The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (29 page)

Soon after their arrival in Westerbork in June 1943, the Hasenberg family had come close to being transferred to Auschwitz. A friend of John Hasenberg’s, a man he served with during World War I, spotted the Hasenberg name on a train list to Auschwitz. The man had influence in camp and managed to get the Hasenbergs off the list.

Soon after, John received an unexpected piece of mail. In the envelope were four passports stamped with the magic word
Ecuador
. John and Gertrude stared at the falsified passports in disbelief. Not only had the broker kept his promise, somehow the mail had been forwarded from their home in Amsterdam to Westerbork. Immediately the status of the family changed; John realized they wouldn’t be transferred to Auschwitz.

In February 1944, Irene and her family were transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was more crowded, and conditions were much worse. In Westerbork, primarily Dutch Jews administered the camp; in Bergen-Belsen, the SS ran the camp and meted out vicious punishment. The prisoners were crammed into smaller spaces than at Westerbork, and women and men had segregated barracks, which meant separation and uncertainty.

As the Russians approached Auschwitz, some of the prisoners there were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Other transports came from Albania, Greece, and Hungary, which meant that prisoners in Bergen-Belsen had less food. At night in the barracks, the women would lie in the dark and describe recipes for their favorite foods—stuffed breast of veal, goulash, vegetables of all kinds, cakes and cookies. Each woman would try to outdo the others in these nighttime fantasy feasts. During these nights, Irene thought to herself that there was no word to describe the physical pain of hunger. “True hunger is a painful, ever-present feeling that is impossible to comprehend,” Irene said. “It’s a gnawing, hollow feeling.”

During the day, she cleaned the barracks and did the laundry. There was no soap, only cold water. When mothers left the barracks to go to work, Irene and other young teenagers cared for the smaller children. Werner did hard labor alongside his father.

Under conditions that were barely survivable, Irene and her family spent eleven months in Bergen-Belsen. “Every night I went to sleep hoping that I would wake up in the morning,” Irene recalled. Finally, on January 21, 1945, after the Hasenberg family passed their medical examinations, they assembled at the center of the camp
with a group of about three hundred other Jews in Bergen-Belsen who were on the list for exchange.

Near evening, a train flying a Red Cross flag rolled into camp. Irene and Werner steadied Gertrude as they walked up the steps into the heated train, John following behind. As the train moved slowly out of Bergen-Belsen, the Hasenbergs were silent. Irene stared out the window.

The train, headed for Switzerland, was forced to make numerous stops. Allied pilots had bombed many of the tracks and they had to be cleared. At times the train sat on the tracks for hours, unable to move. In the compartment, both Gertrude and John were in great physical pain. They struggled to stay upright in their seats. Werner and Irene, both suffering from malnutrition, did their best to take care of their parents.

On the second night of the four-day journey, John got up to go to the bathroom. He was too weak to walk by himself, so Irene walked with him.

“We’re almost free now,” she whispered.

“I’m not gonna make it,” he replied.

That night, he fell asleep on Irene’s shoulder, and sometime during the night he died. Irene shook him but there was no response. For several hours, she and Werner held him in their arms. Gertrude seemed confused, unable to comprehend what had happened. John was the first person to die on the train. Over the next few days, others from Bergen-Belsen, headed for exchange and freedom, died as well.

In the morning, a nurse came by and declared John dead. His body was wrapped in a blanket and left off at the next town on a bench near the train station. The indignity of it—their father left in a strange town with no funeral rites—did not yet penetrate Irene or Werner. After all they had endured, they were too numb, perhaps in shock.

When breakfast was distributed throughout the train, Irene and Werner heartily ate the first real meal they had eaten in more than a year. An acquaintance from Amsterdam, a man who knew their
father, approached them to express his condolences for their father’s death.

“How can you eat when your father has just died?” the man said.

Irene and Werner stared at him, unable to say a word. Both thought to themselves, “How could he speak to us like that?” With their father dead, they had to fight for their lives. They were literally starving and had to survive. They continued to eat their breakfast in silence.

