Joseph Heinrich

Joseph Heinrich Tells of His Family's Escape from Nazi Germany

from: http://ellenlandweber.com/rescuers/book/Pinkhof/josephh/joe1.html

Joseph Heinrich was one of ten children born to a middle class Jewish family in Frankfort am Main, Germany. His father, who ran a small grocery shop, was sympathetic to the Zionist movement. By 1937, when Joseph was thirteen years old, his four older brothers and sisters had already left Germany to settle in Palestine.

Joseph Heinrich: On November 9, 1938, we stood by the window of our house--the house where I was born--and watched while they burned down the big synagogue across the street. The Boerneplatz Square was crowded with thousands of spectators; they made a circus out of it. We saw it all. Suddenly they burst into our rooms with axes and bars and smashed everything up. We ran to the neighborhood police station for help. They looked at us and just laughed. We fled from them to find shelter with a family my father knew. Then in the evening we took a taxi to my aunt's house. That was Thursday. On Friday we saw them arresting Jewish people all day long. Friday evening, we were still with my aunt. We heard a knock on the door; they had come to arrest my uncle, my father's brother-in law.

My father said to them, "I won't let him go alone." "Fine. You can come too," they said, and took them both away.

A few hours later my sister and I went to the police station asking for our father. They told us to get lost. Several days after, on the 15th of November, my mother sent my little sister Lorle, my younger brother Asher, and me to Holland. We went together with a group of about twenty-five children, organized by some Jewish women; I don't know who they were.

When we arrived at the Dutch border, two S.S. men took us off the train, into a waiting room. All the Germans had to leave the room because they couldn't have Germans and Jews in one place together--we were very dangerous people, you know; I was fourteen, Lorle was eight, Asher was twelve, and there was another child of three or four. They told us there was no toilet, no water fountain, no nothing, and don't cry. Right away the little ones started crying.

We weren't allowed to leave the room until evening when they put us aboard another train, the Reingold Express--I remember it very well. We crossed the border into Holland. When we arrived, a committee was waiting to greet us. There were journalists and photographers; everyone was asking how things were in Germany. We told them about the burning and arrests.

I don't know if I can tell you how I felt; as a young child, maybe it was like some kind of adventure; I know I wasn't afraid. Even when I saw the synagogue burning and how they broke up our flat, I'm certain I was not afraid--really not.

But when we arrived in Holland, that moment was very hard for me. I think I realized all at once that something was irreversibly broken. It was only at that moment that I understood what was going on, or maybe more, I started to think about what might be in store in the future.

The next day the people looking after us told us to write letters home letting our parents know that we had arrived safely. They made sure we stayed in contact with our families by writing every week. I found out that my father was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp. But then he was set free because he managed, through a cousin, to get an affidavit for England. In 1938 Buchenwald was not yet a death camp, although there were plenty of people who never left the place. If you could show you had an affidavit to emigrate, they would set you free and let you leave the country, but it was very, very hard to do. There was practically no country in the world that would take Jews--not America, not England, none. Ships were leaving for America, but if you were Jewish you couldn't go, even if you had the money. The only place you could go to easily was Shanghai, and who had enough money to go there? --very, very few. When the Germans invaded Poland on the first of September 1939, my mother said to my father, "You must leave, otherwise they will arrest you again." But there was no affidavit for my mother. I never saw her again.

My father was on the last civilian train to cross the Holland border, and then on the last boat from Holland to England. In England he was arrested right away for being German--an enemy alien--and put in a concentration camp on the Isle of Mann with Nazis! He was there for a long time.

Joseph Heinrich: In Holland, Lorle, Asher and I were put in a home for refugee children in Den Dolder, near Bilthoven. Nearby was a school called the Children's Werkplaats. The Werkplaats was a very special place, a private school managed by Kees Boeke, somewhat along the principles of Montessori in Switzerland. Children began in kindergarten and stayed there until they were eighteen years old. Mirjam Waterman was a teacher there. Once one of the pupils told her, "Mirjam, do you know there is a group of young people--refugees--who have nothing to do? Do you think they could come to us?" It was her students who made the connection between our refugee home and their school.

