Defying the Nazis

by Artemis Joukowsky

  The rest of the typewritten letter reflects how quickly the two men had come to trust and rely upon one another. “We have had no news from you so far,” Fry continued,

  and so we have no information about developments in Lisbon. I have asked Mr. Aisenberg, who brings this letter, to speak to you about this. We are naturally all very eager to have news of our friends, for living in France today is rather like living on the moon.

  I am also asking my people in New York to authorize you to give out relief funds to anyone on our lists who is in need there. Persons of Hebraic origin may of course be referred to HICEM and it is better that they should be, for our funds are very limited. But I am counting on you to take care of the others. I hope you will also keep New York informed by frequent letters, such as I wrote before I left Lisbon. I am also asking New York to get a man to Lisbon as quickly as possible; so that there will be someone to replace you when you have to leave.

  Good luck. Give my warmest regards to the Riesers, and tell them that I hope their relatives will soon be with them. Yours most warmly, Varian Fry.

  By the time Fry left Lisbon, his list of people to be rescued had swelled to perhaps as many as three thousand. With Waitstill—and then with the Rev. Charles Joy, who replaced the Sharps in August as his liaison in Lisbon—Fry would spend thirteen months directing a bold, high-risk, and much-celebrated refugee-smuggling operation in the south of France that included an all-star cast of Kulturträgers, among them artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, writer André Breton, and philosopher Hannah Arendt.

  In early August, Waitstill also heard once more from Robert Dexter, who telegrammed that Ernest Swift, a US Red Cross official, had complained to him by letter that with the milk shipment the Unitarians were wandering onto Red Cross turf. “It seems to me and to Mr. Gano, with whom I talked after receiving this letter,” Dexter went on, “that we must not tangle things up by going into relief, and particularly the sending of goods. You ought to be able to arrange to use Red Cross supplies or any others that are available, but we will get both you and ourselves in trouble if we attempt to ship goods.... I am sure that it was only because you saw the urgent need that you went into the relief business, but hope you can straighten things out with the Red Cross, and that we won’t have to do it again. Also, I do not see any way by which we could ship much in the way of supplies without crippling our other work.”

  Waitstill wrote back in exasperation, reminding Dexter, “Martha and I came over on this commission with the clear understanding that we held a roving commission. Over and over it was said, ‘We will back you in whatever you decide is the best course of action on the spot.’ The general idea is that we began where the Red Cross left off, with services of a personal nature AND with the material relief which the Red Cross was unable to administer. AND THAT IS PRECISELY JUST WHAT WE HAVE DONE, if both you and Swift will let up on the anvil chorus long enough to learn the facts.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Milk Arrives

  Martha spent the first weeks of August 1940 working in Pau and surrounding villages with Helen Lowrie to prepare for the arrival and distribution of the milk. The more time Martha spent among the French villagers, the more deeply she understood how acute their children’s plight truly was. At the time, the local weekly milk ration was one-half liter per family, when available, no matter the number of children to be fed. Many of the refugee children received no milk at all.

  Nor were their medical problems confined to malnutrition. In one clinic, she later recalled seeing “a boy with a shattered knee, a premature baby in an incubator and another child, found just the day before, abandoned. He was covered with eczema from head to foot.” A case of typhoid was diagnosed in nearby Oloron during her visit.

  Martha’s conversation with Percival Brundage was never far from her mind. When she began to ask, informally, if French parents in the area would support the idea of sending their children to the United States for the duration, she was referred to Madame Hyacinthe Loyson, head of a Protestant women’s auxiliary, who was herself a refugee in Montauban, north of Toulouse, along with a daughter and granddaughter.

  Martha wrote Loyson of her interest in taking French children to America. On the morning of August 15, they met together over coffee. “She showed me the letter she had sent to all the French Protestant women leaders,” Martha wrote. “I was surprised that she had broadcast what was a simple request on my part without sending me a copy. Fortunately, she had not included too many details. But when I saw the piles of replies, and read the queries of anxious parents she had received in response, I knew that giving United States hospitality to French children for the duration of the war was a vital and necessary program which many French parents felt would be a godsend.”

  Martha met later in the day with pasteur Marc Boegner, de facto leader of French Protestants, who worked tirelessly to rescue Jews, particularly Jewish children. The minister strongly urged Martha to take as many French children as possible to the United States.

  “He was especially worried about the plight of some of his outspoken young ministers who had been arrested and imprisoned for preaching resistance,” she remembered. “He asked me if I thought we could accept emigration for the children of these leaders fighting totalitarianism from the pulpit. Their emigration would free the children from persecution and potential starvation and would lessen their fathers’ sense of guilt for their plight.”

  Martha left the meeting determined to push ahead with a children’s emigration program. But with her long-range objectives now settled, she was increasingly alarmed about the present. Communications between Pau and Lisbon suddenly and mysteriously stopped cold. Day after day she wrote and cabled Waitstill and heard nothing in reply. He, meanwhile, was writing and cabling her as well, with the same results. Nothing was moving in either direction.

