Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  Under the nominally more lenient administration in the capital, Karl would be permitted to move and reopen his business there, and he announced as much in mid-May to his employees. (Three-fourths of them would join him; he was in fact a well-liked boss.)

  Seven articles appeared that year denouncing “Jew Joel, the bloodsucker and oppressor,” and after the massive Nuremberg Rally, where crowds roared for Hitler in the swastika-bedecked streets, Karl Joel was arrested three times in short order—and freed each time upon word from Tillmann, who had plans for the family business.

  While Karl was optimistically reestablishing his business under the strict new regulations, installing German-made machinery and putting up a mandatory sign declaring that the business was Jewish-owned, he took the precaution of shipping Helmut to an elite boarding school in St. Gall, Switzerland. (Helmut would inherit from his father, a great Wagner fan, a deep love of classical music. Thus the photograph, in this book’s gallery, of Helmut aged about twelve, playing a piano on the terrace of a resort hotel in the Rhine-side spa town of Flims, Switzerland.)

  Even as Der Stürmer (loosely, “The Attacker”) regularly inveighed against the “Nuremberg Linen-Jew Joel,” Helmut would come back to Germany sporadically, including a visit for his bar mitzvah in June 1936. However, any sense of normalcy was giving way to strict new rules for his father—certain suppliers began cutting him off, a German plant manager was installed, and Karl was ordered to stamp all his outgoing packages with a J. Then in June 1938, a new law passed, forfeiting all Jewish businesses to Aryan ownership. Karl was visited by Josef Neckermann, who engineered the purchase of the company for some 2.3 million Reichsmarks, then roughly equivalent to a half-million U.S. dollars but less than a fifth of its real value.

  Billy’s grandfather signed the papers that July. The transaction was overseen by Tillmann, as Karl was forbidden to use his own attorney. He asked for some assurance that the agreed-upon sum would be paid and was answered with ominous threats that he would be wiser to look after his own security. Neckermann also took possession of the family house, whose inventory included the children’s bedroom set that Helmut had used.

  Karl and Meta checked into a hotel to await payment, but the prelude to the Nazis’ “Final Solution”—propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had been quoted as saying, “The Jew is a waste product. It is a clinical issue more than a social one”—was ramping up. A great number of Berlin’s Jewish population had already been incarcerated in the Gestapo’s Moabit district prison, later infamous for the executions committed there, when a warning came to Karl and Meta that the Gestapo planned to arrest them. Karl literally ran out the back door of the hotel where the meeting had been scheduled to take place. “My grandparents fled in the night,” Billy says, “and, using fake passports, escaped via the Bahnhof Zoo Station, across the Swiss border to Zurich. They got in touch with my father at his school and told him that they had left Germany for good and planned to stay in Switzerland.”

  As the family sheltered in a one-room flat in Zurich, the drama took one more twist when Karl Joel was notified by a letter from Josef Neckermann that there had been a problem clearing his payment; the letter advised him to return to Berlin to settle the deal. “That was ambiguous,” Billy’s father says in The Joel Files. “In a way, it was a death threat.”

  Wary of a trap, Karl nonetheless traveled to Berlin and met surreptitiously in a café with Fritz Tillmann, who asked him for a check for a hundred thousand Reichsmarks for his efforts to straighten things out. Tillmann told Karl, falsely, that Karl couldn’t cash the Neckermann payment check himself because the banks had invalidated Jews’ accounts. Meanwhile Karl was detained for a week before escaping once again to Switzerland. He had realized that he would never be properly paid for his business, even the reduced amount he had agreed to.

  “I think,” says Billy, “that’s when my grandfather realized that remaining in Europe was simply untenable. Just think of the irony of relocating your business from Nuremburg, the Nazi Party headquarters, to Berlin, only to see Berlin end up as the new Nazi power base.”

  Karl finally realized he had to take immediate measures to save the family. The account that follows owes much to the expert researchers of the Holocaust Museum. One thing that’s certain is that given the rigors of escaping Europe at that moment in history, as well as the difficulty of finding a way into America, the Joel family was among a very small minority of those who successfully evaded the Nazis’ clinical, exterminating wrath, if not their depredations.

