Someday You Will Understand

by Nina Wolff Feld

  Although there have been no large scale actions by enemy resistance forces, such organizations are being assembled in towns and villages, under various guises. In Upper Austria and Salzburg for instance, insignias representing an Edelweiss, made of barbed wire from the American concentration camp for Nazis, are being distributed, and are openly worn. They are manufactured by the inmates of the above mentioned concentration camp; upon close inspection a swastika is plainly visible, as formed by the leaves of the flower. Many instances of discrimination against genuine Anti-Nazis on the part of the US appointed officials and the local populations are given. In other words, it really doesn’t pay to be an Anti-Nazi these days, since the US administration make few attempts to support its real friends. It appears that it has become the unofficial policy of our forces to support the Christian Social Party, which I have described before. The Social-Democrats, about as red as our New-Deal Democrats, are actually shunned, but they are really the middle road party which we should encourage.

  If another attempt at establishing Democracy on the Danube fails—and it surely will unless we radically change our methods—we have nobody but ourselves to blame; we certainly did little more than arrest most of the well-known Nazis, but not all, and to intern hundreds of unimportant and inoffensive small-fry.

  After almost a year of occupation we have not established policy covering all the exigencies of the situation, providing adequate punitive measures, scaled uniformly according to the seriousness of the crime. If we are to improve our administration, it is imperative the MG, MIS, and CIC receive carefully selected and well-trained personnel—and soon.

  Yours Truly, Walter C. Wolff

  Acknowledgments

  It has taken a village to write this book, and I have been incredibly fortunate, from the beginning, to have received encouragement and support from people across the globe who wanted this story to become part of the vast archive of Holocaust writing.

  To my mother, Lila Wolff, whose love and devotion to me and to my father is endless, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are an example to us all, and I love you. I am so proud to call you a friend and a role model.

  I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to Isabella Pia Ayoub, who urged me from the moment she heard about it, to go through that dusty green box carefully because in it lay my greatest inheritance. You encouraged me to move mountains to accomplish my goal. By continually raising the bar, you have given me the confidence to believe in myself and surpass my own expectations. You, my friend, refine my broad strokes. Thank you for reopening my creative soul and giving me the time and the space to use every tool in my toolbox, and for listening to and reading every sentence of this book, often while we were separated by an ocean of time zones. Our friendship is a sisterhood replete with the beautiful sounds of laughter, tears, children, and enough stories to fill volumes. I cannot think of anyone whom I would rather have by my side and whose boundless love and esteem for my parents helped bring this project to life.

  To Jennifer Lyons, who brought me to Arcade and did not give up until we found a home for the manuscript.

  To my editor, Cal Barksdale, who gave this book its ultimate shape and whose guidance allowed the story to flow so that my father’s voice could be heard. Thank you for taking a chance on this project.

  To Rhoda Fiedler and Shelley Fiedler for taking the bull by the horns and championing this project from the start.

  To my closest family, friends, and allies who have listened patiently whenever I asked to read to them. Thank you.

  To my father’s first cousin, Doris Wolff Bendheim, and family friend Gerda Preuss, who lived through that perilous time and have known my family intimately since they were children in the 1920s. Thank you for giving veracity to my words by sharing and reliving your memories to confirm details about your surroundings before and during the war.

  To Roberta Haselkorn for listening and actively promoting me from the beginning. Thank you.

  To my first literary agent, Rosalie Siegel, who somehow knew at “hello” and has been a pillar of support ever since.

  To the many scholars who have taken the time to answer my queries and given their time and energy to a novice, but specifically to professors and authors Volker Berghahn, the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, who took an early interest in this manuscript and opened a world of knowledge to me; Anne Nelson, professor in New Media and Development Communication at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA); Atina Grossman, Modern European and German History, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Cooper Union; Dr. Frank Mecklenburg, director of Research, chief archivist at the Leo Baeck Institute; Dr. Guy Stern, Ph.D., distinguished professor emeritus at Wayne State University; and the many scholars at USHMM, thank you.

  To the staff at Apple, in particular Seth Bengelsdorf and Matt Forte, who almost fell over when they saw the collection of letters in the archive, and to all of the Creatives at Apple who guided me so beautifully through the technical aspects of building this project.

  I also want to thank the teachers and students who invited me to take part in their Holocaust Education programs at middle and high schools all over New York City. Their enthusiasm, questions, and letters after my speeches are a continuous source of inspiration.

  And to my cousin, Alan Kaufman, who has endeared himself to me forever for lending his ears and his heart while we searched for a home for this book.

  Notes

  1. On January 1, 1942, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, Maxim Litvinov of the USSR, and T. V. Soong of China signed a short document that evolved into what became known as the United Nations Declaration, committing the signatory governments to the maximum war effort and binding them against making a separate peace. Representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures the following day. https://www.un.org/en/aboutun/charter/history/declaration.shtml.

  2. During World Wars I and II, “square heads” was a disparaging slang term used to describe Germans, especially German soldiers.

