The next day, Waitstill recalled, “Lion Feuchtwanger appeared just before the gangplank was going to be lifted, and walked those last steps on European soil. His wife stepped forward, threw her arms around him, said some words of endearment and farewell, and they parted, a pair of stoics. And that ended my tour of duty.”
Aboard ship, finally safe, Feuchtwanger asked Waitstill a question that had been on his mind for several weeks.
“Mr. Sharp,” he said, “I am a novelist. I am more interested in human motivation than any other question. Why do people do what they do? May I address you as though you were a character in one of my novels and ask, Why are you here doing what you are doing? How much are you paid per carcass? Is there a payoff from some agency?”
“Not one escudo, Mr. Feuchtwanger,” Waitstill answered.
“Are you paid a large salary, then, because this is dangerous, difficult, exacting work?”
“I’m not paid a salary at all. I am a Unitarian minister. My salary to maintain my wife and my two children and my home is paid for by my church.”
Waitstill then explained the missions to Czechoslovakia and France. “And now I’m getting out you Kulturträgers,” he said.
Feuchtwanger said he didn’t often encounter such altruism.
“I’m not a saint,” Waitstill answered. “I’m capable of any of the many sins of human nature. But I believe the will of God is to be interpreted by the liberty of the human spirit. So I do what I do without any piety at all but ad magna gloria libertatis humani spiriti.” (To greater glory, freedom of the human spirit.)
“Well, this is a surprising answer,” said Feuchtwanger. “You get enough reward out of that?”
“Yes, I do,” Waitstill answered. “As my friend Dick Ball said, ‘I don’t like to see guys pushed around.’”4 (Waitstill had to explain the terms “guys” to Feuchtwanger, who nodded his understanding.)
“I hate it,” Feuchtwanger agreed, “and I’m going to do whatever I can to stop it and to sustain freedom, by which you mean the liberty of the human spirit.”
At the conclusion of an uneventful voyage, the Excalibur docked in New York on October 5. Waitstill recalled mixed emotions. “Finally, we arrived in New York Harbor, steamed past the Statue of Liberty, and it had never meant as much to me as it did then. But my elation was short-lived. I knew that Martha was still in peril. How would I tell our children that their mother hadn’t come home?”
After seeing off her husband at the dock, Marta Feuchtwanger made her way immediately to Estoril, where she went in search of the grandest hotel, correctly assuming that this was where she’d find the Werfels in residence. Marta had but five or six dollars total and was in need of help.
On the way, she also had her single serious encounter with the authorities. Walking along an estuary in the afternoon heat, Marta stripped down to her two-piece bathing suit and dove in. A local policeman noticed and was waiting for her when she climbed out of the water.
“He said it [was] a crime against public morals to wear a two-piece French bathing suit. He had to arrest me. I spoke a little French and a little Spanish. I asked, ‘Is there a fine?”’
She thought the policeman said yes, and she tried to hand him her few dollars, which he refused. Instead, he instructed Marta to appear at the nearby courthouse.
Meantime, she found the Werfels, strolling together. When Marta explained her predicament, Alma reached into her stocking and produced sufficient cash for her to book a steamer to New York.
Then Frau Feuchtwanger headed for the courthouse, where she convinced the Portuguese authorities that the policeman was mistaken—she had not meant to bribe him. It was a minor misunderstanding but one that might have had cataclysmic consequences for her. “I wasn’t afraid to go to jail,” she later said, “but that they would send me back to Germany again.”
She rejoined her husband in New York two weeks later.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Children’s Journey
In late August, before her reunion with Waitstill, Martha had composed a letter to Hastings to explain why she would be staying in France a while longer. She was recording, as well, her own rationale for prolonging her absence from him and Martha Content for yet another extended period of time.
“I have some very important news for you,” she wrote.
Here in France today the children do not have enough food. They do not have enough milk. There is not enough soap left to wash the clothes. I have seen no butter since I came here in July. There is no chocolate. There is not enough wool to make them sweaters and there are no more factories making woolen cloth to make trousers and skirts—and there is no coal to heat the houses for the winter.
So the children will be hungry and very cold and some of them will be sick. These children would like to have good food and warm houses. Some families in America are inviting these children to come to spend a year or so with them in their homes. They must come soon before winter, so I am going to wait until I can arrange for them and bring them to America myself. This means that I shall not return home with Dad. I must wait until I can make all the arrangements for the children. So I must give up seeing you until about your birthday! Then what a celebration we will have!
She signed the note, “Lovingly, Mommy.”
The children’s emigration project had seemed well on its way just three days earlier, when Martha was notified that fifty blanket immigration visas, which the US State Department originally had earmarked for British children, had been redesignated for French children and soon would be available to her at the consulate in Marseille.
In fact, the visas would be delayed until November. The second bit of news was more solid. She learned that the US Committee for the Care of European Children had officially agreed to include children of different nationalities in the group, rather than only French as originally had been planned. Brundage’s group would also pay the children’s transportation costs from Lisbon to the United States.
