The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. Bruce Henderson
he arrived at Chabannes, Stephan was summoned to the director’s office. Months earlier, he had sought Monsieur Chevrier’s help in trying to contact his parents, whom he had never stopped thinking about during his own flights through wartime France. Were they in danger? Or had something terrible already happened to them? So much had transpired since they had parted in Berlin. Now the Nazis were at war with the world, not just the Jews in Germany. Although he was terribly afraid he might get bad news, Stephan had decided that he needed to know one way or another. Were his parents dead or alive?
Mercifully, on this day, Chevrier was not bearing bad news. He explained that he had just received a wire from the Red Cross in Switzerland, reporting that Stephan’s parents had been located in America.
Stephan wasn’t sure he had heard right. “America?”
“Yes,” Chevrier said, smiling. “You can write to them.”
Stephan was excited and greatly relieved that his parents had found a way to get to America. Would he be able to join them? He hurriedly wrote a letter that same day. Several weeks passed before he heard back. When a return letter arrived, forwarded via Switzerland, it was written in his stepmother’s graceful cursive.
Dearest Stephan,
We were so excited when your letter came we first stared at the envelope before we dared open it . . .
Back in Germany, Arthur had lost weight, lowered his blood pressure, and passed his follow-up physical with ease. In quick order, they had received an affidavit from Johanna’s cousin, Bert Klapper, in Massachusetts, and visas for the United States. They had taken what they believed was their last opportunity to escape the Nazis, departing Germany in May 1940. It had been an agonizing decision for them because they did not know where Stephan was or even if he was still alive.
On their third day at sea, aboard a ship that left from Rotterdam, they heard news of the German invasion of Holland and Belgium. By the time they arrived in the U.S., France was at war, and the organizations they contacted were unable to find out anything about Stephan. There was more, much more, in the letter: their excitement at locating him, their love for him, how they were determined to find a way to bring him to America, too. Stephan read the letter again, and then, for the first time in a long time, he cried.
Over the next several months, and after some bureaucratic hitches, the paperwork for Stephan’s entry into the United States was finished. Johanna’s cousin signed an affidavit for him, as did his parents’ employer, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and become very successful in business. Arthur and Johanna Lewy were working as butler and maid at his mansion in Boston, Massachusetts. Their employer even gave them five hundred dollars to pay for their son’s ship passage.
In April 1942, Stephan said good-bye to everyone at Chabannes and took the train to Lyon, where he picked up his visa at the U.S. consul’s office. He then traveled two hundred miles by rail to Marseille, France’s southernmost Mediterranean port, and boarded a French passenger ship. Once on board, the captain gathered everyone together and explained the circuitous route he planned to take.
“If we leave here and head straight out into the Mediterranean toward North Africa,” he said, “we’ll probably get torpedoed by a German U-boat and no one will ever know what happened to us.” Instead, he was going to hug the coastline, slipping in and out of every inlet. “If we get torpedoed, I can at least scuttle the ship near land and maybe save our lives.”
They reached Barcelona and took on fifty Spanish refugees. Continuing along the eastern and southern coast of Spain, they crossed the seven-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, heading toward North Africa. Not forgetting the captain’s dire U-boat warning, everyone on board was relieved to finally arrive in Rabat, Morocco.
Stephan took a bus to Casablanca, where he waited several weeks for the ship that would take him across the Atlantic: the Portuguese steamship Serpa Pinto, a six-thousand-ton vessel chartered by the U.S.-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to take seven hundred Jewish refugees to America. Because it flew under the flag of a neutral country, the Serpa Pinto was one of the few passenger ships still making transatlantic voyages despite the U-boat menace. It departed Casablanca on June 7, 1942.
As the five-hundred-foot ship sped across the Atlantic at near top speed, Stephan found himself unnerved by the ship’s running lights, which were left blazing all night. The ship stood out like a beacon in the inky darkness. One morning, Stephan questioned a ship’s officer about all the lights. With all the U-boats, wasn’t it dangerous to be so lit up at night?
“We are neutral,” said the officer. “That is why we fly an extra-large Portuguese flag so prominently with the lights glowing. Any vessel can see we are a neutral ship.”
The flag, clearly visible at the stern and lit by flood lighting at night, was a huge green-and-red wooden one that did not crumple or ruffle in the wind. The officer’s explanation seemed plausible to Stephan—up until a few hours later, when the vibration of the engines ceased. He joined the other passengers in a rush to the railings and saw a low-slung submarine with a swastika painted on its conning tower.
Several German sailors from the U-boat climbed into a small, motorized launch, which they took to the ship. When they reached the Serpa Pinto, a rope ladder was thrown over the hull for them to climb up. On deck, there was no chatter from the refugees, only deathly silence. Stephan felt sick to his stomach. He knew there was no place to hide.
For three hours, the armed boarding party searched all the compartments on the ship, apparently looking for contraband. When they found none, they had the crew collect the passengers’ passports and went through them one at a time. Nearly all carried the red “J.”
At last, the boarding party left and returned to the submarine. The passengers remained on deck, watching to see what would happen next. “Habt keine Angst,” said a multilingual ship’s officer. He circled the deck, telling the mostly German-speaking passengers not to be afraid.
But every one of them was scared to death. Would the U-boat turn toward them, launch a torpedo, and sink them? Hoping he hadn’t come this far only to drown in the middle of the ocean, Stephan joined the others on deck who were praying in German and Hebrew; they continued until they could no longer see the submarine in the distance.
On June 25, 1942, the Serpa Pinto arrived in New York harbor. The ship slowed as it passed the Statue of Liberty, allowing the passengers a good look at the three-hundred-foot sculpture of the Roman goddess Libertas. She held high the copper torch, lighting the path to freedom from tyranny and suffering for oppressed immigrants from other shores. Some on the boat were smiling and laughing; others were struck speechless.
Stephan Lewy, who had been an orphan for more than half his lifetime, knew his father and loving new mother were waiting for him dockside. He breathed deeply, and his eyes filled with tears. He had made it.
Günther Stern’s father had cautioned him to “be like invisible ink” so as to not draw attention to himself. But soon after they said good-bye at the port of Bremerhaven, where he boarded the SS Hamburg in November 1937, Günther joined in with the other emigrant children on the ship, running around playing hide-and-seek and pulling practical jokes on one another. The Jewish youngsters were eager to be free of the restrictive rules under which they had been living in Nazi Germany, which required them to be better than good in public so as to remain inconspicuous. In fact, Günther was still so wrapped up in his new oceangoing adventure that he hadn’t yet had time to be homesick.
On deck one sunny day, the children befriended an older American who was traveling