The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  When Luis Unger’s friend returned to Guatemala City, however, something had changed between them. “Listen,” he said, “I can’t be seen with you anymore.” In his friend’s office, a new photo of Adolf Hitler hung on the wall.

  Unger felt “brutalized” according to his son David, a translator and novelist who lives in New York. Luis Unger spoke to his son of the broken friendship years later in words that showed it still stung. “He was speechless, he didn’t see it coming.”

  Notices appeared in the German Embassy advising against associating with certain Jewish families, whether or not they had been neighbors for years. The unraveling of personal ties was just one sign of a deteriorating situation; it also became more difficult to bring over relatives.

  President Ubico, the Guatemalan dictator who admired Mussolini, virtually closed the door on refugees from the Reich in 1938 when he cut the quota for German immigrants. He stood by when Nazis took control of Guatemalan German clubs and schools. Nevertheless, to the salvation of many, Ubico provided visas under the table in exchange for cash. Undoubtedly, he saved lives.

  * * *

  In the months before Kristallnacht in 1938, the mother of fifteen-year-old Hans Guggenheim was standing in a line to buy butter in Berlin when another Jewish woman said to her, “They are giving visas to Guatemala.” Hans and his younger sister, Gaby, had already been sent to England; that night, their parents made a plan to write to a cousin whose family had moved to Guatemala in 1900 and ask him to obtain visas for them any way he could, so they too might escape. Once safely in Guatemala City, they went to President Ubico, who received visitors in a vast, pale green stone palace he had just built on the capital’s central square. They paid money, and the Guggenheims left the president’s offices with the promise of visas for their children.

  At age ninety-three, sitting before tall windows in his multistory brick home in Boston, among pieces of fine art and artifacts collected over a lifetime, Hans Guggenheim recalled the excitement of that first trip across the Atlantic on a luxury liner. “Why cry bitter tears? I was barely eighteen and for me this was high adventure,” he said. “There was a sub attack on the way to Cuba, and I ate frogs legs provençale for the first time.”

  Guggenheim, a painter and former professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is writing a memoir covering the years “from fascism to Trump,” and he remembers well the flowering beauty of the Guatemalan capital in the late 1930s and 1940s. Wealthy Jewish families lived in “large, elegant homes on the Reforma,” a wide avenue, he said. In Berlin, the Nazis confiscated the family’s assets, but in Guatemala they had a chance at life. His father soon owned a small factory that produced wrought-iron furniture in the capital, where Jewish life freely revolved around three synagogues—Ashkenazi, German, and Sephardi. At age twenty, the young artist had his first exhibition at the Club Guatemala, an exclusive downtown venue. He was at home. “We felt ourselves to be one hundred percent guatemaltecos,” he said. “Probably there was someone around who didn’t like Jews, but it wasn’t institutionalized.”

  Guggenheim plainly calls Ubico, the Guatemalan dictator, a fascist. Nevertheless, in the capricious way of war, a figure that history defines as an ironfisted, self-centered ultrarightist is remembered by some as key to their survival. Guggenheim calls Ubico “a friend to the Jews.”

  “I wouldn’t be here without him,” he said. “He saved my parents’ lives, and Gaby’s life, and my life.”

  * * *

  In 1939, Hans Guggenheim had a fine job downtown as an editorial artist at La Prensa, Guatemala’s major daily. He did not know Luis Unger, who was about to begin work in the quartermaster’s office of the U.S. air base under construction at the edge of the city. But just as Guggenheim felt safe in his new home, Luis Unger too was taking comfort in the midst of the growing bad news from Europe, knowing that his widowed mother was leaving Hamburg.

  On May 13, Betty Unger and her sister, Gusti Hansen, set sail on the same kind of luxury liner that had brought Hans Guggenheim to Guatemala. They were headed for New York to join another sister, Julia, who had paid for their passage. Their passports were marked with a red “J” by the Reich, indicating they were Jewish. But they were fleeing toward freedom now, out of Hamburg bound for Havana. When they landed, the passengers—a third of them children whose parents awaited them—would disembark and stay in Cuba. Or, like Betty Unger and Gusti, they would arrange for transport to their final destination elsewhere in the Americas.

