Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Joe Lash, who had fought in Spain, was a significant part of ER’s thoughts about the Spanish Civil War. He “brought back from Spain” a small bronze figure of a young “militiaman in coveralls . . . a symbol of the Republican cause.” She cherished the “little bronze boy,” which always sat before her “on my very crowded desk & is a joy.”

  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas ER’s days were full, but she was eager to spend more time with Joe and Trude. For his birthday, on 2 December, she sent him a book of poetry as a gift and left a letter at his apartment, “the first birthday letter I have ever written you & yet I feel as though you were very close to me & your concerns were mine.”

  I think I knew we were going to be friends . . . when I looked across the table at you about a year ago! Anyway my dear boy we can count on a growing understanding . . . out of which enduring love & respect grow. . . . I sent you the Home Book of Verse because sometime if you like to read aloud perhaps you’ll let me come over & read some of my favorites in front of your fire.

  She had also sent him a little radio, a transistor shortwave, noting, “I get the news in the morning on mine & I never cease to marvel that something so small can bring you a voice from Europe!”

  Joe felt it was “a wonderful birthday week—mainly because of the thoughtfulness and love of ER.” She filled his apartment and his life with “magical influences.” She had restored his sense of purpose and helped him recenter his heart. He thanked her for becoming “the most precious friend in the world who walks beside me . . . counseling me to be a better person, a kinder person, a happier person. . . . I only hope that in some way I am helping you.”

  At the time he had no idea how much he and Trude did in fact help ER. They shared her vision of a better, more expansive democracy. They worked to rescue targets of Hitler’s violence. And they gave her daily hope for trusted companionship in a landscape that was otherwise often lonely for her. ER’s friendship with Joe had expanded to include Trude, with deep independent roots, and became profound and lifelong. They too shared political goals and a range of emotional journeys that forged a unique bond.

  Scholar, teacher, and activist, Trude had been educated as ER had always wanted to be. The first lady deeply admired Trude’s learning, her love for languages, and her activism. Trude was thirty-four, with three toddlers—the same age as ER had been (though she was the mother of five) when she learned of FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer. Now the romance of Trude’s relationship with Joe was beguiling to ER, and she wrote Trude a remarkable letter:

  Ever since our talk . . . I have wished that I could help you. . . . Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else’s life not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself. . . . There was a time when I thought happiness did not matter, but I think differently today.

  Trude and Joe had a “sense of being driven by fate,” but she was still married. Eliot Pratt gave his wife “whatever freedom she wanted,” and they seemed to have an amiable understanding. Hence she agonized at each step, and her decision to divorce him took years. ER evidently supported that decision with an enhanced commitment to personal happiness that fortified her own being in an entirely new way. When Joe first told her of Trude’s decision to separate, marveling at the “immensity of the step” and the “prospect of happiness,” ER embraced him.

  More immediately, ER was eager to do all she could do to support the Varian Fry rescue operation under way in Marseilles: the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), for which he worked, succeeded in getting people out of France, as the last exits out of Europe’s horror slammed shut. Fry’s operation would eventually be responsible for the rescue of nearly two thousand notable refugees. Using the skills of forgers and mountain climbers, he and his team guided refugees including Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger across the Pyrenees and onto rescue boats that transported them to America. Trude Pratt’s role in the ERC has never been fully acknowledged, but she was responsible for much of its initial success, having introduced ER to Karl Frank and Varian Fry. She never wanted to be credited for her role, but ultimately acknowledged,

  Of course I knew and much admired Varian Fry, and I helped him where I could (not enough), one of the ways was an introduction to Mrs. Roosevelt. She realized how difficult his work was and how important. . . . It is still hard to think back to those times. So much more could have been done by people of this country, who were slow to believe that the horrors were actually happening. Mrs. Roosevelt was certainly not one of them.