Boeke rented a special house for all of us Jewish refugees from Germany--about forty-five or fifty children. At fourteen, I was the oldest; the youngest was only four years old. Because we didn't know the Dutch language yet, they put us apart from the other children, to make it easier for them to teach us. That was how I met Mirjam: she was my Dutch language teacher.

Mirjam was very patient as a teacher; I think she felt sympathy for the little children who had to leave their families. In the beginning I think she just felt sorry for us, but later on she became really involved, with all her heart.

We became very close; if there was anything I needed to talk about, I went to Mirjam, not to any of the male teachers. There was only about five or six years difference in our ages and she was like a big sister to me.

One time she brought me home to her parents. "Mother, this is Joseph," was all she said. It was that easy. Her mother became like a mother to me--really.

My impression was that her father was a very rich man; I think he was a diamond merchant. He had some land, and orchards with apple and plum trees. He was an easygoing man. Mirjam made me a present of a bicycle; between Bilthoven and Loosdrecht, where they lived, it was only a 20-minute ride. I went to their house very often, in fact, every moment that I could.

Other children in the refugee group were friendly with them, but none were as close as I was; I was like their child; I was at home there. I could go to her mother if I felt sick. Her father had a library with a lot of books, which he took great pride in and carefully protected. No one was allowed to touch the books, but he made an exception for me.

Then in 1939, before Hitler started the war, the children at our Den Dolder refugee house were sent to live with families all over Holland. My sister Lorle went to a family in Friesland, in the north, where she stayed safely until the end of the war. Asher went to a family in Bilthoven, and I was sent to an orphanage in Utrecht.

When the war in Holland broke out on May 10, 1940, the director of the orphanage sent me to a Youth Aliyah group in Zeeland. I stayed there for only two or three weeks until the Germans decided to evacuate all the Jewish people from the province. They sent me to another Youth Aliyah House, this one in Loosdrecht, in the neighborhood of Mirjam's parents. That was the connection: Mirjam knew us and our leaders who were all young people her age. Officially, she was not part of the Loosdrecht Youth House, but she came over all the time; it was only two hundred meters from her house. Now I was at home at two places: Loosdrecht and Mirjam's.

At Loosdrecht there were about fifty boys and girls my age, between fifteen and seventeen. On a certain day we got an order that we had to go to Westerbork concentration camp, the whole group together. The leaders decided to hide us instead, although they had only a few days to make the arrangements.

The Westerweel Group: Mirjam was the link between our Loosdrecht leaders and several teachers from the Werkplaats school in Bilthoven. They formed a group headed by Joop Westerweel, a non-Jew. I was in his home quite often before all the troubles began. He was a really special person, a very strong man. For Joop there were only two sides: something was either right or it was wrong. He said, "It's wrong to persecute people for their religion or race. It's wrong, and you must fight wrong without compromise."

The Dutch government had prepared identity cards for everyone in Holland before the war even started; there was nothing like it in any other western European country, not even in Germany. So when the Germans came in, they found the whole Dutch population registered and accounted for. That made it easy for them to find people, and difficult and dangerous for underground work. Joop had refused to take an identity card for himself or his family. "I'm not a sheep to be herded," he said, "I'm a human being." But when he began to work in the underground he took an identity card--a false one, of course. He and his wife, Willie, went into the war without any compromise, even though they had four children, and Willie was pregnant. A Christian person risked everything by helping Jews--his whole family. When Joop and Willie were caught they had to hide their children, including a baby who was less than a year old.