Now all she had to do was find the right candidates, secure their French exit visas as well as exit and entry visas for Spain and Portugal, gather all of them together, then transport the group to Lisbon and onto a ship for New York. Among the few people available to provide her regular, practical assistance was Helen Lowrie, who once again volunteered her services.
Martha did not wait for anyone’s approval to get started. On August 27, two days before her reunion in Toulouse with Waitstill, she visited the internment camp at Recebedoux, near Toulouse, where she encountered a pair of brothers, Joseph and Alexander Strasser, eight and six respectively.
Their father, Paul Strasser, a Viennese physician, had been sent by the Nazis first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald. After two years in the concentration camps—the systematic exterminations hadn’t yet begun—his wife, Madeline, had sold her jewels to purchase Strasser’s freedom. The family had then moved to France where Frau Strasser died of metastatic breast cancer, and her husband and sons were interned.
“We left money with the staff to get the boys photographed,” Martha wrote. “Their father begged us to make it possible for the boys to go.”
Now that the children’s US entry visas and transportation costs were guaranteed, she approached the prefect for the département (state) of Bouches des Rhone, whose office was near Marseille, to ask if he would cooperate in granting the necessary exit visas. “He was most gracious and cooperative,” Martha later recalled, “and expressed himself as delighted by the possibility of this French-American collaboration. He promised me that he would give the exit visas to all the children in his prefecture within 24 hours whenever I gave him the names.”
The one part of her work she knew would be little problem was finding émigré recruits. Since Hyacinthe Loyson had spread word of Martha’s project countrywide in August, Martha had received hundreds of letters and postcards from parents all over France, pleading that she take their children with her to America.
Some were even smuggled south from the
Occupied Zone in hay carts, tucked inside midwives’ instrument bags, and even secreted under loaves of bread. All her correspondents wrote that they feared that soon there would not be enough food in France to feed their children, and many openly wrote that they wanted their children to attend schools free of Nazi ideology.
Martha then confidently visited the Portuguese and Spanish consulates in Marseille. Both countries at that point still regularly issued visas. The Portuguese only required a valid US visa and a fully paid ticket from Lisbon to anywhere outside the country. The Spaniards asked for Portuguese and US visas, nothing more.
It all seemed straightforward, but it was deceptively so.
Martha opened a joint office with the Lowries in Marseille. Irina Okounieff came over from Pau to serve as their shared secretary. Before Waitstill left Marseille by train with the Feuchtwangers on the morning of September 18, he had run a lawyerly eye over the registration form Martha was creating, a complex document that needed to address not only the immigration laws of four countries but also potential civil matters, such as lawsuits should any of the children die, be physically injured, or suffer some other sort of harm or disability.
Details were important. Under French law, for example, only a father could legally pass responsibility for a child to another individual. It was therefore of paramount concern to secure the fathers’ signatures.
By September 25, the registration and related documents were completed, and Martha, along with Helen Lowrie, had collected affidavits from the parents or guardians of fifty children, all of whom were ready to emigrate at once.
Then came her first reversal. It was suddenly decreed that exit visas no longer could be issued on a prefect’s sole authority. Permission had to come directly from the top, Vichy.
So instead of taking her list of names to the friendly regional police commissioner, Martha headed instead for the seat of Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist government. She grimly guessed it would take at least three days to secure the proper approvals in Vichy—wildly wishful thinking, as it turned out.
Martha later called Vichy “the city of lost hopes.” Because the old spa lacked proper governmental office space, Pétain operated out of a hotel. So did several of his ministries. The Ministry of Interior, for instance, was headquartered at the abandoned casino. The spa itself was reserved for the Foreign Ministry.
“The former bathing areas, where you could take showers before you went into the swimming pool, were all used as offices,” Martha said. “They all had these spigots on the side and the top and the bottom so that if you happened to touch one of them you would have inundated the person sitting there in front, facing out with the linen curtain pushed back, because it was the shower, you see. You were allowed to sit on something that normally had been the place where people sat when they dressed after they had their shower. It was a sort of bench. It was very interesting because they had a little sign on all of these robinets [faucets] which read, ‘Do Not Touch.’”
She pulled every string she could. In Vichy, Martha called on Robert D. Murphy, the interim US ambassador, who said he would like to help her, but since hers was a private program, not a national one, there wasn’t much he could do.
There ensued a frustrating string of meetings with officials in various Vichy ministries. The routine never varied. Most appointments had to be rescheduled several times. If one of Pétain’s bureaucrats actually was in at the appointed hour, the drill began in the lobby, where Martha would be handed a pencil stub with which to write her name, the identity of the person she wished to see, and a description of her business.
Then, along with everyone else, she waited, sometimes for hours, before a uniformed soldier would walk among the crowd, calling out the names of those who had at last been summoned to their meetings. Martha strained for recognizable syllables.