  Although Gertrude Wenzel Pratt’s name appears nowhere in the Varian Fry record, the rescue operation was launched because of ER’s absolute trust in her and in her extended circle of activist allies in the German resistance community.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Isolationism Is Impossible”: The Politics of Rescue

  Varian Fry arrived in Marseilles on 15 August 1940, carrying a short list of two hundred notable artists, writers, musicians, “immediately endangered political refugees” and prominent antifascist activists whom he was determined to rescue. Within days he expanded his initial goal: he would now work to save everyone stranded in the crowded seaport city of southern France, including the hundreds of thousands of foreign-born, now stateless Jews. From his suite in the Hotel Splendide, with the support of the ERC in New York, his indefatigable efforts ultimately produced significant results.

  But Fry’s heroic determination to save lives contradicted State Department policies as well as FDR’s diplomatic priorities. Ever since ER’s “interference” regarding the passengers on the SS Quanza, Breckinridge Long had been firmly in charge of refugee issues and consular decisions. Although FDR had agreed to grant visitors’ visas to the most endangered and noteworthy refugees who were trapped in unoccupied France, Long’s policy of “delay and delay” ruled the moment. On 30 August, Karl Frank wrote to ER that her friendly interest had resulted in “many hundreds” of visitors’ visas, but “the problem of exit permits from France” endured, so that, of the 576 people whose names the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees had presented to the State Department for visas, the vast majority remained trapped. Actually fewer than fifty had the papers they needed. On 6 September, outraged by the many bureaucratic hurdles, ER wrote Sumner Welles, “Is there no way of getting our Consul in Marseilles to help . . . a few more of these poor people out?”

  After a month of earnest activity in Marseilles and Lisbon, ERC chairman Frank Kingdon told ER that the situation remained dreadful. The Lisbon consul “is holding up many people who have taken the first great step in escaping from France, and whose departure from Lisbon should be expedited.” Kingdon hoped she would find something to be done about “this unnecessary stoppage,” which merely added “to the overcrowding of Lisbon and the suffering of the refugees.”

  Moved by the agony of so many people stranded in peril, ER acted upon every request made of her. She was particularly emphatic regarding writers like Lion Feuchtwanger, whose works she had read and admired.

  She had enjoyed Feuchtwanger’s company during his November 1932–January 1933 U.S. lecture tour. On 19 March 1933, only a week after FDR’s inauguration, ER’s friend Helen Rogers Reid had published Feuchtwanger’s article “Hitler’s War on Culture” in the Sunday New York Herald Tribune Magazine—the first alert to U.S. audiences of the bitter and dangerous reality that had so quickly and completely distorted the Germany of Lessing and Goethe into a land of brutality and fear, violence and hatred. After leaving Washington, the author had joined his wife, famed German gymnast and athlete Marta Loffler Feuchtwanger, in Austria, where she had been on a skiing holiday. Within months Hitler revoked the citizenship of those “disloyal to the Reich,” and Feuchtwanger, now stateless, had joined the German exil
e community in the south of France.

  Comfortably settled in Sanary, on the Mediterranean coast, Feuchtwanger wrote five novels over the next seven years and completed a trilogy, The Day Will Come, on the life and work of Flavius Josephus, ancient Rome’s Jewish historian who sought to transcend confining nationalisms and limited identities to achieve world citizenship. But France’s debacle in June 1940 changed everything. The armistice signed by the Nazis and the French included a “surrender on demand” clause requiring the Vichy government to turn over any German nationals, including refugees, that the Nazis demanded. Like all “enemy aliens” in the country, the Feuchtwangers were sent to internment camps—Marta to Gurs, and Lion first to Les Milles, then to St.-Nicola, near Nîmes.

  ER’s AFSC contacts reported that the French internment camps were overcrowded, filthy places of “squalor and disease.” When ER was shown a photograph of the famed author, grim and gaunt behind barbed wire, taken during the summer of 1940, she did everything possible to get support for Varian Fry’s work in Marseilles and achieve his rescue.

