American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [202]
She was born Ellen Raphael in 1915 in Germany. In the 1930s, she moved to Prague and married a Czech man named Boxhorn. Being Jewish, Ellen escaped from Prague—and the marriage—after the Nazi invasion and made her way to England, avoiding the fate that befell much of her family in Nazi concentration camps. During the war, she worked as a Red Cross nurse and then served in the Royal Air Force. After the war, she made her way back to Germany, where she landed a job as a civilian with the U.S. military government, first working for the Civil Censorship Division and then as a secretary in the Signal Corps.
In February 1948, Ellen married Kurt Knauff, a naturalized U.S. citizen and an honorably discharged army veteran working as a civilian for the military occupation. After the war, the U.S. government passed the War Brides Act, which allowed U.S. servicemen to bring back foreignborn brides without regard to either the strict mental and physical requirements required of immigrants or the national origins quotas.
When Ellen arrived in New York in August 1948, however, she was not greeted with any celebrations. Instead, she was ordered detained at Ellis Island. No explanation was given. When a government official told her, “I am sending you to a place where they will look after you,” Ellen broke down in tears. She had lost family members in the Holocaust and the detention order caused her to fear that she too was heading to some kind of concentration camp. Ellen was not allowed a hearing, nor was she informed of the charges against her. Therefore, she was stuck at Ellis Island with no apparent way to prove her innocence and gain entrance to America.
The government’s case against Ellen was as follows: When she was employed by the army’s Civil Censorship Division in Germany, she furnished Czech agents with secret information, including copies of telephone conversations that her department was monitoring. She was also accused of warning the chief of the Czech Liaison Section in Frankfurt against using telephones since they were being tapped by the Americans. She was also alleged to have described to Czech agents the type of decoding machines used by American intelligence.
All of this took place before the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, so the charges were not that Ellen was a Communist, although later witnesses would testify that they saw Ellen enter Communist Party headquarters in Frankfurt. The major source of the charges against Ellen was an unnamed “former highly placed Czech official” who had defected and was now assisting the American military. Two other Czechs also provided testimony against Knauff.
Though still flush with wartime victory, Americans were growing increasingly insecure and vulnerable regarding national security threats at home. Ellen Knauff was ordered detained just nine days after Alger Hiss appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to deny falsely that he had been a Communist spy.
It would be more than two more years before Ellen would hear these details, since they were kept classified to protect confidential intelligence sources. She would remain in detention at Ellis Island for the next nine months while her lawyers submitted a habeas corpus petition. In her letters to her husband, who was still working in Germany, Ellen told of her “bitter disappointment in the Ellis Island version of American freedom.” She called it “a concentration camp with steam heat and running water” and said the food there was only “fit for pigs—if you were not particular about what your pigs ate.” For all of her anger, Ellen had nothing but good things to say about the men and women who worked at Ellis Island.
Eventually, her case reached the Supreme Court. While the Court was deciding the case, it allowed Ellen to be released on bond. The Court reached a decision in January 1950. By a vote of 4 to 3, it rejected Knauff ’s request. Two justices did not take part in the case, including newly appointed Justice Tom