Most of the “offices” Martha visited were converted bedrooms, minus the beds. Typically, she found an office supplied with some sort of filing cabinet and two or more chairs. Desks seemed to be at a premium. The interviews with Vichy officials invariably concluded with a pronouncement either that her plan was impossible or that she needed to speak to somebody else, often multiple somebodies.
Slow seemed to be the only speed the bureaucrats knew, but they actually did conduct some due diligence. In the Pau municipal archives are several letters written by local officials in October 1940, all in response to Vichy inquiries about Martha and her milk program.
“Her generosity was greatly appreciated,” wrote a welfare inspector to the prefect, who was collecting a dossier on Martha, “as well as her tact, particularly: She met with the various directors of maternal and infant care organizations in the unoccupied zone ... so as to precisely gauge their needs and it is thus, in my humble opinion, that it was possible to assure an equitable and judicious distribution of the milk products (thirteen tons) thanks to American generosity.”
A “special commissioner” under the prefect also remembered Martha with fond respect. “She has not, in any circumstances, manifested any hostile sentiments toward France, and actually seems to have good intentions toward our country,” he reported. “She has thus rendered a real service to the children and has warranted our thanks.”
But the warm reviews did not seem to advance her cause in any substantive way. After eleven days of traipsing around Vichy and getting nowhere, Martha wrote Waitstill, who by then had returned to Wellesley Hills.
My darling Waitstill, I have been thinking of you all day and wishing I were at home to hear that first sermon—and see the church full of friendly faces—greeting you at the door—and tying Martha Content’s ribbons for Sunday School and hearing from Hastings’ new teacher. How dear and familiar it all sounds.
I am still in Vichy—trying to get consent for the visas des sorties. The difficulty seems to be that they don’t want French children to grow up in America, where they will find the life so easy and delightful that they will want to stay. As a matter of principle, they want French families to stay together to take what comes together.
She explained that Vichy also had refused the Argentine and Mexican governments after they offered to take children.
The bureaucrats told Martha they feared that the children would learn English, forget their French, lose touch with their culture, and therefore wouldn’t really be French anymore and would never be able to completely readjust and re-assimilate. They were concerned that British propaganda might even make the children anti-French. They raised the possibility of French boys growing to young manhood in America and then possibly facing conscription into the US armed services. If French boys were to be soldiers, Martha was informed, they would be French soldiers.
She disclosed that she had been reading D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “The parish would disown me if they knew that book!”
Martha closed the letter, “All my love, Martha,” then resumed writing again: “I couldn’t resist taking another page just to say I love you and miss you dreadfully—really one of us is less than half as efficient alone—at least I feel that way—I need your vitality—either for or against things!”
She went on. “I really must stop and send you my love—and tell you how I wish you were here—or that I was there. I think you made the right decision in August—we must be together—but perhaps we can be sent over here together after the war—at any rate we ought to begin to improve our French from now on. It is important to speak well. Love, again all of it, Martha.”
Over the next two weeks she would continue to battle the Vichy bureaucracy as well as a variety of digestive and respiratory problems. Martha spent October 10 sick in bed with “aches all day in legs and arms,” according to notes in her datebook. Doctors put her on six different medications.
Martha even underwent “fire cupping,” a folk remedy for a number of ailments, in which alcohol-soaked wads of cotton are placed on the skin and set afire. A glass cup is then placed over each burning wad, which is extinguished
. As the hot air inside the cup cools, a vacuum is created that allegedly relieves “stagnation” under the patient’s skin. There is no reliable evidence that fire cupping works, as Martha attested, and it can leave ugly marks, as she also discovered. “They draw the blood to the surface and make you look perfectly awful,” she wrote.
Martha soldiered on until October 18, when she at last capitulated to the bureaucrats’ intransigence—or seemed to. “It is with much regret that we write to say that the project for the children invited by American families to stay in the U.S.A. for the duration of the war must be given up,” she announced in a typed memorandum.
The plan was started with definite assurance from French Government officials that the exit visas would be given. Since that time, the regulations have been changed. [Mrs. Sharp] has now been advised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the sending of French children to America under present circumstances is contrary to the policy of the French Government.
We are keenly sorry that this link in French American friendship cannot be forged, and that these young ambassadors cannot carry out their mission to keep alive in so many American homes and committees, sympathy and interest for France. We had hoped that the interchange of customs and ideas might still further strengthen the ties between our two countries.
We know that you will share our keen regret—
The unfinished note was meant either as a surrender or a ruse. Whether a finished copy ever was completed is not known. However, the Vichy government soon and suddenly reversed itself. Since the Unoccupied Zone was burdened by thousands of homeless French children—particularly Alsatian children—who’d been driven from their homes by the Nazis and weren’t likely to reunite with their families any time soon, it was decided that Martha would take these children to the United States, as long as she could find relatives there who’d take care of them. In practice, this meant that her best choice would be children with an American parent. One of the children joined his father, a physician, in the United States.
Defying the Nazis Page 18