Joop left his teaching job, and Mirjam became one hundred percent involved after we went into hiding. It was not the kind of work you could do part time. They had to go around to all the places where we were hiding and bring money, false identity papers, and ration stamps to the families looking after us. They also had to travel all over Holland, constantly looking for new families that would take us in. It's a small country, but in those days travel was not so easy. Even if you had a car, there was no gasoline. There were curfews, raids all the time, and German guards at every station checking identity papers on the trains. It was a full-time job.

Joseph Underground: The first underground place I was sent to was the home of a painter in Arnhem. I was in a group of eight or nine boys there; the time had been too short to find a place for each of us. This artist had a Jewish girlfriend who was caught by the Germans after we had been with him for only two or three days. We had to leave quickly, in case they decided to search his place. Within a few hours we were taken to another address in Arnhem. A few days later, my brother and I, and a young Dutch student, not a Jew, moved again, to a place near Appeldorn. This man's name was Urban, and he was known far and wide as a communist.

Whenever something bad happened in the neighborhood, they called on Urban first. One night the Dutch police came again to arrest Urban for something or other. We were sound asleep and didn't hear them coming. Suddenly I heard a policeman asking me, "Where's your identity card?" "I'm only fourteen years old. I don't need an identity card." "You are only fourteen?" "Yes." "Get dressed then. You have to get out of here."

It was two o'clock in the morning. My brother and I and this Dutch boy, who had false papers, left the house, out into the cold and rain. We went to the neighbors to ask for shelter, but nobody would open their door. They didn't know who we were, but they knew we had been staying with Urban--we had his stigma.

All night long we stood in the rain, waiting for daylight. Then, soaked through, we took a bus to Amsterdam and made a connection with some members of our Westerweel group; they found another place for us. That's how it went: you had to change places all the time.

So many things happened, you couldn't stop to think too much about any of it. You just knew you had to go from point A to point B, and that's all. You could go straight, or go around; you had to figure it out for yourself. Nobody told you how to behave--only the newcomers didn't know. One thing you learned was that when you see a German, don't step off the pavement, but walk straight ahead; it's your right to walk on the sidewalk. Don't act afraid, or cross the street, or they'll look at you. Don't look over your shoulder. Behave like other people. Coming from Germany, our language was German, of course, but if a German speaks to you in German, don't answer. Sometimes they would be standing right behind you and say, "Come here!" You couldn't turn your head. We spoke in Dutch and the Germans couldn't detect whether or not it was with a German accent.

I didn't see Mirjam again until after the war, but Menachem, our Loosdrecht leader who became Mirjam's husband, I saw very often. I was also in frequent contact with Jan Smith, a teacher from the Bilthoven Werkplaats, and he saw Mirjam frequently. He brought me her greetings and news; I always knew what was going on with her and her family. I knew when they went into hiding, but I didn't know where. No one wanted to know more than was necessary.

Menachem was an intellectual. He worked at the Youth Aliyah house as a teacher and a leader, but by profession he was an engineer. A man named Lodi Cohen was the head of the Loosdrecht leaders, and Menachem was second. There were four altogether--Cohen, Menachem, Hanna Asher and Adina Simon, who was married to Shushu.

It was not easy for these leaders to work with us. We were children who had left our families, there was the war, and on top of that there were all these German decrees on how we were to behave, such as Jews having to wear the star--I think I wore it only twice. We were a group of youngsters--fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old--and our leaders were only twenty-two, or twenty-four years old themselves, yet they were completely responsible for us. They worked very hard.

I don't think I was an especially good boy. One time my brother and I and another boy, Dov Ascheim, decided to run away from Loosdrecht to be on our own. We made a connection with the secretary of the village to provide us identity cards without the incriminating "J" (for Jew) stamp. But then he went to our leaders telling them that three of their boys might be planning something. Menachem took me aside and said, "Joseph, we will all go into hiding together. Give me your identity card, and don't make trouble." It was a very hard responsibility for a young man like him to take on; he couldn't know whether he would succeed in hiding us.