The Red Cross train stopped in several camps to pick up Americans who were held in internment camps. The real Americans, as Irene thought of them, filed onto the train, some weeping with relief. The reality of the exchange was not yet clear to Irene. “It was like we were commodities,” she said. “I didn’t yet understand that my life would be saved.”

On February 3, the train passed from Konstanz, Germany, across the border into Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Swiss authorities boarded the train with food and water. Irene focused on her mother—watching her chest rise and fall—to make sure she was still alive.

Once the Swiss had checked off names for the exchange, the train continued to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where they disembarked. Irene slept in a barn on a bed of hay soiled with urine and feces, but at least there was food. Compared to Bergen-Belsen, the conditions were manageable. Werner and Gertrude were immediately admitted to a Swiss hospital. Werner’s feet had been frostbitten, and he needed surgery to avoid gangrene. In Bergen-Belsen, he had stood too many hours in the cold in shoes too small for him during the daily roll calls.

Gertrude’s condition was critical. Someone at the hospital called a priest to say prayers over her because they thought she was dying. An elderly Jew from the train told the doctors to stop the priest from praying, explaining that in Jewish tradition prayers aren’t spoken until after someone has died.

In early February, the Swiss authorities, flooded with refugees and eager to be rid of them, put together the list of everyone—Americans, prisoners of war, and the Jews from Bergen-Belsen—who would return to America on the MS
Gripsholm
, the ship that
had carried Ingrid and her family from America, which was scheduled to leave from Marseille on February 8.

The Swiss authorities placed Irene, now an official displaced person (DP), on the list for the train bound for Marseille. Her mother and brother, also DPs, were scheduled to stay behind in the hospital. In a year and a half in concentration camps, Irene had not been separated from her family. She told the authorities she couldn’t leave her mother behind, who might not survive, and wouldn’t travel to America without her older brother.

“Here in Switzerland we are free, right?” said Irene. “I won’t go without my family.”

But the Swiss gave her no choice. On the day the train left, Irene boarded with assurance that if she went on to Marseille, the Swiss would find a way to bring her back to her family in St. Gallen. It was a ploy to get her on the train. The moment she sat down, Irene regretted her decision and wished she had sought out a place to hide in St. Gallen.

The train was filled with Americans who had been trapped in Germany. Many had been housed in abandoned German army barracks and had subsisted on little food and lived in fear for their lives. However, compared to Irene, an emaciated concentration camp survivor, the Americans looked reasonably healthy and were naturally in good spirits on this day.

An American woman, horrified at the sight of the sickly and despondent Irene, sat beside her on the train. Irene explained that her mother and brother were in St. Gallen in the hospital and that she didn’t know if she would ever see them again. The American woman picked up Irene and placed her on her lap. Even though she was fourteen, Irene sat and buried her face in the woman’s shoulder. The woman rocked and hugged Irene as if she were an infant. The woman whispered to Irene that everything would be all right, that she would take Irene with her to America and care for her until her mother and brother could make their way to the United States as well. Irene relaxed in her arms.

A Red Cross worker walked down the aisle and delivered a Red Cross package to every passenger. Irene took her package. Then the American woman gave Irene her package. Now she had two and told the woman, “I’m in seventh heaven.”

As the train neared Marseille, one of the Swiss authorities approached the woman and asked to speak to her. They left the compartment and moved to the back of the train. When the American woman returned to Irene, she was crying and said, “I can’t take you to America. They won’t let me.” Irene felt confused but had no choice and accepted the news.

When the train came to a stop in Marseille, Irene saw the MS
Gripsholm
in the harbor. The stunning sight was more beautiful to Irene because the ship was Swedish and neutral. Next to the ship was a small Italian freighter, the
Città di Alessandria.

When she disembarked the train, Irene was placed in line with other DPs from Bergen-Belsen. The Americans formed a separate line and boarded the MS
Gripsholm
, where champagne and a large buffet of good food waited. Irene and a group of approximately one hundred Jews from Bergen-Belsen boarded the freighter. Once on board, Irene was told that the freighter was bound for a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration camp near Algeria in North Africa. Irene had no idea where Algeria was on a map.