  In The Joel Files, Howard cites his gratitude that the family had some cash to spread around to help their escape: “I was lucky because my parents had some money left. That’s why I’m still alive.” A staffer at the Holocaust Museum agrees: “At the very least, the process would not have been as smooth—relatively speaking—as it was. Certainly people without large sums of money were able to make it out, but the path was much more difficult. Some well-timed bribes may have played a part here and there—there are hundreds of other ways, large and small, where having money would have made an enormous difference. For example, a key part of the immigration process for most individuals at the time involved obtaining affidavits of support from people in the U.S., which often included putting down a financial deposit to help ensure that the immigrants would not become a burden on the state. The country was still reeling from the Great Depression, and fear of immigrants was often driven as much by economic concerns as it was on any ethnic or religious prejudices. Being able to demonstrate that he had the means to support his family would likely have made a big difference in that process, as would being able to call upon his business connections should he need an affidavit.”

  While most refugees’ bank accounts had been completely drained and their property seized by the time they left Nazi Europe, Karl had been able to retain at least a cash residue from his lost fortune. By whatever means, he obtained three visas, and the family headed for England. From there, they secured places on a cruise ship called the Arandora Star for a January 1939 passage across the Atlantic to Cuba. A 1927 vintage luxury liner with a capacity of four hundred for deluxe voyages and operated by the Blue Star Line, she was known as the “wedding cake” due to her white hull and scarlet trim. A contemporary advertisement listed her winter voyages to Brazil and “Argentine” as featuring “Unsurpassed Comfort … No emigrants … No second class”; clearly she epitomized a privilege and frivolity out of joint with the times. Though she would be torpedoed in 1940 in an infamous incident killing eight hundred foreign deportees whom Winston Churchill was shipping to a Canadian prison, in January 1939 England had not yet declared war, and the U-boat wolf packs had not yet begun their deadly campaigns in those waters.

  The family must have felt both relief and hope in boarding her for the 4,600-mile passage, which would last about four days. Listed on the “Alien Passenger” manifest as first-class passengers (identified as manufacturer, housewife, and student) “contracted to land” at Havana, the three Joels were also categorized as “intended future permanent” residents of Germany. They of course had no such intention.

  Due to the Immigration Act of 1924, pushed through Congress easily in the name of preserving “the ideal of American homogeneity,” in part to stem the flow of Jews who had fled Poland and Russia, there were strict quotas in place. For those born in Germany, the quota was only 25,957 immigration slots per year.

  As the war erupted in 1939, the would-be emigrants from Germany to the United States greatly outnumbered the available slots, and entry might take years. The Holocaust Museum staff hypothesize that Karl may have applied for a quota number in 1938, when his firm was “Aryanized,” and this was likely why the Joels left for Cuba. Many people in their situation who had the means went there rather than waiting in Europe, which by this point was in full-blown war.

  Karl Joel’s family, having paid the standard fee equivalent to about $500 but feasibly with additional money changing hands, was permitted to disembark i
n Havana and would reside there for not quite two years.

  The same could not be said, however, for Karl Joel’s brother Leon, who, along with his wife, Johanna, and son, Gunther, boarded the infamous SS St. Louis alongside 934 other passengers traveling to Havana on May 13, 1939. The voyage, later portrayed in the 1976 feature film Voyage of the Damned, departed with doomed hopefulness—the passengers little realizing that the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had plans to exploit the seaborne refugees’ attempted escape as an example in his endless strivings to make Jews out as problematic. On a Friday morning, five days after arriving in Cuba, the vessel spun up its engines, and the entire group, denied entry and trapped on board, went to the rails to wave to friends and family who bobbed about the harbor in rented boats—Howard’s family among them.