  3. Two years before my father’s pledge, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Congress changed the original stiff-arm salute to the raised hand or hand over heart gesture. Prewar photographs show American schoolchildren and adults—including some saluting Roosevelt—looking like Fascists with their arm outstretched, the gestures were so similar.

  4. National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov.

  5. Alois Schicklgruber was the name of Hitler’s father. Adolf was his bastard child born out of wedlock. His mother remarried a miller with the last name Heidler. After she died, the young Hitler was sent to live with his stepfather’s uncle for unknown reasons. He later took his adopted father’s name Heidler, which was misspelled on a legal document, resulting in the name Hitler.

  6. Sh’erit ha-Pletah, Hebrew for “Surviving Remnant,” is a biblical term that originally referred to the Jews who survived and remained in Jerusalem after the destruction of the temple. The Jewish Displaced People came to refer to themselves this way after their liberation from the concentration camps in 1945.

  7. HICEM resulted from the merger of three Jewish migration associations: New York–based HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society); JCA (Jewish Colonization Association), which was based in Paris but registered as a British charitable society; and Emigdirect (United Jewish Emigration Committee), a migration organization based in Berlin. HICEM is an acronym of these organizations’ names. The agreement between the three organizations stipulated that all local branches outside the United States would merge into HICEM, while HIAS would still deal with Jewish immigration to the US. However, Emigdirect was forced to withdraw from the merger in 1934, and British wartime regulations later restricted the JCA from using its funds outside Britain. Thus, for a while, HICEM was funded exclusively by HIAS and could be considered as its European extension. (Wikipedia)

  8. In her book Jews, Germans, and Allies, Atina Grossmann states: “Already dur
ing the war, before the scope of the Final Solution was fully understood, Jewish officials had warned UNRRA that a ‘great number of people,’ of whom the ‘overwhelming majority would be the Jews,’ who had been ‘deported or expelled to foreign countries and also many of those displaced within their own country would be unable or unwilling to be repatriated.’ . . . For the most part, however, the Allies did not specifically focus on the Jews, assuming that they would be few in number.” See Attina Grossman, Jews, Germans, and Allies (Princeton University Press, 2007), p.133.

  9. Just weeks before he died, President Roosevelt appointed Earl Harrison as the US representative on the Intergovernmental Commission on Refugees. In June 1945, President Truman sent him to perform an inspection of the DP camps. In what came to be called the Harrison Report, which was submitted to Truman, Harrison clearly stated that the deplorable conditions he found on his tour of the DP camps warranted that a separate and distinct category be created for the Jews, who had suffered so greatly at the hands of the Nazi regime. Because of Harrison’s findings, President Truman took a much more active role in supporting improved conditions and separate DP camps for surviving Jews, as well as a more liberal immigration policy in favor of the DPs. Changes were slow, though, and they didn’t occur until the Truman Directive was issued the following December. In his directive, the president said, “The pressing need . . . is to act now in a way that will produce immediate and tangible results. I hope that by early spring. . . immigration can begin immediately. . . . I am informed that there are various measures now pending before the Congress which would either prohibit or severely reduce further immigration. I hope that such legislation will not be passed. This period of unspeakable human distress is not the time for us to close or to narrow our gates. I wish to emphasize, however, that any effort to bring relief to these displaced persons and refugees must and will be strictly within the limits of the present quotas as imposed by law. The attached directive has been issued by me to the responsible Government agencies to carry out this policy. . . . This is the opportunity for America to set an example for the rest of the world in cooperation toward alleviating human misery.” His executive order did not substantially help immigration to the United States, but more Jews were admitted than before.See https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/truman_on_dps.html.

  10. From the My Day Project, November 7, 1945. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project is a university-chartered research center associated with the Department of History of George Washington University.

  11. That prayer is at the root of anti-Semitism. It has been argued time and again that Jews are not to be trusted because the prayer is a loophole through which contracts are broken and obligations not met. It is, on the face of it, exactly that; however it has to do with breaking a personal obligation and prepares the soul for the coming year by giving it a clean slate. Paradoxically, Beethoven was inspired by Jewish liturgical music, and the melody from Kol Nidre inspired him to write a few bars of it into his String Quartet in C Minor. Hitler’s love for inspirational music led him to listen to Beethoven and send his troops into battle listening to the Ninth Symphony in particular to raise their morale.

  12. Mrs. Rosenthal is referring to the report by Earl G. Harrison, the man appointed by President Truman to look into the condition of the Jewish DPs at the camps.

  13. Nicknamed “The Voice of Doom,” Gabriel Heatter was a famous radio announcer whose dramatic broadcasts during World War II always started with, “There’s good news tonight . . . ,” offering optimism to boost the listeners’ morale before delivering the devastating war news that often followed.

  14. Gerichtskasse: German term for a court’s cashier office.

  15. UNRRA: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for repatriation and support of refugees under Allied control after the end of World War II. Among their responsibilities was relief coordination at camps housing displaced people.