  In the initial plan orchestrated by Fry, the Feuchtwangers were to have escaped together with Heinrich and Nelly Mann, Gottfried Mann (Thomas’s son, historian/journalist known as Golo), and Franz and Alma Mahler Werfel. But Spain was rumored to have closed its borders to “stateless” people, and Fry left the Feuchtwangers in Marseilles. ER then contacted the Sharps—activists in Marseilles—for help. The Reverend Waitstill Sharp, a former minister of the Unitarian church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and his wife, social worker Martha Sharp, had traveled from Prague in their efforts to help refugees escape. Now they accompanied the Feuchtwangers over the Pyrenees and then by train across the Spanish-Portuguese border to Lisbon, where they boarded a U.S. ship, the export liner Excalibur. When it docked on 5 October in New Jersey, an eager press corps greeted the Feuchtwangers. Unfortunately, the excited author told the story of their escape in dramatic detail. Although he did not name names, the secrets of Fry’s operation and the activities of Hiram Bingham, Fry’s only ally in the U.S. consulate in Marseilles, were fully reported.

  The next week the Manns and Franz Werfel, author of the best seller The Forty Days of Musa Degh, a vivid study of the 1915 Armenian slaughter, and his wife, Alma Mahler Werfel, arrived on American shores. They had left Marseilles with Varian Fry on 12 September, and after several delays in Madrid and Lisbon, they had been able to book passage on the Greek liner Nea Helias. Press reports were ecstatic: several most esteemed writers and artists were safe.

  Now at the dock in Hoboken, Werfel, surrounded by the press, relatives, and old friends—including Thomas Mann, there to greet his son Golo and his often estranged, more radical brother Heinrich—refused to answer questions regarding their journey: “It would be very dangerous to speak of it. Many of my friends are still in concentration camps.” During their protracted ordeal, Werfel had destroyed twenty manuscripts, he said, in case he was arrested. He hoped for time to write in peace and complete his Song of Bernadette—which while stranded and despondent in Lourdes, he had promised Saint Bernadette herself he would do were he to be blessed by the miracle of escape.*

  Reporters noted that Heinrich Mann, almost seventy, looked particularly exhausted. The former president of Prussia’s Academy of the Arts, and one of Germany’s earliest and most prophetic anti-Nazis, he was most famous in the United States for his historical novel Young Henry of Navarre, translated in 1937, and for Professor Unrat, the story of an esteemed academic destroyed by his obsession for a seductive cabaret singer, filmed in 1930 as The Blue Angel. The film, produced by Germany’s UFA Studios, was released in December 1930 and launched a new era in film history.* But Heinrich Mann was not the star—Marlene Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg were. Now Heinrich Mann faced an unknown future as Thomas Mann’s less celebrated brother.

  At the dock the press failed to interview the extraordinary Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had carried a rucksack on her back across the Pyrenees and kept it by her side at all times, on train, plane, and ship. It was filled with manuscripts, including the scores of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony and of all of Gustav Mahler’s works, as well as seventeen of her own songs for voice and piano.

  Many of the forty-three passengers on the Nea Helias had recently escaped detention and concentration camps and were on their way to the Dominican Republic. They had agreed to become “pioneers” at Sosúa, an experimental farm community for refugees, and looked forward to their new lives in a place they had never heard of, free at last from Nazi rule. Ecstatic upon landing in New Jersey, they were stunned to be rounded up by immigration officials and sent to Ellis Island, another prison, where they waited for transit visas and other requirements “under lock and key”—for Jewish immigrants in flight from Hitler were deemed security risks: they might be “fifth columnists” or Communist spies. After a week, they finally sailed for the Dominican Republic.

  On 14 September, two days after Fry’s trek across the Pyrenees with the Manns and Werfels, the Marseilles consular official Hiram Bingham received a State Department memo ordering him to cease all aid and support for the ERC. Frank Kingdon, chair of the ERC, “feared there would be only a few weeks more in which escapes could be made.”

  One searches in vain for ER’s reaction to these events—her columns are filled with her love for music, her presence at many concerts, her special interest in Mahler. There is no evidence that ER knew about the treatment of the Sosúa refugees at Ellis Island, but she was clearly aware of every step the ERC took to rescue the many notables on the emergency visa list. She was informed of every detail involving the incoming refugees.

