The US government was just now beginning to take a stand and make a specific category for the Jewish victims of Nazi war crimes who would not consider repatriation as a viable option. For the first several months, no separate distinction was made for the Jews.8 Further, during the summer of 1945, Israel was still a goal with no guarantee that Palestine would be opened to the stateless Surviving Remnant as a permanent home. Immigration laws were not amended by Great Britain or the United States until much later. Bills to relax immigration quotas were not introduced in Congress until 1947, and Great Britain, which held Palestine as a mandated territory following the defeat of Germany and the Ottoman Empire in World War I, did not want to stand against the Arabs, who did not want to see Palestine become the Jewish homeland. Anti-Semitism was still the norm, and the policy for granting asylum was a dynamic political process.9 There was not yet even a specific term to describe what had happened. There was no “Holocaust” or “Shoah”; only later did these terms become part of the vernacular to describe the Nazi’s war against the Jews.
My father saw his reflection in the eyes of the Surviving Remnant. In them, he found the unadulterated truth of Hitler’s Final Solution and the profound reality of what he had escaped. He drew strength from their humanity and commitment from their plight. This is a rough draft of the letter he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt:
Linz, Austria
30 July 1945
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,
Enclosed you will find a rather interesting “publication,” if I may call it that. [It was not attached to the draft because my father must have included it with actual letter.] Unfortunately, I could get only these fragments, but it amused me so much that I thought it worthwhile to send it to you.
At the same time, I would like to take the liberty to inform you that, while Polish, Yugoslav, and Italian refugees are generously taken care of, the remnants of the European Jewry are pushed around from camp to camp, with nobody taking any real interest in them. I was even told about some officers stating that we had come a little too early—had we come later we would have had fewer of these Jews to worry about. This, I trust, is not the general attitude of all concerned, but it does reflect a certain trend.
I was also told by some of these poor people, in a camp near Munich, that they had no contact with any American relief organization so far. The same appears to be true in the case of the Salzburg camp. I am telling you all of this in the hope that a reminder from a person of your prestige and standing should prod some of the organizations (whose moral duty it is to look after these unfortunate people) into action.
Respectfully Yours,
M/Sgt. Walter C. Wolff
32908561
H.Q. Documents Center
G-2 USFA /A.P.O. 777
US Army
* * * *
I found no record of a response to his letter, but Eleanor Roosevelt’s undying commitment shows in her speeches before Congress, in her My Day syndicated column, and mostly by the work she did with the UNRRA, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, for which she took a great part in the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights. She wrote, “There is in Europe at the present time a group of 100,000 displaced persons—the miserable, tortured, terrorized Jews who have seen members of their families murdered and their homes ruined, and who are stateless people, since they hate the Germans and no longer wish to live in the countries where they have been despoiled of all that makes life worth living. Naturally, they want to go to Palestine, the one place where they will have a status, where they will feel again that sense of belonging to a community which gives most of us security. President Truman has asked Great Britain for consideration of their condition and permission for their admittance to Palestine . . . It seems to me urgent that these people be given permission to go to the home of their choice. . . . Our consciences can hardly be clear when we read about and see the pictures of these emaciated, miserable people who suffer while we sit comfortably and let them die at the rate of fifty per day—which is what is happening now, I am told. It seems to me imperative, also, that the Senate pass the UNRRA appropriation as rapidly as possible. . . . The need is great.”10
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke publicly several times a week at fundraising events for Refugee and DP organizations in the United States during and after the war mainly through United Jewish Appeal. Later, in the beginning of 1946, she began working on the DP issue through the UN, attending her first session that January and then visiting the Zeilsheim DP Camp directly afterward, in February 1946.