The first night at sea the cooks on the ship served platters of hamburgers, the first hamburgers Irene had seen since she’d left Amsterdam and entered Westerbork in June 1943. She ate more than one and became sick. All she could do was lie on the deck beneath the moon stitched into the dark sky. As the sides of the freighter were licked by waves, Irene vomited the hamburgers. She scolded herself for eating too much, too fast.

Later that night, she heard a door open and saw a waiter bring a tray of hamburgers on deck and dump them into the sea. She couldn’t believe her eyes. After so many months of hunger, the waste of food seemed criminal to Irene. The ocean kept moving beneath her. The wind whipped up and darkness covered the moon and
stars. She could smell the salt from the sea. Alone on the deck, with her father dead and her mother and brother far away in Switzerland, Irene cast her mind back to her childhood in Amsterdam and cried for all she had lost. Then she fell asleep, a lonely girl at sea, as the freighter took her to North Africa.

From
the moment the Eiserloh family was transferred to Bregenz, they were outside the protection of the US government and the Swiss and under the authority of the German Reich. Step by step through the snow, the family made their way north on foot, headed for Idstein, Johanna’s hometown. Cold was the immediate enemy, with temperatures well below freezing. Johanna tucked Guenther, a sickly infant, inside her coat. Ensi, only four, stayed close to her mother. Ingrid and Lothar followed in their father’s footsteps.

After a few hours’ walk, Mathias hitched a ride for the family in an open-air truck to the next railroad station. From the back of the truck, Lothar watched as they passed through villages heavily damaged by Allied bombing. Even at nine years old it was clear to Lothar that Germany had all but lost the war.

Only two weeks before, the German winter offensive to the west of Germany in Belgium and the Ardennes Forest in France, known to the Allies as the Battle of the Bulge, was finished and Germany’s fate sealed. The battle began on December 16, 1944, when Germany opened fire with two thousand guns on American forces in the Ardennes Forest. The weather was bad and the attack came as a surprise to Allied forces. When Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe was asked to surrender, he replied famously, “Nuts!”
Meanwhile, General George S. Patton’s Third Army turned north to attack the left flank of the Germans while British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the right flank. In the battle the
Germans lost one hundred thousand men and the Americans eighty-one thousand.

The complex endgame of the war was in play. In the early days of February, as Ingrid and her family trudged through the snow in Germany, they were invisible casualties of much larger forces. Given the official secrecy of the government’s exchange program, few in America knew anything of the plight of families such as the Eiserlohs. In the face of the magnitude of the loss of American lives during the war against Japan and Germany, it is unlikely many would have cared.

On February 4, 1945, the three Allied leaders—FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—gathered in Yalta on the Black Sea to plan the final defeat of Germany and Japan. Stalin, whose army controlled Poland and the Balkans and was advancing toward Berlin, had insisted that the meeting take place on his home turf. Only a few weeks earlier, on January 20, 1945, Roosevelt was sworn in for a historic fourth term. By then, FDR was a sick man. Determined to spare his strength, his inaugural address lasted only five minutes, the shortest in history.

Over seven days in Yalta, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin haggled over reparations. Stalin wanted $10 billion, and both Churchill and Roosevelt held firm against his demands. By the end of the meeting, Roosevelt was physically spent but wrote to Eleanor that he was pleased with the negotiation: “Dearest Babs, We have wound up the conference—successfully I think. . . . I am a bit exhausted but really all right.”

When Franklin returned to the White House on February 28, Eleanor was shocked by his appearance. Not even when he was stricken with polio had he ever looked so frail. The following day FDR gave an address to Congress and remained seated for the first time in his presidency. “I hope you will pardon me,” he told the combined chambers. “It makes it a lot easier for me to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around the bottom of my legs.” His eyes looked down at the podium. “It has been a long journey.” His voice faltered. “I hope you will agree that it was a fruitful one.”