Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (7 page)

Moreover, these signals were often profoundly
mixed
. Random kindnesses, the most obvious “mixed signals,” gave some Jews cause for hope. one woman wrote that every Jewish person “knew a decent German” and recalled that many Jews believed “the radical Nazi laws would never be carried out because they did not match the moderate character of the German people.”
⁸⁸
Ultimately, confusing signals, often interpreted differently by women and men as well as attempts by the government to rob Jews of all their assets, impeded many Jews from making timely decisions to leave Germany (although as we well know, in the end, closed doors to places of refuge played a far more important role than did the timing of emigration decisions).
⁸⁹

That men and women often
assessed
the dangers differently reflected their various contacts and frames of reference. But,
decisions
seem to

have been made by husbands—or, later, by circumstances. Despite some important role reversals, families generally held fast to traditional gender roles in actual decision-making unless they were overwhelmed by events. The common prejudice that women were “hysterical” in the face of danger, or exaggerated fearful situations, worked to everyone’s disadvantage. Charlotte Stein-Pick had begged her father to flee in March 1933. Her husband brought her father to the train station only moments before the SS arrived to arrest the older man. Not aware of the SS visit, her husband returned home to say: “actually, it was entirely unnecessary that your parents left, but I supported you because you were worrying yourself so much.”
⁹⁰

Not only were men inclined to trust their own political perceptions more than those of their wives, but their role and status as breadwinner and head of household both contributed to their hesitancy to emigrate and gave them the authority to say “no.” one woman described her attempt to convince her husband to flee:

A woman sometimes has a sixth feeling . . . I said to my husband, “we will have to leave.” He said, “No, you won’t have a six-room apartment and two servants if we do that.” I said, “ok, then I’ll have a one-room flat . . . but I want to be safe.”

Despite his reluctance, she studied english and learned practical trades. His arrest forced their emigration and she supported the family in Australia.
⁹¹
else Gerstel fought “desperately” with her husband of twenty-three years to emigrate. Fearful that he would not find a job abroad, he refused to leave, insisting: “there is as much demand for Roman law over there as the eskimos have for freezers.” “I was in constant fury,” she wrote, representing their dispute as a great strain on their marriage.
⁹²
The Berlin artist Charlotte Salomon painted this dilemma as she awaited her fate in southern France in 1941–1942. She portrayed her short grandmother looking up to her tall grandfather, whose head juts above the frame of the painting. The caption reads: “Grossmama in 1933: ‘Not a minute longer will I stay here. I’m telling you let’s leave this country as fast as we can; my judgment says so.’ Her husband al-most loses his head.”
⁹³

A combination of events usually led to the final decision to leave and, as conditions worsened, women sometimes took the lead. In early 1938, one daughter reported that her mother “applied to the American authorities for a quota number without my father’s knowledge; the hopeless number of 33,243 was allocated. It was a last desperate

act and Papa did not even choke with anger anymore.”
⁹⁴
Yet another woman responded to narrowly escaping a battering by a Nazi mob in her small hometown by convincing her husband to “pack their things throughout the night and leave this hell . . . the next day.”
⁹⁵
After the November Pogrom, there were wives who broke all family conventions by taking over the decision-making when it was unequivocally clear to them that their husbands’ reluctance to leave Germany would result in even worse horrors.

Sometimes the “Aryan” wives of Jewish men took the lead. Verena Hellwig, for example, feared for her two “mixed” (
Mischling
) children even as her husband, also of “mixed blood,” insisted on remaining in Germany until his approaching retirement. when her teenage son could not find an apprenticeship, she spoke to a Nazi official about her children’s futures. He told her that people of mixed blood “are our greatest danger. They should either return to Judaism . . . and suffer the fate of the Jews or they should be prevented from procreating like re-tarded people.” She had reached her turning point: “her homeland was lost . . . Germany was dead [for her].” She had to find a “new home,” a “future” for her children.
⁹⁶

November Pogrom: Families in Dissolution

Immediately after this cataclysm, with men imprisoned, women comprised the majority of those who remained with any possibility of action. The most crucial task confronting Jewish women was to rescue their men. wives of prisoners were told that their husbands would be freed only if they could present emigration papers. Although there are no statistics to indicate their success, these women displayed extraordinary nerve and tenacity in saving a large number of men and in facilitating a mass exodus of married couples in 1939. women again summoned the courage to overcome gender stereotypes of passivity in order to find any means necessary to have husbands and fathers released from camps. Charlotte Stein-Pick wrote of the November Pogrom:

From this hour on, I tried untiringly, day in and day out, to find a connection that could lead to my husband’s release. I ran to Christian acquaintances, friends, or colleagues, but everywhere people shrugged their shoulders, shook their heads and said “no.” And

everyone was glad when I left. I was treated like a leper, even by people who were positively inclined towards us.
⁹⁷

Undaunted, Stein-Pick entered Nazi headquarters in Munich, the notorious “Brown House,” to request her husband’s freedom based on his status as a war veteran. There, she was shown her husband, twenty pounds thinner, and begged repeatedly for his release The Nazis required that she explain the finances of her husband’s student fraternity, of which he was still treasurer. She could do this and—upon his release—she was required to return to the Brown House monthly to do the fraternity’s bookkeeping until she left Germany.
⁹⁸