My grandmother was highly critical of the letter to the former First Lady and found it to be naive. My father wrote back that he wasn’t asking for her opinion. He had chosen to send the letter home first in order to avoid the still-prying eyes of the censors, the idea being that his family would then forward it to Eleanor Roosevelt. What Omi failed to understand was that my father—along with every other Jewish soldier and the thirty or so Jewish chaplains in Germany and Austria directly after the war who took part in both the liberation of the camps and the military occupation—were the first American Jews to lay eyes upon the survivors as they made their exodus into the safety of the American Zone of Occupation. They were in the unique position of being the eyes and ears for a world just beginning to understand the extent of the atrocities committed.
In the heading of his letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, the place of writing is given as Linz, which was the site of my father’s new posting. His close working relationship with Captain Lafon came to an abrupt end on Saturday, July 28, while he was preparing for a weekend trip with friends. The man who would become his permanent new commanding officer, Captain Scottie, came to him in Salzburg and declared that later that afternoon he was to leave with him—simply because Captain Scottie needed him. With great regret, my father’s colonel “adjudicated” him to Linz, where there were several DP camps close by and where he would remain for many months. With that, he was forced to abandon not only someone to whom he had become quite close but a very comfortable room in Salzburg, where breakfast was served in bed, and his personally stocked bar with a considerable cache of wine and liqueur that he had yet to dispose of. He had only the uncertain assurance that all of his belongings would be forwarded to him shortly thereafter.
He bid Captain Lafon farewell and headed two hours northeast with Captain Scottie to the city on the Danube where Hitler spent some of his childhood. In fact, with his parents buried in a cemetery in the village of Leonding a short distance away, the Führer considered Linz his hometown, a feather in his Anschluss hat. Hitler’s vision for this city reached far beyond its gray industrial past. It was to become the jewel in his Third Reich crown and a seat of industrial modernization and German Kultur, which was to rival any of the great cities in Europe. He invested enormous time and energy designing new buildings to fulfill his dreams of supremacy in urban planning and architecture to complement his quest for world domination. The new museums and cultural venues were designed to showcase plundered art and artifacts from every occupied country around the globe. Linz was to be the Hitlerite cultural utopia for the leader and chancellor of a modern global empire.
For the Great Dictator to rebuild a city to reflect his ultimate vision, he needed disposable slave laborers to quarry the stone and create building material. The SS brought in political prisoners first and Jews later to build three of the more notorious concentration and hard labor camps in the Linz area. Mauthausen and its subcamp Gusen were top on the list. They were both considered the largest and most ruthless as Level IIIs, “Return Undesirable.” And then there was Ebensee, whose backdrop was the beautiful Lake Traunsee near Gmunden where my father would spend a winter he would never forget. They were all part of a network of camps created to support Hitler’s massive reconstruction effort. Work them, torture them, annihilate them, replace them—all to build, build, build.
At the end of the war, Linz had been left in near total ruin by the Allied bombing campaigns, and the city was
split geopolitically along the Danube by the Nibelungenbrücke Bridge. The Soviet Red Army was on one side of the river, in Urfahr, and the Americans controlled the other side, occupying Linz. Each of the Allied zones was poised to shape a new Austrian government as well as stamp out Nazism. In a race to sell each of the superpowers’ governing styles, Communism was pitted against Democracy. During my father’s first days in Linz, the airwaves overflowed with reports of Russian troops threatening the city. He reported in a letter of August 5, “The Russians have just occupied Urfahr. . . . It caused a panic and an exodus of people with a bad conscience, who in their haste withdrew into our zone. This really moved me, I assure you. These bastards here in Austria and naturally in Germany would like very much to see a war between the USSR and the Allies. For that very reason I’m glad to see the new British government. At the moment we’re listening to the rumor that the Russians will take Linz and we will occupy Urfahr. This caused another panic.”