  16. Bindermichl was a Displaced Persons camp located in a suburb of Linz in Austria, in the American zone.

  17. While serving under General Eisenhower as military commander of Bavaria, General Patton, during an interview with American journalists, declared that there was too much attention being paid to denazification and made light of the situation by comparing the Nazi party’s loss to that of a loss between the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States. After he was formally reprimanded by Eisenhower for making those comments, Patton assured the president that he would uphold the Potsdam Agreement in which the Allies agreed to eliminate Nazism in all of its forms from German life. Ten days later Patton was removed from his command of the Third Army. Just two months later in December, General Patton was killed in an automobile crash that many have speculated was not an accident.

  18. American Jewish Chaplains and the Shearit Hapletah: April–June 1945 by Alex Grobman. “The chaplains were American military personnel who were among the first Jews from the United States to meet survivors.”

  19. The Zebra Club was an exclusive club for personnel with three stripes or more, or as my father put it, “Upper 3 Graders Club.”

  20. Parigot is slang for “a French person from Paris.”

  21. The Difficulties of Mr. Hofmannsthal, a comedy about Austrian aristocracy.

  22. General John C. Lee was known as Jesus Christ Himself both because of his initials and his highly egotistical nature combined with an intense religious fervor. The general was the first person to go against army segregation policy, offering all physically fit African American soldiers in the Services Supply Corps a chance normally given to otherwise white divisions in the infantry during World War II. “Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, General Eisenhower’s deputy commander, ETO, provided a perfect solution when he suggested using the African American servicemen in the theater as volunteer infantry replacements. Since African American soldiers were already in the ETO in service units, and seemingly under-utilized, Lee theorized that these men were a solution to the Army manpower dilemma. Lieutenant General Lee invited ‘a limited number of colored troops who have had infantry training’ to accept ‘the privilege of joining our veteran units at the front,’ allowing the men the opportunity to ‘fight shoulder to shoulder to bring about victory.’” US Army Center For Military History, http://www.history.army.mil/html/topics/afam/aa-volinfreps.html.

  23. While I completed the research for this book at Columbia University and we were discussing Paris one day, my mother made note of something quite curious about the large apartment overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, where her cousins Marie and Nathan Lévitan lived. On a family visit in 1968 when we were invited to lunch, she complimented Marie on her stylishly appointed living room at their flat on Rue de Franqueville. It reminded her of Radio City Music Hall. As she looked around, she commented on her exquisite taste in Art Deco furniture and the wonderful view from her window. Flattered, Marie disclosed that behind the perfect veneer of their home was a more suspect past. During the war, a German general took possession of the apartment after the family’s escape. When the Lévitans returned after liberation, in August of 1944, they found their home in perfect condition; not a thing was missing. This was odd, because during Möbel Aktion, under the auspices of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis systematically emptied upwards of 38,000 Jewish homes in occupied Paris alone. They looted everything from art to cultural artifacts to furniture and musical instruments, including thousands of pianos. Marie elaborated that before his escape, the general gave specific orders that the contents of the apartment be left alone. Before the war, the Lévitans had an Austrian cook who worked for them and who remained in the service of the general during the war. She must have been some cook if he ordered the apartment to be left untouched!

  Although the general’s name is lost to history, another fascinating detail surfaced that until recently remained one of Paris’ great secrets. The Lévitans owned a famous furniture store chain whose motto was “Un meuble signé Lévitan est garanti pour longtemps” (A
piece of furniture made by the Lévitans is guaranteed for a long time). It was furniture for the laboring classes. During the occupation, French radio was taken over by the Vichy government and Radio Paris became a propaganda vehicle. People all over France, including my father, turned to the BBC on their short-wave radios for real news. The BBC broadcast in French and took advertising slogans like the Lévitan ditty and changed the words to, “Le triomphe des Allemands n’est pas garanti pour longtemps” (German victory is not guaranteed for long).

  Behind the façade of a city under siege was an outpost of the notorious concentration camp, Drancy. The Nazis requisitioned the Lévitan building located on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin and turned it into an internment camp for people of mixed “racial” origin from 1943 to 1944. It became a slave labor camp in the heart of the city, where hundreds of internees “were made to sort, clean, repair and pack furniture and other objects of value that had been methodically looted by the Germans from tens of thousands of Jewish apartments in the occupied zone of northern France . . . sent off by the trainload to Germany,” according to the Glasgow Herald, October 23, 1940. The first priority for the stolen property during Möbel Aktion was given to military and Nazi hierarchy who often came to shop at the warehouse as if they were shopping at a department store, while the rest was distributed to German civilians as a means to compensate them for losses incurred by Allied bombings or to help raise money needed to immigrate to the Reich’s newly acquired territories. Even though conditions were somewhat better than at Drancy, they were still deplorable. Internees were permitted the occasional visitor, packages were allowed to be delivered or could even send mail, but prisoners rarely saw the light of day, and discipline was harsh. Many were eventually deported to other concentration camps and exterminated. After the occupation, the building was returned to the family and its past was hidden under layers of grime and old paint, until a recent renovation uncovered clues. That is when noted historian, and my distant cousin, Jean-Marc Dreyfus approached the building’s new owners and told them of its sordid past. The new home of Paris’ largest advertising agency was once Lager Ost-Lévitan.