  There were multiple causes. The Germans capriciously held up all outgoing mail from the Pau post office in order to destroy its time value to any potential foe. More generally, there was an unexplained weeklong interruption in cable traffic between France and Portugal. Not knowing any of this at the time, Waitstill glowered and seethed while Martha fell into a chronic state of panic that gradually deepened until August 18, when mail from Lisbon finally caught up with her in Toulouse. It was, she recalled, a bittersweet moment.

  The first letter from Waitstill brought the first news of any kind from home, and so Martha at last learned how Martha Content had developed a badly infected throat requiring a tonsillectomy more than three weeks earlier. “My first impulse,” she said, “was to leave France at once to reach my daughter’s beside. I called the US consulate in Toulouse to get their advice on how long it would take to get visas for Spain and Portugal. They replied that visas were possible, but the French frontier again was indefinitely closed. Nobody could leave France.

  “Then I read the date on my husband’s letter. It had taken fourteen days to arrive! I thought, Martha Content must already have had the operation. She must be better, or somehow I would know.”

  She cabled Waitstill at once, asking for news. She felt helpless and perhaps a bit guilty but comforted by the fact that the child was in good hands.

  Three days later, the much-delayed milk shipment finally arrived in Pau.

  “Thanks to American generosity, our babies will not lack milk!” announced Le Patrie des Pyrenees, largest of the local newspapers, in its August 23 edition. The paper described a grand ceremony in Pau presided over by the local prefect, or police chief, as well as the mayor and numerous other dignitaries. “In symbolic recognition of the participation of the mayor,” Le Patrie reported, “Madame Sharp expressed in the purest French, and in a most eloquent manner, the profound feelings of affection that unite the great American people with the great people of France.”

  In all, the twelve tons of condensed milk and milk products that Martha and Waitstill brought to the lower Pyrenees would feed eight hundred babies and toddlers for about two months. Beer
trucks were used to haul the precious cargo from the railhead to its various destinations.

  Martha had sent a full description of the needs for milk that she and Helen had documented to Malcolm Davis in Geneva. In response, Davis said that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was shipping seven more carloads of milk to southern France, and he indicated that more would come. Martha believed all her life that the children of the Basses Pyrenees received monthly deliveries of milk for the duration of World War II. Tragically, that was not the case. It is possible that there were sporadic shipments to the area, perhaps from supply ships like the McKeesport—at least until November 1942, when the unoccupied zone came under Nazi control. There is no evidence, however, of regular Red Cross deliveries. Records of the ICRC in Geneva paint a cruel and depressing picture of the relief situation. ICRC efforts to get supplies to starving civilian populations met the harsh resistance of the military on both sides. The ICRC shipped just over 280 tons of milk to all of France for the balance of 1940, Davis’s seven carloads presumably among them, and four million liters of milk, total, over the next four years of fighting. The supply did not begin to meet the need.2

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Refugees’ Odyssey

  In Lisbon, Waitstill’s world was about to become considerably more complex. As he later recounted, Erika Mann paid him a surprise visit one day with news that her uncle, Heinrich, sixty-nine, and her thirty-one-year-old brother, Gottfried, known as Golo, were hiding from the Nazis in the vicinity of Nice. Also with them, Erika said, was Nelly Kroeger, forty-one, Heinrich’s longtime companion, whom he’d married the previous year. Nowhere in his surviving papers does Waitstill mention when he learned that Heinrich and Nelly in fact already had made their way from Nice to the Hotel Normandie in Marseille, and that Golo was hiding in the villa of Hiram (known as Harry) Bingham IV, the US vice consul in Marseille.

  Though not a Jew, 1929 Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain) was as prominent as any of the literary Kulturträgers. The Thomas Mann Societies in Europe, such as the one J. B. Kozak chaired in Prague, led the intellectual resistance to Hitler. Mann’s older brother, Heinrich, was also a leading antifascist. With the rise of Hitler, he fled first to Prague and then to Nice, with his new wife and nephew.

  According to Waitstill, the meeting with Ericka Mann fundamentally reordered his priorities, yet at the same time he deeply yearned for home. When Dr. William Emerson, chairman of the Unitarian Service Committee, inquired whether he and Martha would consider extending their stay in Europe, Sharp declined emphatically. “We feel we must come home now,” he wrote Emerson on August 16.

  Our little daughter was seriously ill this July with a streptococcus throat which will necessitate a tonsillectomy. She has never been a strong child and must have her mother’s constant care during this coming winter.

  That rules Mrs. Sharp definitely out of a return to Europe. Before we parted she said that she was returning for good on September 19. Our son needs both of us for his guidance. And thirdly, there is my church at Wellesley Hills which I am most loath to leave at this time with my full service not rendered there so far. If this decision were coming before me at the end of say a ten-year pastorate, I might much more easily break the very happy pastoral connection than I am able now. Fourthly, I do not wish to live for a winter in Europe separated from my wife and children.

  As sincere as Waitstill was in his determination to get home with Martha according to schedule, fortune was about to intervene.

  The Werfels and the Manns presented a novel and complex set of challenges. All five were “hot,” in Waitstill’s term, and in clear peril of arrest and deportation to Nazi concentration camps if they weren’t able to escape. Helping them also entailed major risks.