In fact, my father had to spend a considerable amount of time calming his new girlfriend’s fears, when this five-foot-seven-inch black-haired beauty packed her bags and was ready to flee after she heard the latest news reports. She came from Teschen, on the border between Czechoslovakia and Poland, and understood very clearly what her future held if she had to live under Communism. He explained to her that she should have faith in the British. Besides, they were having way too much fun together for her to leave, and these reports were just rumors and might never come to fruition. My father couldn’t get enough information fast enough and waited anxiously for issues of Time magazine and Stars and Stripes to arrive so he could stay abreast of events and study the situation. In fact, the rumors didn’t pan out. For now, Linz remained part of the American zone, with the demarcation line of the Iron Curtain falling right down the center of Hitler’s one successful addition to the city—the iron and steel bridge spanning the Danube River. His “little friend” from Teschen stayed, and their romance continued.
* * * *
My father sat on the threshold of an old school with one leg crossed over the other, guarding the POWs. The sounds of furniture scraping worn wood floors mixed with the heavy grunts of men whose rank, masculine odor overwhelmed the singular smell of my father’s soap and walnut tobacco. How fantastic it was that this twenty-one-year-old German Jew now sat overseeing men might who under other circumstances would have murdered him. A Mogen David—the yellow star of David—was glued to his gun holster, with (kosher) written over it. He found that a much more forceful reminder of his authority than the weapon the holster contained. It certainly did the job for the man who said of himself, “I am not the killing kind.” The star forced them to face their captor, a Jew. He had survived them.
During the afternoon, one of the Germans approached. His face was red, and where his former rank had been displayed on either side of his gray lapel were a bunch of fraying holes. My father enjoyed a little psychological warfare. He lifted his arm and gave the POW a vigorous “Heil Moses!” and simultaneously clicked his heels.
Sweat darkened the POW’s collar. His armpits were wet in the close August heat. He was one of eighty Wehrmacht and SS prisoners now charged with moving two offices, with all of their files and furniture, from another building close by to this one. Halls that should have been filled with the enthusiastic voices of children were filled instead with the complaints and grunts of hopeless men doing menial labor. The POW stared back at my father and said, “Sergeant, I have carried forty armoires today, und brought each vun up two vlights of shtairz. How can ve do all of zis ven ve are given only vun meal in ze day?”
My father grimaced ever so slightly before he very calmly answered the man in perfectly accented German. “Although regrettable, you do not run the risk of getting a bullet through your head if you are too tired—which would have been the case if the positions of the actors in this game were reversed. Verstehen Sie? HEIL, MOSES!”
With that, my father saluted the former SS officer, abruptly ending the discussion. The others stood by watching this exchange of politesse with their eyes focused on the star positioned at my father’s hip. He then took his lighter out of his pocket, flicked it open, and pushed down hard until metal struck flint and spark turned to flame. He lit a cigarette and exhaled into the room, offering a more subtle form of torture, tobacco envy.
* * * *
My father’s first weeks in Linz were packed to overflowing. The dreary five-story red brick building that had probably been an old school had become the Documents Center where he now worked. It was surrounded by an eight-foot brick wall, just a short walk from the old monastery at the center of the city. His office had a nice view of its spires and looked out onto a small park. Damage from the war was evident in the crumbled buildings off to the side. It was a pleasant day, so he took some more photographs. As he did, he caught sight of Wehrmacht soldiers passing by the center on their way to be interrogated. An impressive sight, prisoners parading along the monolithic wall toward their uncertain futures. One at a time, they would be questioned and vetted to identify war criminals among them.
Soldiers of the defeated Wehrmacht marching toward the Documents Center, Linz, Austria.
In a famous photo of Hitler taken during the last days of the war, he sits like a child, staring intently at a full-scale model of Linz. It was snapped sometime in March 1945, only a few weeks before his suicide. In the background of the photo, just to the right of his cap, are the spires of the monastery that show prominently in a photo my father took of the entrance to what became the Documents Center just seven months later.