  Many of the sisters’ fellow passengers were professionals, lawyers, and doctors, forbidden to practice by the Nazis. Some had already been held in concentration camps. Max Loewe, a lawyer from Breslau, had been arrested on Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau, until he managed to secure a release and book tickets on the St. Louis for himself, his wife, and their fifteen-year-old daughter. The St. Louis trip was a “special voyage” whose financial details were overseen by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA, the bureau for which Adolf Eichmann worked. The RSHA required everyone to pay for round-trip tickets, even though the refugees were traveling only one way. The German newspaper Der Stürmer crowed “GOOD RIDDANCE” when the ship sailed.

  But Captain Gustav Schroeder ordered white-clad staff to treat passengers “like privileged tourists.” Nazis among the ship’s staff objected, almost to the point of mutiny, but Schroeder held his ground. It could not have been easy. Six Gestapo agents had infiltrated the crew. Their job on landing in Havana was to collect espionage documents from the Abwehr station, an outpost of the Reich’s intelligence agency. Meanwhile, they were charged with keeping an eye on the captain.

  Schroeder, a slight man with thirty-seven years’ experience at sea, maintained his authority. He made sure that children were treated to swimming lessons in the deck pool and that adults enjoyed dances. He permitted passengers to throw a tablecloth over a bust of Hitler in the dining room and hold Friday night services. In photos from the voyage, men lounge easily in wooden deck chairs with blankets folded upon outstretched legs, women stand at the ship’s rail in crisp white dresses as the breeze lifts their hair. Young boys look up at the camera, grinning as if they can barely contain their glee, free at sea with the run of the grand ship. Betty Unger and Gusti are there, appearing relaxed in a shaded seat on deck, dressed in flower-print organdy and shiny black Mary Janes, narrow-brim straw hats giving the middle-aged sisters a jaunty look.

  As the St. Louis sailed toward Havana, Schroeder began to receive disquieting cables from the Hamburg-Amerika line main office.

  23 MAY 1939: MAJORITY OF YOUR PASSENGERS IN CONTRAVENTION OF NEW CUBAN LAW 937 AND MAY NOT BE GIVEN PERMISSION TO DISEMBARK. SITUATION NOT COMPLETELY CLEAR BUT CRITICAL IF NOT RESOLVED BEFORE YOUR ARRIVAL IN HAVANA.

  And from the shipping line’s Cuba office:

  26 MAY 1939 ANCHOR IN ROADSTEAD. DO NOT REPEAT NOT MAKE ANY ATTEMPT COME ALONGSIDE.

  In Havana streets, Nazi demonstrations organized by the German Embassy protested the arrival of the refugees. On the St. Louis, rumors circulated around the decks that almost none of the passengers’ landing permits were in order. The Cuban Immigration Service director, Manuel Benitez, was a charlatan and a thief. Benitez, a crony of future Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose protection he enjoyed, had been operating a visa racket, pocketing fees. President Federico Laredo Brú fired Benitez the day before the St. Louis was scheduled to dock, and canceled the transit visas Benitez issued—some say because the corrupt immigration chief failed to cut Laredo Brú in on the deal.

  For days the sun rose over the St. Louis, anchored far from the docks of Havana. Except for thirty passengers who had received visas directly from the ministry—not from the conniving Benitez—no one was allowed to disembark. Some refugees became hysterical; women lifted their babies over the ship’s rail and threatened to drop them if they were not allowed to get off. Depression possessed others. Max Loewe, the lawyer from Breslau who had survived Kristallnacht and Dachau, slit his wri
sts in view of other passengers and jumped into the sea. (A crew member dived in and grabbed Loewe and managed to place him half-dead on a launch to shore, where Loewe was hospitalized and survived, but his wife and daughter were forbidden to join him.) Captain Schroeder had selected a small number of passengers to act as liaisons with the others when the first troubling cables began to arrive. Now he assigned them to a suicide watch.

