A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [66]
Victor Waterman, whose family had been Amsterdamers for more than three centuries, remembered how long he had waited last time, how he almost hadn't made it out, how his brothers and sister and mother had stayed and died. He was worried about the Russians and about the soon-to-be-rearmed Germans and about what the Dutch, who had acted so badly before, would do this time. He concluded that he couldn't trust anyone in Europe anymore. He was still in the chicken business and still had contacts in the United States. In 1951 he and his wife and children moved to Union City, New Jersey, where he began working again in the kosher chicken industry. When people asked him why he had moved, he would say, “When you've experienced the Germans, you trust nobody.”
10
In the
New Berlin
WHILE THOUSANDS OF SURVIVORS WERE WAITING IN Germany to arrange for a ship to take them away out of Europe so they could be far from Germany, a small number of German Jews went to English ports looking for ships to get back to Germany. Most of them had barely managed to get out only a few years before.
From the time Mia Lehmann left Antwerp for Berlin until she finally escaped to England in the late 1930s, moving to Germany had been for her a nearly fatal choice. Mia was a small woman —it seemed almost by design. She could lean close to people, ask them about their troubles, and then turn her head to listen so that her ear would be exactly at the level of the other person's mouth. Her strong and determined jawline contrasted with her soft and sympathetic eyes. An activist by nature, she did not think that Nazis coming to power and ruling the streets with brown-shirted bullies was any reason for her to be quiet. To her, it was all the more reason to speak out. She spent two years, from 1934 to 1936, in a Nazi prison in Silesia, accused of plotting to overthrow the government. She always laughed about the charge, because she thought it gave her undue credit; all she had really been doing was getting aid io families of political prisoners. She was one of six Jewish women in her cell block, all of whom served their sentences for political crimes and were released. The Nazis had not yet decided to murder every Jew. Maybe they would just send them to Madagascar. After her release, Mia had to report to the police once every week. She had no grasp of the extent of what the Nazis were planning, but as she watched Jews near the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue being rounded up in open trucks and taken away, she understood that she would not survive if she stayed in Germany.
To leave, another country had to agree to accept her as a refugee. She had to have a sponsor to get a permit. It all took money. The Jews who had money were leaving, and those who didn't were being rounded up in trucks. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1938, half of the 500,000 Jews in Germany got out. Finally in May 1939, Mia's international Communist connections landed her a permit to go to England and work cleaning houses. Three months later, the war started and it was impossible to escape.
WERNER HANDLER'S FAMILY were German Jews who suddenly found themselves living in Poland when the borders were redrawn after World War I. Shortly after Werner was born in 1920, the family moved to the mountains a little to the west so that they would be in Germany again and not Poland. Eighteen years later, in November 1938, Werner and his father were among the twenty thousand Jews arrested during Kristallnacht, the night Jews and Jewish buildings throughout Germany were simultaneously assaulted. The Handlers were taken to Sachsenhausen.
In those days Sachsenhausen had no gas chambers