Escaping Hitler: A Jewish Haven in Chile

1. The Germany We Left

1 The germany We left We received my grandparents’ last letter from Burgsteinfurt, germany, on november 9, 1941.1 They were then sixty and sixty-five years old. my mother and i had arrived in chile on november 13, 1939, fleeing the nazi inferno. The second World War had already started. We never heard from my grandparents again. at the end of the war we learned through german government records that they had been killed in riga, latvia.2 now we know, according to Burgsteinfurt historian ingeborg Hötting, that they and my grandaunt and granduncle were among a group of eighteen Jews who were hauled from their homes on december 10, 1941, and taken to nearby münster. There, along with hundreds of Jews from the entire region, they were locked inside a once-famous restaurant, the gertrudenhoff .3 They remained there until the train arrived that was to carry them from münster to Bielefeld, and finally to the riga ghetto in latvia. another group of seven Jews left Burgsteinfurt on January 27, 1942, and went to riga via dortmund. not a single member of this group survived the war. a third group was transported to Theresienstadt in czechoslovakia on July 13, 1942. This latter group included my mother’s schoolteacher and Jewish community cantor, Hermann Emanuel. according to german historian Willi Feld, only three Jews from this group survived.4 a total of 1,350 citizens from the Westfallen district alone lost their lives. There were some ethnic germans who tried to help the Jews in the münsterland before their departure. gerda dubovsky tells of her uncle ludwig Kaufmann, from Burgsteinfurt, who was visited by a former client, an important ss man, who saw Kaufmann just before his transport to riga and offered to take him across the border into Holland that same night. a col- 2 / chapter 1 league wanted to hide him and his wife, but Kaufmann did not accept their help, refusing to put these people in danger. another Jew, Ellen löwenstein, from oelde, recounts an incident occurring on the last day before deportation when a completely unknown woman brought her a package of butter, cheese, and sausage and disappeared before she could thank her. Before Jews were deported, the gestapo would take their money, valuables, and house keys and give them a receipt.5 siegfried Weinberg, one of the survivors from the first transport to riga, recalls that on december 12, 1941, Jews were moved to the freight train station starting at eleven o’clock at night. about thirty-five to forty people were packed into small buses with their handbags. according to ingeborg Hötting, on the morning of december 13, 1941, during one of the coldest winters on record , 1,006 Jews boarded the train, 400 of them from the münster/Westfallen region. They were crammed into the third class area of the train—eight to ten in each locked compartment—and on december 13 at ten o’clock in the morning, the train started to move.6 They remained on board for three days without any heat or food. Jeanette Wolff, who lived in dortmund—where the Jews were waiting to be deported—told about them being held in the stock exchange building and sleeping on the bare floor for four nights before they were loaded on dirty, unheated wagons with toilets that were full of a half meter of frozen excrement . The unusually cold winter made the trip even more unbearable. Wolff describes the train trip: “The terrible cold, and on top of it to have to sit day and night almost motionless brought about terrible frostbites.”7 after three days of traveling with insufficient drinking water, those who arrived late in the evening at the riga station had to sit one more night in the unheated wagons. The next morning when the ss beat the Jews to make them get off, they could hardly move because of their stiff limbs. They had difficulty wearing their shoes due to their swollen feet. But the beatings started immediately, and those men who had a cigar in their mouth quickly had it knocked out, and the same happened with their hats. That was their welcome ! The Jews had to march seven kilometers carrying their hand luggage to the ghetto. Those who were too old, too sick, or too young were taken on sleds and never seen again. all the Jews’ heavier luggage was to be sent to the...