  Yet she wrote not a word about the people she worked to rescue, or about Frank Kingdon’s fear that the State Department and the Gestapo were about to cut off all remaining escape routes, thereby ending the ERC’s work. As always, she walked a tight line between her roles as an activist first lady and as the president’s wife, carefully choosing when to go public and when to keep silent and acting only when she knew she stood a chance.

  Her public silence during the autumn of 1940 was mandated by the demands of her husband’s reelection campaign. Public opinion polls indicated that over 80 percent of Americans wanted no change in U.S. immigration quotas.

  Moreover, FDR’s long-range diplomatic commitment to maintain “friendly relations” with Vichy France defined his international priorities—and fully enhanced Breckinridge Long’s power. Long saw every successful rescue as a challenge to his absolute authority, and every life saved as diminishing that authority. FDR refused to place limits on Long’s power and seemed to agree that the refugee community was riddled with dangerous elements. Long now wanted all lists of refugees terminated, except for the few that his consular officers might recognize. James G. MacDonald, of the President’s Advisory Committee for Political Refugees, was outraged to have been bypassed.

  Given this situation, ER understood that the success of the ERC depended on her public silence and FDR’s willingness to let her continue the work. She could press him personally, as she did on 28 September when she urged him to meet with MacDonald to “get this cleared up quickly,” since “these poor people . . . may die at any time and . . . are asking only to come here on transit visas.” But at times FDR’s priorities and urgencies seemed at cross-purposes with hers, even virtually opposed to them. While she fought to ease restrictions on incoming refugees, he sought to stanch the flow. With one eye on his electorate and another on his supporters in the administration, he often spoke in an anti-alien rhetoric that must have alarmed and distressed his wife. Yet the dreadful circumstances mandated their opposing views as well as their collaboration and cooperation.

  Indeed, the situation of the refugees stranded in Marseilles was becoming ever more dire as Vichy France implemented Hitler’s “surrender on demand” clause. On 27 September Vichy ordered all Jews in the occupied zone to register at French police stations, car
ry their identification cards everywhere, be subject to search at all times, and place signs in their windows if they owned a “Jewish business.” On 3 October it imposed the Statut des Juifs, which curtailed the civil rights of French Jews in the unoccupied zone and regulated and restricted their participation in national life, the economy, and the professions. “At a stroke [Jews] were excluded from government, the military, the press, education, and cultural institutions” throughout France. On 4 October it authorized the surveillance and internment of foreign-born Jews. On 7 October it revoked the citizenship of Algerian Jews. These exclusionary laws of October 1940 rendered Hitlerian rules regarding Jews “official French policy.”

  Autumn 1940 was a bitter season for Jews in all the occupied areas. A new decree regarding “ownerless Jewish property” enabled Nazi troops to remove valuables—books, jewelry, furniture, and art—from Jewish homes, schools, businesses, and cultural centers in France, Belgium, and Holland. Nazi curator Alfred Rosenberg established a unit to transport significant “cultural objects” to Germany. More than five thousand works by eminent painters—Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Gainsborough, and many others—were removed from museums and residences, along with thousands of statues and all manner of antiquities. At the same time, in Frankfurt, Rosenberg introduced the concept of Judenrein as the goal of the new Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question: Germany would regard the “Jewish Question [as] solved” when “the last Jew has left the Greater German living space.”

  More ghastly events unfolded. On 3 October 150,000 Jewish residents of Greater Warsaw were ordered to move, bringing only their hand-held belongings, into the newly defined ghetto. Up to 400,000 Jews were to be walled off into an area built for 250,000 people, initiating a new terror. On 4 October Hitler met Mussolini at the Brenner Pass and announced, “The war is won!” From 5 October to 3 November, Nazi night raids against London remained relentless. On 5 November, Churchill told Parliament that 14,000 civilians had been killed in the Blitz. On 14 November, 500 German bombers targeted Coventry. A giant blaze leveled the city, destroying 60,000 buildings, including seven major war production plants, and killing almost 600 civilians. Raids on Birmingham and London followed.