The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. Bruce Henderson
where they would be cared for by a Jewish rescue organization. He had already signed Stephan up. It would be safer for him in France, said his father.
“Leave Germany without you?”
Stephan realized his dream of reuniting with his parents was lost.
His father promised that they would join him as soon as possible in France—or possibly in America. “We’ll see. We will write each other.”
On July 4, 1939, Arthur and Johanna took Stephan to Berlin’s cavernous Anhalter Bahnhof railroad station. There, they found a group of about forty boys and their chaperons off in one corner. Stephan knew about a dozen of the children from the orphanage. As relatives said their good-byes, many of the younger boys were laughing, joking with each other about the great adventure they would soon embark on. Aware of the trip’s implications, Stephan stayed silent.
None of the adults present, including Arthur and Johanna, revealed to their children any foreboding that they might not ever see each other again. Of course, as the situation in Germany worsened daily, the grown-ups knew this was a possibility. Arthur had had to sign a conservatorship document assigning the legal responsibility for Stephan’s welfare to the rescue organization until he was eighteen. Even without parental permission, the organization would be free to take Stephan to wherever they felt he would be safe.
As the group moved toward the train platform, Stephan heard his father calling out to him: “Be sure to behave.”
Stephan went back to the last car as the train pulled out of the station, and looked out a frost-covered window at Berlin, fading into the distance behind him. With his finger, he drew three X’s in the condensation on the pane. The triple X was a well-known German sign of displeasure. It would be left, for instance, by a customer on the check at a restaurant after a bad meal, signifying that he would not come back.
Stephan was a German, but he was also a Jew. And after what he had already lived through in his young life, he never wanted to return to Germany.
By January 1939, hundreds of the Jews interned at Dachau concentration camp after the Kristallnacht roundups two months earlier had already died, casualties of SS brutality or the vile conditions. After being forced by camp officials to sign over title to his mother’s home, Martin Selling didn’t think he would leave alive. He had every reason to believe the rumors he heard that the crematories in Munich were working day and night to process the corpses from Dachau, a result of the major influx of Jews into the camp beginning in November 1938.1
But some Jewish prisoners were luckier—about half of those brought in after the roundups had been released to ease overcrowding, with priority given to those who could prove they had a way to get out of Germany. The population decrease in the camp meant there were now enough thin blankets to go around; each inmate could have his own during the frigid nights. Martin found some sewing kits and put his tailoring skills to work, repairing the straw mattresses and prison uniforms. He also gathered some of the cleaning cloths used to prepare the barracks for inspections and sewed them together into a long-sleeved undershirt. Wearing his new shirt under the lightweight prisoner garb helped cut the chill. When the other prisoners saw what he had done, they asked him to make undershirts for them, too. The guards began to notice the shortage. Word spread that at the next inspection, the guards would be looking for the missing cloths, and anyone found with them would be punished. Martin collected all the undershirts he had made, took out the seams, and folded them so as to hide the alterations. When the guards searched, they found only neat piles of cleaning rags, which had somehow reappeared.
The highlight of each day came after the evening meal, when the guards posted a list of the prisoners who would be processed for release the next day. Every day Martin hoped his name would be on the list, and every day he was disappointed. By the time his name appeared—January 27, 1939—he was the last of the nine men who had come in with him on the transport from Nuremberg still at Dachau. His friend Ernst Dingfelder, who had tried so hard to stay kosher in Dachau, had been let out a few days earlier.
Martin didn’t sleep at all that night. Each day had been spent just trying to survive. What lay ahead now? he wondered. As he lay awake, he thought about other inmates, men whose names might never appear on the list.
Another friend he had made at Dachau, Alois Stangl, had been a deckhand on a Danube river barge. He was thirty-five years old, but after five years at Dachau, he looked fifty. Although Stangl was a German Aryan, he had been an outspoken member of the Socialist Party, which meant the Nazis considered him an enemy of the regime. His sister was married to a fervent Nazi official, who had denounced Stangl to the party, leading to his arrest. His release would be an embarrassment to the man who had put him there, he told Martin. Alois Stangl saw no chance of ever getting out of Dachau alive.
The next morning, Martin and the fifty other men being released that day were taken to the communal shower room, where they stripped and showered. Next, they went for a medical examination with a singular purpose: anyone with evidence of maltreatment or injury had to wait until their wounds healed, else they be used to corroborate claims of physical abuse. Martin was pulled aside because of a long scar on his right knee, which he explained to the doctor was an old injury. The SS physician seemed skeptical. Martin had to show he had full range of motion in his knee before he was allowed to continue on.
To the surprise of Martin and the others, the prisoners were handed bags marked with their names; inside were the clothes they had been wearing upon arrival. After they dressed, an SS officer lectured them about the threat of reincarceration if they spoke publicly about Dachau. He also reminded them that they were Jews, not Germans, a refrain that had been drilled into them daily, often while they were being beaten by the guards.
Martin had grown up with Judaism as his religion and German as his nationality. His family celebrated Jewish religious holidays as well as German national holidays. Their ancestral roots in the country went back centuries, and the family included men such as his mother’s brothers, Hugo and Julius Laub, who had fought for the German empire in the trenches of World War I and were proud, patriotic Germans. As Manfred Steinfeld’s uncles, Solomon and Arthur, had also once believed, Martin’s uncles held on to the hope even after Hitler rose to power that their country would not turn on its veterans. But for Germany’s Jewish veterans that was not to be. It had been forcefully impressed upon Martin and his uncles, as well as Manfred and his uncles, and thousands like them, in countless insidious ways, that they were no longer Germans.
Calling the prisoners about to be released verdammte Saujuden (damn dirty Jews), the SS officer warned, “After you leave Germany, the louder you complain abroad, the less likely will you be believed.”
The prisoners boarded the train at the same platform from which they had arrived. A number of armed SS guards boarded with them. Although they were told that they were no longer in custody, but were merely being escorted to Munich, Martin and the others were afraid to show relief or any other emotion. They remained silent. Lulled by the rhythmic sound of the train on the tracks, an exhausted Martin, who had not slept in forty-eight hours, struggled to keep his eyes open. He was about to lose the battle and drift off when a prisoner sitting across from him let out a sharp cry. Martin’s bleary eyes darted open. The man was holding his bloodied nose. The SS had to get in a last lick.
“No one falls asleep in my presence!” hollered the guard who had struck the sleeping man with the butt of his rifle. “So you thought you were already rid of us?”
After that, no one dared to close his eyes. Even after the released prisoners had been turned over to the reception committee from the Jewish Community Council at the Munich station, even after the guards had long since departed, Martin kept