  Betty Unger and Gusti waited aboard with the others, holding their “Benitezes”—the questioned transit visas had acquired a dark nickname. Schroeder cabled company headquarters, pleading intercession with diplomats. He went ashore with two Cuban attorneys to personally deliver a memorandum from the passengers to the Cuban president, but the president refused to see him. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a private U.S. benevolent association struggling to place refugees in safe havens, and other agencies lobbied frantically on shore, even offering money that was never enough for key officials.

  Meanwhile, the St. Louis lay off Havana Harbor in tantalizing sight of the white buildings of the city. The tropical breeze blew softly, but passengers felt caught up in a vortex over which they had no control, the realization that freedom was slipping away. Some sold the last of family jewelry and other heirlooms to crewmen to pay for telegrams to President Roosevelt, to Cuban president Laredo Brú, even to the Cuban president’s wife Leonor: “your woman’s feelings give us hope…”

  For three days, relatives of the passengers rowed or motored out to see their loved ones. From the small boats, the relatives shouted over the sound of the waves until, unbelievably, amid cries and lamentations, they watched the liner sail away.

  Captain Schroeder did everything in his power to prevent returning his passengers to Europe, sending messages to a host of ports. But no country in the Americas would have them. Schroeder purposefully sailed the few miles north to Florida, and hugged the coast, hoping Washington would allow him to dock. But U.S. Coast Guard cutters forced the ship away. Returning across the Atlantic, he discussed running the St. Louis aground near Southampton, or setting a fire so passengers might escape and be rescued in British territory.

  England, Denmark, Sweden, France, and Holland finally were persuaded to admit groups of the refugees. But the transit of the St. Louis goes down in history as a voyage of the doomed. Of the passengers, 254 were eventually taken prisoner in Europe and died in the extermination camps of the Nazi Reich.

  Luis Unger would never see his mother again.

  Betty and her sister Gusti disembarked in Amsterdam and lived quietly for three years in a small house in Groningen, a university city ninety miles northeast of the Dutch port. The last photo of them that David Unger has shows the two ladies sitting primly in wicker chairs on a wooden porch, wearing dark dresses, Betty with a high collar, Gusti in pearls. Their hands are folded on their laps, a bright sun lights their smiling faces. In 1942, Nazis and Dutch collaborators rounded up the Jews in Holland. The sisters died together in Nazi-occupied Poland at the Sobibór camp, where they were gassed.

  Luis Unger found out from the Red Cross in 1947 about his mother’s death. After the war, too, Hans Guggenheim and his family discovered that Hans’s grandmother was gassed at Auschwitz. Soon after Hans and his sister had arrived safely in Guatemala, his parents had returned to President Ubico and asked for a visa for the grandmother, but Ubico turned them down.

  “I suppose he thought, ‘No, I’ve given them four visas, that’s enough,’” said Guggenheim. “But he had no idea of what was going to happen, none of us did.”

  * * *

  Sometimes it seems that Jews who lived through World War II in Latin America, and their descendants, carry the era in a way inseparable from thoughts of loved ones gone in the Shoah. Hans Guggenheim does not say he carries the old war with him, but he has begun art schools for children in countries affected by modern wars, in Mali and Guatemala. In 1995, he donated dozens of original Goya etchings, The Disasters of War, to a museum in Vietnam.

  Even members of succeeding generations seem to maintain a connection with the war years that elders lived. Judith Scliar, born in Brazil, made a kind of pilgrimage to a new Jewish museum in Warsaw. The journey to the city from which her grandparents were taken, she said, affected her “deeply.” On a balmy night in Bom Fim, Scliar gave a presentation to a packed synagogue about her Polish visit. Above us on a second floor in the synagogue’s archive were the filing cabinets that held the wartime memories of the neighborhood’s residents. On either side of me in the audience sat middle-aged women who told me their own stories of their parents’ losses and migrations. I had the feeling that in Jewish communities like this one, wherever one might travel in Latin America, the war and its sequels still reverberated.