  Then arose another complication in the person of the popular German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, fifty-five, who in the summer of 1940 was at the top of the Gestapo’s hit list. “Now, he’s a Jew and anti-Nazi,” noted Holocaust scholar Mordecai Paldiel, “so when the Germans entered France they really wanted to lay their hands on him so Feuchtwanger was quite in jeopardy.”1 He was, according to historian Deborah Dwork, on “a list of German-Jewish refugees they wanted to incarcerate. The clock was ticking.”2 In 1933, the Nazis had burned all available copies of Feuchtwanger’s books. He had earned the Reich’s undying enmity in February of that year with a speech at the Hotel Commodore—later birthplace of the ERC—where he satirically disparaged Hitler’s prison manifesto, Mein Kampf, as a 140,000-word mess containing 140,000 mistakes. “To speak with absolute exactness,” he told his audience, “the book contains 139,900 mistakes. For, in the earliest editions, there were about a hundred words which were quite correct both as to subject and form.”3

  A month later, storm troopers raided the writer’s Berlin residence, ransacking the place. They stole documents and an unfinished manuscript, and even drove off with his car.4

  The Feuchtwangers, like many of the Nazis’ opponents, did not foresee how fast and far Fascism would spread. Instead of departing for the United States or Latin America and safety, they chose to join many like-minded friends, colleagues, and coreligionists in Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of France, where they expected to wait out the madness in Germany in safety. By the summer of 1940 it was clear that none of them had run far enough.

  In 1939, panicky French officials rounded up thousands of stateless aliens, including Feuchtwanger, and sent them to detention camps. In his case, that was a derelict brickyard in the village of Les Mille, near Aix-en-Provence. Although the writer was quickly released with apologies from the government, which explained that there had been a mistake in his case, it was clear to Feuchtwanger that the French were at best deeply ambivalent toward prominent German antifascists. Anger and disappointment quickly shaded to dread, however, when without explanation he was refused an exit visa.

  On April 9, 1940, Feuchtwanger learned from radio newscasts that the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway. In May, after the Panzers rolled into the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France, he wrote, “I was alone, listening to the news reports. Things did not look good either in Belgium or in the Netherlands.... Suddenly, the following came: All German nationals ... men and women alike, and all persons between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five who were born in Germany but are without German citizenship, are to report for internment.’”

  On May 21, Feuchtwanger reentered the camp at Les Mille as prisoner No. 187. His wife, Marta, reported to the women’s camp in Gurs.

  The brickyard at Les Mille was “indescribably ugly,” he wrote in The Devil in France, a memoir of 1940, comprising “two buildings surrounded by earthworks and brick walls inside a barbed wire fence on which the detainees, anywhere from one to three thousand men, customarily hung their wash.”

  The facility was crowded and filthy, was covered in brick dust, and stunk of excrement. By day, the men were required to haul the crumbling bricks around the open yard, stacking and restacking them to no purpose. At night, they slept on the second floor of the main building in a bare room lined with brick racks made of lathes. “We were given a little straw for our bedding,” Feuchtwanger wrote, “and the rest was left to us. There were no chairs, no benches, no tables, nothing but piles of defective bricks. Out of these we tried to build seats and tables, but they would always fall apart.”

  Potable water was scarce (only a single faucet in the camp was safe to drink from), diseases such as dysentery were chronic, and not a few of the older detainees (some in their seventies) fairly quickly descended into various stages of dementia.

  Feuchtwanger spent about a month at Les Mille, each day more dreadful than the previous one, as the Germans continued their push south. Unaware that the Nazis would momentarily halt at the Loire River, leaving the south of France unoccupied and under nominal Vichy control until November of 1942, he and all the rest of the antifascists in the camp expected advance units of the Wehrmacht to ma
rch into Les Mille, round them up, and either shoot them on the spot or ship them back to Germany for imprisonment and execution.

  Walter Hasenclever, the German expressionist writer, finally broke under the strain. On Saturday, June 22, the day the German-French Armistice was signed—and two days after Martha and Waitstill first landed in Lisbon—Hasenclever apparently “took his own life with an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal so as not to fall into the hands of the Nazis” at Les Mille, just hours before a French freight train arrived at the camp to take internees who were at highest risk to an allegedly safer camp. After an interminable, “hideous, torturing trip,” as Feuchtwanger described it, he and the others were deposited at their new home, “San Nicola,” an abandoned farm near Nimes.

  He was tempted to escape; getting away would be relatively easy. Yet the writer also knew that to be caught by the regular French police with no identification papers or travel passes meant an immediate and probably lengthy stay in a regular jail or prison, where the risks were even higher.

  Marta meanwhile was all right, considering the rigors of camp life in Gurs, and had returned to their house in Sanary. She had slipped away from Gurs by creeping under a fence. She knew Lion had been moved, but had no idea where. By the middle of July, discreet inquiry finally led Marta to Lion at San Nicola, where she found him, racked by dysentery. She stayed with him for several days. In the meanwhile, a scheme to rescue them both was beginning to take shape.