  Finally, on June 7, after steaming about in the vicinity of Cuba with some forlorn hope of gaining entry to a U.S. port, the ship began a return voyage. Nine days later the disembarkations back in Europe would begin, with the passengers scattered to Holland, Great Britain, Belgium, and France. The Leon Joel family was among 224 in the latter group. Of the original 937 who sailed, 254, as tracked by researchers, would die at the hands of the Nazis, including Leon and Johanna, who, after being moved between various concentrations camps by the collaborationist Vichy government, were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz shortly after their arrival in September 1942. Gunther, however, escaped over the mountains to Switzerland and eventually emigrated to the United States, where he would go on to serve in Korea and live on Long Island as Henry Guy Joel until his death in 2009.

  “I am eternally grateful,” says Billy today, “that my father’s family was finally allowed to enter Cuba—that the Cuban authorities allowed Jews to find asylum in their country was probably my salvation.” In fact, Howard Joel, turning seventeen and attending the University of Havana at roughly the same time as Fidel Castro, would even find himself returning to some of the casual joys of growing up. ““It was great,” he would recall to Tim White. “There were lots of girls.”

  Finally word came down that the family could be admitted to the United States. They boarded the SS Oriente (typically transporting tourists to “Gay, Carefree Havana” on all-inclusive six-day cruises for $75) on September 18, 1942, listing their new address as 200 Ninetieth Street, New York City. They had very little savings and minimal prospects, and Howard’s war was far from over. But for now, the family was safe.

  THE WORST FEARS were clearly in the past for Karl and Meta Joel when they stepped onto a Hudson River pier in early 1942. What possible terrors could the New World hold after what they had been through in the old one?

  They found an apartment on Bogardus Place in the Washington Heights section of New York, overlooking Fort Tryon Park near the Cloisters. Karl started a business in downtown Manhattan at 395 Broadway (a commercial fifteen-story limestone building at White Street) making headbands, ribbons, and hair clips for five-and-dime stores, and Howard helped make the deliveries.

  One of the odd synchronicities of Billy Joel’s life in music is that not only did his maternal grandparents, Philip and Rebecca Nyman, meet thanks to a Gilbert and Sullivan production (in their case, at London’s Royal Albert Hall), his parents, Howard and wife-to-be Rosalind, did as well—in 1942, while performing in a City College of New York Glee Club production of The Pirates of Penzance. They were also both in The Mikado, conducted by the well-known maestro Julius Rudel, who’d fled Vienna in 1938. “I’d like to think the musical DNA in our family is largely responsible for my parents getting together,” says Billy.

  By contrast to the (once-)prosperous Joels of upscale Nuremberg, the ancestral Nymans were denizens of the notorious Whitechapel district in London’s East End. Known for the tanneries, ironworks, and breweries that fouled the air, it attracted workers in those trades and those who could abide their effluvium. Billy’s grandfather Philip—who was to be the real and frequently acknowledged hero of his life—was born there as the son of Jacob and Leah, both originally from Kiev, in November 1889, the year before Jack the Ripper began preying on the neighborhood prostitutes. Wife Rebecca was from Polish stock, born in London in 1896. (Both her region of origin and her husband’s would see violent anti-Jewish pogroms as the century turned, perhaps explaining their parents’ relocation to London, and if so, giving Billy two lines of forebears with refugee histories.)

  Rosalind (Roz, as she was known for short) Nyman arrived—as the third of three daughters born to Philip and Rebecca—in 1922, in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the family had migrated after leaving England in 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War. “Her father didn’t want to get conscripted into the English army,” relates Billy, “which was a pretty smart thing to avoid.”

  Roz and her parents, along with her elder sisters Muriel (born 1918) and Bertha (1920), settled in the Flatbush district of Brooklyn, on Ditmas Avenue. Billy would visit there and remember their home as a pile of dingy bricks, “dark and small,” a turn-of-the-century row house in a Jewish neighborhood, with kosher butchers all around. His mother’s parents would live there the rest of their lives.

