The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. Bruce Henderson
Lewy’s train ride out of Germany landed him and the other Jewish orphans from Berlin on the outskirts of Quincy-sous-Sénart, a French village of fifteen hundred residents about twenty miles south of Paris. The boys were awestruck as they approached their new home, a majestic old château owned by Count Hubert Conquéré de Monbrison. The count and his wife, Princess Irina Paley, a cousin of the last Russian czar, had for years opened the château to refugee girls from the Russian and Spanish civil wars, and they had recently been asked by a board member of a Paris-based Jewish children’s aid society, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), to take in German Jewish refugee children, whom the group had been rescuing after Kristallnacht.
When the forty boys arrived from Berlin in July 1939, there were no rooms available in the château; most were already occupied by Spanish girls. For the first several months, while the girls waited to be taken in by local families, the boys had to stay in an annex building, along with instructors and other staff, most of whom were also Jewish refugees.
The boys were enrolled in the village school across the road. Since Stephan and the others didn’t speak French, they were placed in the first grade. Stephan, who was already fourteen years old, picked up the language quickly. And given how good he was at mathematics and geography, he was soon advanced to his grade level.
One of the things he learned in his French history class was that France, a country of forty million, had lost two million men in the last war with Germany. It was a crushing loss, one that still lingered in recent memory. And yet, in spite of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and the rearming of Germany, there existed among the French a cheerful optimism and a strong sense of safety and security. The newly constructed Maginot Line, which consisted of miles of concrete walls, obstacles, and fortifications on the French side of the border with Germany, was believed to be impenetrable. Built to replicate the static defensive combat of the first war, French military experts thought it would protect their country from future German invasions.
From their own experiences with the Nazis, and after the military buildup they had seen in Germany, Stephan and the other Berlin boys did not share the locals’ sense of well-being. Stephan’s father, Arthur, had predicted that Hitler would wage war in the fall, “after the crops are in the barn,” so as to feed his army. This was the same timing Germany had employed in the last war, his father had explained to Stephan before he left Germany. Now Stephan worried about what would happen to his parents, still in Germany, and to himself in France in the event of war.
On September 1, 1939, everyone in the château gathered around the console radio to hear the BBC bulletins about Germany’s invasion of Poland. Columns of horse-mounted Polish cavalry were reported to be charging armored tanks. Two days later, France and England, allies of Poland, declared war on Germany. With the Germans unleashing a new type of modern, highly mobile warfare tactics that became known as blitzkrieg (lightning war), the battle in Poland lasted just weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 27, and a week later the nation of Poland ceased to exist, subjugating thirty-five million Poles, including more than three million Jews, to Nazi rule.
After the fall of Poland, news reports indicated that the warring nations had found themselves in a defensive stalemate, with French and Allied troops manning the Maginot Line and Germans holding the fortified Siegfried Line on their side of the border. In what the British press and politicians labeled the “Phoney War” for its lack of major fighting, for months only minor skirmishes took place. But Stephan was unable to send mail to Berlin or to receive it, and as a result, he lost all contact with his parents after fall 1939.
In May 1940, German troops invaded Belgium and Holland. Deftly bypassing the Maginot Line to the north, the Germans split the French-British-Belgian defensive front and drove Allied forces back to the coast at Dunkirk, where hundreds of small boats ferried more than three hundred thousand evacuees across the English Channel. In the south, German forces broke through the suddenly obsolete Maginot Line, and the blitzkrieg steamrolled into France, headed for Paris and the Normandy coast.
Early one morning, Stephan and the other boys were awakened by the sound of several large vehicles pulling up in front of the château. Jumping from their beds, they ran to the windows and looked out. The large courtyard was filling up with French military trucks and artillery pieces. Within an hour, the French soldiers had set up their big guns, pointing in the direction of their country’s capital. The soldiers waited, ready to try to halt the anticipated German advance after it rolled through Paris. One played an accordion; others idly smoked cigarettes.
At 10 A.M., a clearly distressed Count Monbrison gathered the boys and their instructors. He told them that the Germans were approaching Paris; and he could not guarantee the refugees’ safety. They needed to escape, and he had arranged for two trucks to take them to Limoges, 250 miles to the south. The boys went to their rooms, rolled up their blankets, put a single change of clothes in their backpacks, and went outside to the waiting trucks. They and several instructors piled into the canvas-covered back of the bigger truck; the smaller truck was loaded with their belongings and several bicycles.
Not long after leaving the château, the trucks joined a long line of stalled traffic. The German invasion had set off a mass exodus of civilians in cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, and carts, clogging the highways and secondary roads leading south. After four hours, the two trucks had made it just six miles—to the town of Corbeil, where boats and barges of varying sizes and power were motoring westward on the Seine. One instructor left to find a vessel to take them to the coast, in the hope that the waterways would be less congested than the roads. He returned an hour later and took the boys to a nearby péniche, a steel motorized river barge built for moving cargo. The vessel was about a hundred feet long, but just fifteen feet wide; it had limited space above deck for the boys and their instructors. The only available space below deck was a cargo hold half filled with coal. The boys packed into the unlit space atop the coal, and the hatch was closed. The air, thick with coal dust, was nearly unbreathable.
At dawn, the hatch was opened; the boys, blackened with soot from head to toe, came out into daylight. Stephan was surprised to discover that the barge had traveled only a short distance on the river; now it was held up in a line of traffic at a floodgate. It took a few more hours for the barge to pass through. When they finally came to a village, they docked to find food and water.
By about noon, they were back aboard the barge, ready to get underway. Suddenly, gunfire sounded all around them, and they heard people screaming on shore. Stephan had never heard gunfire before, and he had not pictured how loud it would be. The shots sounded very close. The boys had no choice but to rush back down into the darkened cargo hold, and the hatch was slammed shut after them. The barge slowly pulled out into the middle of the river. A short time later, no more than a half hour, they heard shouted orders in German, followed by the sound of the barge’s motor shutting down.
The staccato clicking of heavy boots sounded across the deck, and the cargo hold’s hatch flew open. The Jewish boys looked up to see German soldiers pointing guns down into the cargo hold.
“Juden!”
One soldier spat, “Ein Haufen schmutziger Juden!” (A bunch of dirty Jews!)
The soldiers laughed, then slammed down the hatch.
After the soldiers left, the instructors let the terrified boys out and huddled for a tense meeting. They decided to get everyone off the barge. Traffic on the river was moving too slowly, and in any case, the German army had overtaken them. The last thing they wanted to do was wind up near the front lines of a battle between the German and French armies. The instructors told the boys it would be best to return to Quincy, now some twenty miles in the opposite direction.
They found a big wooden pushcart, pulled by two long handles, and loaded their belongings. The trek back was against the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which still poured forth out of Paris as the mass evacuation of civilians continued southward.
After sunset, far-off fires and explosions turned the sky bloodred, and the boys heard the muffled explosions of distant bombs. In the dark, they walked into a checkpoint manned by French paratroopers. Wary of the group of young Germans, the soldiers questioned them closely. Where had they come from? Where were they going?