They were a group of eight: three NCOs, four officers, and a charming blonde who worked at the “desk” facing his. His job was to inventory sacks of documents and stamp them with date of receipt and their provenance. Within a couple of weeks of his arrival in Linz, my father became the chief of his department, the name of which, for whatever reason, he fails mention in his letters. POWs and other soldiers did the physical work, and he oversaw their duties along with his lieutenant, whom he referred to as “a pedantic idiot.” The man ran around like a chicken with his head cut off, coming in and out of the office with such frequency he was more disruptive than a good manager. Not one to keep his dissatisfaction a secret, my father eventually spoke to his captain, a man named Bodenheimer, who confided to him that he would have peace and quiet very shortly because my father was going to be given complete control over the department. He had great rapport with his captain. They had a lot in common. They were both German Jews who had escaped and lived in New York. The captain was originally from Frankfurt, about an hour away from where my father was born, in Koblenz.
Enemy documents to be sorted, Linz, 1945.
Meanwhile, geopolitical conflict continued to play out on the world stage. In Western Europe, the Russians posed one threat, and in the Pacific, the Japanese war machine would not give in to the Allies. While my father read and chatted with friends over Sunday brunch, Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. The bomb’s vaporizing power instantly killed and maimed over one half of the population of the city as it exploded before ever hitting the ground. Three days later, the Japanese would still not surrender, so President Truman ordered “Fat Man,” a bomb three times the size of “Little Boy,” to be dropped on Nagasaki. On August 8, with almost a quarter of a million dead or wounded and suffering from radiation poisoning, the Japanese were left with no choice but to surrender to the Allies. The Russians had declared war on Japan for failure to follow the tenets laid out in the Potsdam Agreement. The Soviets were after the eastern ports, and declaration of war allowed them time to secure strongholds in the warm waters of the Pacific.
With no particular interest in what he was doing, my father was more often than not bored with the exigencies of tasks he felt were better left to others. He had other things weighing on his mind that he wished to accomplish during his short window of time in Europe:
Linz
August 5th, 1945
&nb
sp; My Dears,
. . . We can now go into Switzerland. You have a fairly complicated account there that does not accrue the maximum amount of interest in its present form. If you write, Chère Mamo, and you, Cher Papo, each of you to the bank, informing them that I have full power to do something in your name, I could transfer this account in a relatively short amount of time to the United States, where we can make the money work for us. How? It’s simple:
1. The soldiers entering into Switzerland have the right to carry only 35 Swiss francs—to spend. As you know, this is nothing in Switzerland—especially if one has the intention of buying a watch or something of that sort. I had the idea of selling some checks from this account, taking in exchange bank checks from American banks or “postal money orders.” To protect myself against rubber checks, I have the name and number of the soldier or officer—and in the army one can always track someone down. I personally know many officers and soldiers who will be very interested.
2. I could buy, in gross, Swiss-made watches—and they tell me that there is an abundance, and I can import them for you in the US.
I intend to go to Switzerland this winter. Not on “Cook’s tour” as you would imagine—I prefer to travel solo (and I detest organized activities). They promised a furlough soon. I will go to Paris and then to Brussels or visa versa. I want to see the city, see if our things are still there and settle a little account with Mme. Jadoule (unless someone has already done that). I never forget!
The guys here are not terribly interesting. I spend most of my time with two Jews from Russia. The rest with few exceptions are German—Jews and Goyem. A few of the Goyem are prototypically “Bundiste”—and the Jews are Germans who, with two or three exceptions, get on my nerves. The officers are pretty much of the same caliber or worse. The CO is of Italian origin. He’s a good boy—but that’s it; the “exec” (his assistant) is nice. The other German Jews tend to pass their time discussing subjects of no importance in a language that contains elements of English. They sometimes forget that they’re not in the German army and want to “play” officer. One of these gentlemen, by the name of Wolfsohn, of French origin, naturally, declared and I quote: “Ai ehm echehmed to bee a Tchewe, etc.” Unfortunately, I was not present. Two of our other heroes were at Ghedi when I had that little “discussion” with the commander. They keep their distance from me—It is really interesting to see how a little “show of force” rests in people’s memories.
Someday You Will Understand Page 19