  Marjorie Agosin’s great-grandmothers escaped from Vienna and Odessa to Chile, where Agosin grew up. Agosin, a poet and literary scholar who teaches at Wellesley College, was born a full decade after the war, but seems to live steeped in the seemingly endless echo of the catastrophe. Her work as a poet and human rights activist resonates with what family and others experienced, in a fashion that connects the World War II era with the far-right state violence of her own generation in the 1970s and 1980s.

  The Argentine military junta (1976–83) “tortured Jews under portraits of Hitler,” Agosin wrote in Dear Anne Frank. Like Nazi genocide victims, those who were disappeared during the postwar Latin American dictatorships “did not have places of remembrance where they could be buried, and their families still do not know where to go visit them to remember them and to offer them life’s gifts.”

  Sometimes the poet in Agosin seems to enter the very minds of those who came before her, on the journey from Europe to Latin America.

  You walk the solemn avenues

  lined with rubber trees

  and the merchants

  with their figs and fresh fruit.

  Suddenly, you pause beneath the blazing sun

  as if your wounded heart

  were pulsing words

  and you begin to say:

  “One time in Vienna …

  one time in Vienna”

  and the angels of memory

  arrive at your feet.

  5.

  NAZIS AND NOT NAZIS, IN THE LAND OF THE WHITE BUTTERFLY

  When Maya Sapper was a small girl, she loved to wander among the semitropical wonderland of trees and streams on the Guatemalan coffee plantation where she was born. The place was so far “in the boonies,” she recalled many years later, that when her mother first came there as a young bride she cooked on a three-stone hearth like the women of the indigenous Q’eqchi’ Maya, the original inhabitants of the mountainous region and for years the family’s only neighbors. As Maya’s father supervised her grandparents’ vast holdings on horseback, her mother learned from the indigenous women the secrets of herbs and teas that might alleviate ailments, immersing herself in the new homeland so far from her native Germany. Young Maya, named for the Indian people her mother had come to admire, was born to the Guatemalan land in the same house as her father, never lived anywhere else nor dreamed she would ever live anywhere else.

  “I remember once as a child, standing among the trees, with the light falling on the hanging vines, and seeing a huge white butterfly,” recalled Maya when I visited her California seaside home. She had turned eighty-five and was sitting at a table in a small dining room, lifting her hands and spreading them wide at the memory. “Its wings were so white, almost transparent, just fluttering, and I said to myself, ‘When I die, I want to be buried right here.’”

  But it was the late 1930s, the war had started, and its ripples were about to shake the Sapper family’s hardworking but idyllic existence. Beginning in 1942, a little-known U.S. program of political kidnapping swept up residents from Latin America, including Maya Sapper’s father, Helmut, and brought them to the United States.

  * * *

  At a hemispheric conference in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, U.S. assistant secreta
ry of state Sumner Welles successfully pressured the Latin American republics to agree to take punishing measures against their residents with roots in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Nineteen countries complied, violating their own laws. The forced rendition policy that ensued also violated U.S. law. Mexico and Brazil uprooted entire communities and relocated them en masse within their own national borders, Colombia moved blacklisted men into hotels surrounded by guards. Fourteen other countries including Guatemala and Peru cooperated with U.S intelligence agents and diplomats and sent residents, not just Axis nationals but also native-born and naturalized citizens, to camps in the United States.

  The captives did not suffer the conditions of inmates of Nazi death camps; but the isolated centers where they were held, sometimes for years, fit every definition of concentration camps, where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a small area under difficult conditions, with limited recourse to law, or no recourse at all.

  To justify the seizure and imprisonment of these civilians, the Roosevelt administration reached back through the centuries to a law passed during an undeclared naval war with France. In 1798, the Alien Enemies Act called for the arrest of nationals of countries at war with the United States as a measure to promote national security. A hundred and fifty years later, Roosevelt invoked the law against the Latin “aliens.” To apply the Alien Enemies Act, however, it was necessary to get the individuals from Latin America into the United States. Almost immediately after Pearl Harbor, the captures began.