  Philip Nyman had an antiauthoritarian streak that ran deep. As a young man, he fought with the Republicans in Spain against Franco and would be under suspicion in America for his leftist leanings—but he also had a kind of elegance in his bearing, Billy recalls: “He didn’t have a lot of money—as far as I could tell, the family never did—but he would sneak us into the Brooklyn Academy of Music, by slipping the usher a pack of Luckies, to see recitals and other classical music performances.”

  The newlyweds who had been united by Gilbert and Sullivan had families more appropriate to Shakespeare’s famous lovers: “two households, both alike in dignity,” with very little use for each other. “Despite my parents’ love for each other,” says Billy, “their two families weren’t compatible at all. Karl was a German Jew, rightly or wrongly self-styled as the aristocrat of the tribe, and my mother’s people were English and Russian Jews whom the Germans would have viewed as the lower, untermenschen class.”

  The courtship faced a still greater obstacle when Howard Joel was drafted into the U.S. Army in July 1943. He wasn’t yet twenty-one, but his ability to speak fluent German earned him a quick ticket to the European theater.

  Howard Joel was part of the Fifth Army, originally in the legendarily savage Italian campaign with Gen. Mark Clark. From September 1943 through the war’s end, the region’s battles would result in 300,000 Allied casualties, about a fifth of that number deaths, mostly from the army’s slog up the boot of Italy through the mountains. Clark had an agenda to get to Rome, and he led terrible duels of attrition, such as the Battle of Monte Cassino, to capture Rome by whatever means necessary. And on June 5, 1944, he did. Ironically, that military triumph was completely knocked aside in the headlines by the events of the next morning, June 6, D-Day.

  Billy’s devotion to military history yielded information about Howard’s wartime service, despite his father’s general lack of communication about the prelude to it: “My understanding is that just after the Normandy invasion, he and his fellow soldiers were pulled out of Italy and invaded the south of France with Patton’s Third Army. The Allies were bombing heavily, and the Reich was pretty tattered as Patton’s troops mopped up.” Howard’s battalion would be part of the liberation of Dachau, near Munich, in April 1945—he wouldn’t yet know of relatives he lost at Auschwitz.

  Says Billy, “I remember him talking to me about that—what it felt like to be in your own hometown of Nuremberg with the U.S. Army overrunning the place. He recalled not wanting to shoot any of his old friends who might be there—his pal Rudy [who served with Herman Göring’s Panzer tank division] or the kids he went to school with. He may have been an American, but he still had strong ties to the town; he had friendships; it was his childhood. I didn’t really understand how, after being disenfranchised and treated so badly, he could want to show any mercy. B
ut that reveals the compassionate side of my father. At one point he ended up behind the wheel of a Jeep in Nuremberg, driving past his family’s bombed-out factory, but the smokestack was still standing amid the rubble.”

  After the war, Josef Neckermann would pay a certain price. Goaded into action by pressure from the Nazis’ conquerors, the military government would sentence him to one year in a military prison in his hometown of Würzburg. Five years later, facing simultaneous lawsuits from Karl Joel (whose postwar attempt to solicit repayment from Neckermann in a meeting at a Four Seasons Hotel in Berlin had yielded nothing), from another victimized businessman named Siegmund Ruschewitz, and from the military government (this time it charged that he’d violated regulations by returning to business immediately after the armistice), he would face paying restitutions—plus four years for the state charges. The court finally decreed that he would avoid prison if he agreed to the two-million-Deutschmark Joel settlement. He had dodged a bigger payment by claiming that the war’s disruption had destroyed a special account he’d set aside for safekeeping to pay Joel. Days after the deal was struck, paperwork emerged proving that to be a lie, but no money was added to the restitution.

  Despite it all, the expropriated mail-order business that had risen from the ashes of the war under its new owner’s name burgeoned, and Neckermann would become the poster boy for the German “Economic Miracle.” In 1960 Time magazine dubbed him “The Mail Order King,” and his business—with a disruptive sprawl that perhaps compares only to present-day Amazon.com—sent out 3.5 million catalogs each year, offering some 5,500 items at prices 40 percent lower than retail competitors. With 40,000 orders a day, the firm moved into a massive steel and concrete headquarters.