Some women saw not only to their husbands’ releases and the necessary papers, but also to selling their joint property. Accompanying her husband home after his ordeal, one wife explained that she had just sold their house and bought tickets to Shanghai for the family. Her husband recalled that anything was fine with him, as long as they could escape from a place in which everyone had declared “open season” on them.
⁹⁹
Similar expressions of thankfulness, tinged, perhaps, with a bit of surprise at women’s heroism, can be found in many men’s memoirs. They were indebted to women even after their ordeal when many men were too beaten in body and spirit to be of much use in the scramble to emigrate. Some men came home desperately ill, others suffered

deep depression.
¹⁰⁰

Many women remarked upon their own calm and self-control as an attempt to retain the families’ dignity and equilibrium in the face of dishonor and persecution. Most likely, men rarely describe this kind of behavior because they took it for granted, while women, previously allowed and encouraged to be the more “emotional” sex, were particularly conscious of their own efforts at self-control and their husbands’ fragility.
¹⁰¹
Charlotte Stein Pick recalled her husband’s counsel on the day of the pogrom: “‘Just no tears and no scene. . .’ But even without this warning I would have controlled myself.”
¹⁰²
This desire to appear calm was not merely a proclamation of female stalwartness to counter the stereotype of female “frailty.” emphasis on composure also resulted from the decorum stressed in Jewish bourgeois upbringing. Moreover, it asserted Jewish pride in the face of “Aryan” savagery, human dignity in the face of general dishonor.
¹⁰³
But women’s perseverance is also more than the sum of its parts, suggesting a new role for women. Traditionally, men had publicly guarded the honor of the family and community; now suddenly, women found themselves in the difficult position of defending Jewish honor.

Despite their apparent calm, women’s inner stress was massive as they faced the dizzying procedure of obtaining proof of immediate plans to emigrate in order to free a male relative from a concentration camp. on their own, women had to organize the papers, decide on the destination (if they had not discussed this previously with a spouse, sibling or parent), sell property, and arrange the departure. The red tape involved in emigrating was a dreadful ordeal.

Statistics from the pre-pogrom years may give the impression that a certain number of Jews smoothly managed to leave Germany and enter the country of their choice. They cover up the individual stories that describe complicated emigration attempts, failures, and new attempts. The problems encountered gave rise to gallows humor. If one studied Spanish or Portuguese to go to Latin America, sudden barriers to entry arose and one had to prepare for another country. If one turned to Hebrew, obstacles to acquiring the necessary certificates were certain to develop and one had to change to yet another language. Thus, a joke made the rounds of one town—the question was: “‘what language are you learning?’ The answer: ‘The wrong one, of course.’”
¹⁰⁴

After the pogrom, women faced a critical situation. elisabeth Freund described her and her husband’s many attempts to leave Germany:

It is really enough to drive one to despair. we’ve already done so many things in order to get away from Germany. we have filed applications for entry permits to Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden. It was all in vain, though in all these countries we had good connections. In the spring of 1939, from an agent we obtained an entry permit for Mexico for 3,000 marks. But we never received the visa, because the Mexican consulate asked us to present passports that would entitle us to return to Germany, and the German authorities did not issue such passports to Jews. Then, in August 1939 we did actually get the permit for england. But it came too late, only ten days before the outbreak of war, and in this short time we were not able to take care of all the formalities with the German authorities. In the spring of 1940 we received the entry permit for Portugal. we immediately got everything ready and applied for our passports. Then came the invasion of Holland, Belgium and France by the German troops. A stream of refugees poured to Portugal, and the Portuguese government recalled by wire all of the issued permits . . . It was also good that in December 1940 we had not already paid for our Panamanian visas; for we noticed that the visas offered us did not at all entitle us to land in Panama.
¹⁰⁵

Freund reflected on friends who urged her and her husband to leave Germany: “As if that were not our most fervent wish.” People in and outside of Germany failed to comprehend that the Freunds—like so many others—desperately wanted to get out, but that opportunities did not exist.
¹⁰⁶

A few opportunities to escape did exist for unaccompanied children. Zionists increased their efforts to bring children to Palestine where they lived on
kibbutzim
or in children’s homes, and Quakers and other groups organized children’s transports (
Kindertransporte
) that delivered children safely “into the arms of strangers,” as the film on the children’s transports described it. For parents, the decision to send off a child, often a very young one, was the most excruciating moment of their lives. The expression “children turned into letters” revealed their despair. Many mothers, with husbands in concentration camps or safely abroad, made the decision on their own and then suffered intensely from the loss of daily intimacy.

As just implied, families frequently had to split in order to save all or some of their members. This became clear as children escaped, often never to see their parents again. More generally, families made harsh and excruciating decisions to save the young and to leave the elderly behind. Statistics show that two-thirds of the deportees were forty-five years of age or older.
¹⁰⁷
This meant that as the young escaped, aided by retraining programs and Jewish communal organizations, the grandparents, often the widowed grandmother, remained behind. Many felt they could no longer start anew in a place of refuge; others believed that they might join their children, once they had settled; all realized that countries of emigration did not allow in unproductive individuals unless they had secure promises of financial support, which they did not; and most thought that they would live a restricted life, but that the Nazis would not hurt them. By the time they realized the last to be untrue, the war had intervened and doors of emigration and immigration had slammed shut.