The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. Bruce Henderson
take the night train to Amsterdam,” he told Werner.
Since the train did not leave until midnight and it was now only noontime, they had a long wait. During their time together, Werner learned more about what had finally compelled his father to get the family out of Germany. New restrictions on Jews were being enacted all the time, he said, including the confiscation of their properties and assets. Germany was witnessing the “gradual strangulation of Jewish businesses.” Ernst feared that sooner or later there would be no opportunity for carrying on business and no way for him to make a living. Under the Nazis, he feared the family would eventually end up paupers with no place to go.
After sitting in a neighborhood café for a while, his father suggested they go see a movie. Dragging their bags along, they took a taxi to the cinema and settled into seats for a film, which was preceded by a newsreel entitled “Papi’s Fortieth Birthday.” It turned out that “Papi” was Joseph Goebbels, who had just turned forty. He was shown celebrating with his wife, Magda, and their young children, who presented bouquets of flowers to the beaming Nazi propaganda minister.
It was all too much for Ernst. He whispered to Werner that he should stay and watch the movie; they could meet afterward at the nearby apartment of his good friend Leo Gerson, to whom he wished to say good-bye.
Werner decided it was a good thing his father had left. The movie was about police chasing bank robbers in Amsterdam.
A surprise awaited Werner when he reached Leo Gerson’s apartment. Before he’d even had time to take off his jacket, his father told him there’d been a change of plans. Werner was to take a taxi to the train station and board the sleeping car, on which his father had reserved a private compartment. Once there, he would tip the conductor two Reichmarks and tell him that his father had been delayed in Berlin on business and wouldn’t be making the trip.
“I am to go to Amsterdam alone? What do you plan to do, Papa?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ernst answered.
His father said only that they would meet up in Amsterdam, and hurriedly sent Werner on his way with money for expenses. Shortly after Werner left, Ernst went to the same railway station, but to a different platform, and took a train heading in the opposite direction. He had a plan, of course, but had thought it was best for them both if he kept Werner in the dark. Ernst had also decided it was safer for them to travel apart. As he’d expected them to be on that morning’s flight to Amsterdam, he had advised his longtime secretary, Else Radinowsky, and the bank’s owner, Leo Königsberger, to report the missing funds to police that afternoon, so they wouldn’t be suspected as co-conspirators. When the flight to Amsterdam was canceled, Ernst had decided against contacting either his secretary or the bank’s owner, for fear of their becoming entangled in his crime. By now, they had likely notified police that the missing Jewish director of the Königsberger and Lichtenhein Bank had withdrawn all of his personal capital and was apparently fleeing the country. If that was the case, the authorities would try anything they could to stop him.
Ernst’s fears were justified. By that afternoon, his colleagues had reported the missing money, and the police in turn had notified customs officials, who sent out telegrams to all border crossing stations reading: “Family of five named Angress to be arrested.”
As he boarded the midnight train, Werner didn’t know any of this. He followed his father’s detailed instructions: he tipped the conductor and said his father would not be joining him as originally planned. The conductor asked for his passport, and Werner handed it over. In the sleeping compartment, Werner undressed and lay down on the lower bunk. Exhausted, he fell asleep before the train had even left the station.
A few hours later, the train stopped in the dark at Bentheim-Grenze, the last station in Germany before the Dutch border. Werner was still asleep when the light came on in the compartment; he awakened to three men standing next to his bunk. One was the conductor he had tipped. The other two wore trench coats and derbies—one of them held Werner’s passport, which he was studying intently.
Your last name is Angress? he asked in German.
A groggy Werner said yes.
Where is your father?
Without hesitating, Werner coolly lied as his father had instructed him and said he was in Berlin.
After further questioning, the Gestapo left the compartment and went into the corridor for a short conversation. They had been advised to be on the lookout for a family of five, not a teenage boy traveling alone. They handed Werner’s passport back to the conductor and left.
The train soon started rolling again. Werner dressed quickly and was given back his passport by the conductor, who said his shift was about to end.
In a few minutes, the train stopped at Oldenzaal, the first station in Holland. Only when the new conductor, speaking German with a Dutch accent, greeted Werner did it register on him that he was out of Germany and traveling in a free country. His mother and brothers were also safe; his one remaining concern was his father. Werner hoped that whatever plan his father had come up with yesterday would also bring him safely to Holland, and that they would find his mother and brothers waiting for them there and be reunited.
In Amsterdam, Werner went directly from the station to the Pension Rosengarten on Beethovenstraat, using directions his father had made him memorize. When he found the address, he saw that it was an old, dark apartment building, filled with newly arrived German Jews who were also waiting to make connections to someplace else. The owner, who was the head of the currency-smuggling ring, had just received a telegram from Ernst, asking if “Werner and Minna” had made it to Amsterdam. “Minna” was code for the briefcase filled with money. The owner was now able to wire Ernst that both Werner and Minna had indeed arrived safely.
It took Ernst another week to reach Amsterdam. To avoid arrest, he followed an agonizingly circuitous route. From Berlin, he had taken the train to Prague. When he arrived at the Czech border, he exited on the wrong side of the train and walked across the tracks, avoiding the German border guards. Entering Czechoslovakia, he identified himself as a Jewish refugee from Germany. He assured the Czech border guards that he was en route to Holland via Austria, Switzerland, and France—a path German refugees called the “Jewish Southern Loop”—and thus avoided being sent back.
In Amsterdam, the family was finally reunited. Yet, for weeks after they had moved into a rented apartment, Ernst struggled to put the ordeal behind him. He had done things in an effort to get his family out of Germany that he had never thought he was capable of doing. He had not only broken the law for the first time in his life, but in doing so, he had subjected his wife and sons to dangers as well. Adding to these deep blows to his self-esteem, Ernst had to reckon with all that the family had left behind in the city and country of their birth. There was their home and all their belongings, which Ernst heard had been seized by the Gestapo, and the respectable reputation he had built in his profession. There were also their extended families and ancestral burial sites, all left behind. No matter how safe they were outside Germany, there were so many things they could not replace or replicate elsewhere.
Werner was nearly inconsolable, too. He’d left all his friends in such a hurry that he hadn’t even been able to say good-byes. After the financial crimes his father had committed, he would never be able to return to Gross Breesen or Germany. Like it or not, he was in exile, too. He talked about this with his father, who understood how he felt. He had always been a German patriot, Ernst told his son. When he was in the army in the last war, he had volunteered to go to the front to take part in the fighting, and had been disappointed when he was assigned to military base duty because of a hearing disorder. But now—
“Hitler and the Nazis aren’t letting us be Germans anymore,” Ernst said bitterly. “They have humiliated and degraded Jews to second-class citizens. For that reason, Werner, Germany is no longer our homeland. I’ll take up a gun against those crooks anytime!”
His own heart made heavier by his father’s sorrow and deep sense of betrayal, Werner had no idea how soon the day would come when he, rather than his father, would be taking up arms in just