Judge and his wife ‘to do any work’ even domestic posts, inconsiderable of our former social standing’, no places could be found for them.
³⁵

The fate of the Jews trapped in central Europe had become a matter of controversy. Those who had to determine the British government’s policy towards Jewish refugees who had reached Poland from the Protectorate were not convinced that these refugees were in any real danger. ‘A great many of these’, wrote one official, Patrick Reilly, on July 24, ‘are not in any sense political refugees, but Jews who panicked unnecessarily and need not have left.’ Many of them, he added, ‘are quite unsuitable as emigrants and would be a very difficult problem if brought here’.
³⁶
Six days later, on July 30, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, commented in a private letter on the persecution of German Jews: ‘I believe the persecution arose out of two motives: a desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness.’ Chamberlain continued: ‘No doubt Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom.’
³⁷

Shortly before a meeting of the British Cabinet on August 4, the Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, who was responsible for policy towards Jewish immigration to Palestine, had asked that the question of ‘illegal’ immigration be put on the agenda. Then he reported that the High Commissioner in Palestine had been authorized to announce that ‘no immigration quota would be issued for the next six-monthly period October 1939—March 1940’. The second step to stop illegal traffic was the Foreign Office’s ‘strong representations’ to certain governments ‘against their laxity’ in the ‘discouragement of this traffic’. MacDonald added:

MacDonald’s reference to what he called ‘the power of Jewish money’ was ill-chosen; in reality, the funds of the Jewish charitable institutions were nearly exhausted. Two weeks later, on August 17, news of just how desperate the Jewish situation was in Europe reached the Foreign Office from Slovakia. The report, on the fate of the eighty-five thousand Jews of Slovakia, was distressing. Non-Jews, encouraged by the Germans, ‘do all they can to rob and plunder Jewish property and persecute the Jewish people’. Other Slovaks, ‘unable to show their hatred of the Germans, so vent their wrath instead upon the Jews’. ‘Jew-baiting’ had become a frequent occurrence. All but a small proportion of Jews had been excluded since the previous March from the professions and the universities. Many Jewish shops and businesses had been forced to close.

Many Slovak Jews were joining the ‘illegal’ movement to Palestine. ‘Their nerves can stand no more,’ the report explained. ‘Fear of the unknown in other countries is more pleasant to them than present persecution and feeling that they are trapped.’ Several thousand had already fled, and some had even succeeded in reaching Palestine. ‘This made the others more reckless,’ the reported added, ‘especially as conditions in Slovakia grew worse.’
³⁹

On 23 August 1939 the world learned of the signature of a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Suddenly it became clear that if Hitler were to invade Poland, the Soviet Union would stand aside. This pact was ominous news for the 3,250,000 Jews of Poland.

Since 1921, more than four hundred thousand Polish Jews had emigrated, many to France and Belgium, others to Palestine. One of these emigrants, Ze’ev Sherpski, from the Polish village of Szrensk, arrived in Palestine, as a tourist, together with his daughter, at the very moment of the signature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Sherpski’s wife Hanna, and their son, were to have followed in a few months’ time. But time had run out.
⁴⁰

On the evening of August 31, as German radio poured out a stream of venom against the Polish Republic, sixty German Jewish children were travelling with their adult escort in a train crowded with German soldiers from Cologne to Cleve, the only point on the Dutch frontier to which trains were still running. Crossing the frontier, the train proceeded to the Hook of Holland. Overnight, the children crossed the North Sea to the British port of Harwich.
There, at dawn on September 1, they learned that Germany had invaded Poland.
⁴¹

Ze’ev Sherpski was safe in Palestine. The sixty German Jewish children were safe in Britain. But, as German forces broke through the Polish frontier, and German bombs fell on Warsaw, more than three million Polish Jews, the largest single mass of European Jewry, were trapped in a front line of uncertainty and hatred. Among them were Hanna Sherpski and her son. No one had yet determined what their exact future would be; but neither was to survive the war.

The German forces crossed into Poland in the early hours of Friday, 1 September 1939. For six and a half years Poland’s Jews had watched with alarm the violent anti-Semitism imposed by Nazi Germany first upon German, then upon Austrian and finally upon Czech Jewry. They knew, at first hand, from Polish anti-Semites, what mob hatred could do. But Polish Jewry had its own means of defence, its own press, its own institutions, and its own representation in the Polish parliament. With the German invasion, these protective shields were torn away. On the railway carriages bringing German troops into the war zone, were painted crude pictures of Jews with hooked noses, and the slogan: ‘We’re off to Poland—to thrash the Jews’.
¹

On that first day of the German invasion, 393,950 Jews lived in Warsaw, the Polish capital. This was a third of Warsaw’s population; a greater number of Jews than were left in Germany. Only in New York, where two million Jews lived, were there more Jews in a single city. In the whole of Palestine there were only a few thousand more Jews than in Warsaw alone.

At nightfall on September 1, tens of thousands of Warsaw Jews flocked to synagogue to welcome the Sabbath, among them eighteen-year-old Alexander Wojcikiewicz, who worked as a proofreader at his father’s printing press. Forty years later, he recalled how, that Friday night, ‘the Jews of Warsaw prayed as never before. The synagogue at Tlomackie Street was full to overflowing and large crowds stood and prayed outside. People cried to the Almighty to have pity on them and their children. They begged for mercy for themselves and all those who might die on the battlefield.’

‘Long after midnight,’ Wojcikiewicz added, ‘my father took me
to the press once more. There he hid some of our valuables under one of the linotype machines, deeply cemented in a large hole. I have never found out what happened to those gold coins, patiently saved over the years. Today another building, on another street bearing the same name, stands where our press once stood. The lost treasure was but a tiny speck of the wealth Polish Jewry had gathered for centuries to lose, irretrievably within a single day.’
²