Every one of them could have saved themselves. But if all the leaders went away, who would take care of the children in hiding? Somebody had to stay in Holland to go on working. The shepherd cannot leave the flock. I think they had to be very very brave and courageous to take on this task. What they did was a very great deed. And they paid the price.

Shushu, for example, brought his wife to Switzerland and he was caught on the way back. Afraid that he would say too much, he asked for a razor blade from the policeman in the prison, and committed suicide.

Joseph Heinrich: At a certain point they started to bring the Pioneer children to France, reasoning that if they brought a lot of them to France, it would make conditions easier for the others in Holland.

I left Holland in April '43, with my brother. My little sister stayed behind, safe with the family in Friesland. Our plan was to go to Spain, to the American Army, but we were caught on the way. Underground in France: We had made our way to Antwerp, where we were staying in a pub called Julia's Anchor, waiting for our guide to Spain--he was the husband of the woman who was hiding us. At first it was just my brother Asher and me, then two other boys showed up, four of us now waiting for this man.

Twice he had made the trip to Spain with Jewish boys from our Dutch pioneer group. We didn't know that on the second trip the Germans caught him. So we were waiting, and meanwhile more and more boys showed up. Now there were ten. One day a neighborhood woman who was friendly with a German soldier, told him, "You know, I think there are a lot of Dutchmen hiding in that place." He came to see for himself. Fortunately, we had work papers and identity papers bearing the swastika stamp--printed by our organization in Holland--saying we were Dutch students working for the Germans in France.

The German police and soldiers were very brutal, but when they saw the swastika stamp, you could tell them just about anything and they would believe it--everything was all right. With the Gestapo, however, it was different; you had to be more careful with them.

We told the soldier we were homesick and had gone home for a visit, but now we wanted to come back to work. He never suspected we were Jews.

"So you ran away from work? Well, now you have to go back!" He gave us an escort of soldiers and put us on a train to France. Well, okay, we thought. France was all right for us; we wanted to be there. They brought us to La Manche, about twenty miles south of Bologne.

For eight months we worked in France, first in the north at Le Mans, later in the south near Bordeaux. Living in France was safer for us: it was easier to disappear into the crowd. Throughout that whole time we stayed in contact with the Westerweel group in Holland. Someone was always going back to bring more kids over the border, one or two at a time.

But how can I explain some of the things that happened? They make no sense. When they took us from the pub to "go back" to work we had to undergo a medical exam by a German doctor; it was not so nice. There were fourteen Jewish boys in the work transport with twenty-five or so non-Jewish Belgians. The doctor was an officer. He checked us from head to foot. But, he did not say one word about what he saw--he said nothing, we said nothing.

"You want to work?" was all he asked.

We were very pleased. Our morale was very high. We went to work for the Todt Organization in France. We were paid wages, and were free to come and go as we wished. It wasn't forced labor. By then it was very difficult for civilians to buy a train ticket, so we traveled on military trains. We told them, "Look, we are working for you; we are Aryan; we can travel on your trains." They considered the Dutch to be Aryan, so it was all right. We traveled for free. We could never have done that in Holland, but in France we did it several times. Even when we went to the Spanish border, it was on a military train.

When I thought about it afterward, I realized that sometimes we did very stupid things. For example, if we were hungry we took what we called an "order paper"--printed with all the proper stamps by our organization in Holland--and wrote in my false name: "Jaap So and So is traveling from Paris to Lille." We showed the pass to the camp supply commandant. It said I had to travel for twelve hours so I must have bread and sausage for the journey. We signed these passes to each other; sometimes we put four or five names on one, and then we could get food for ten men.

There was a Todt Organization man who was very very tough; we called him "Stucker," after the fighter plane. One time he said to one of our men, "I am sure you are a Jew." We went to the camp commandant to make a complaint: "Why was he calling us Jews?" After that a car was sent to pick us up and take us to work everyday. Everyone else had to walk, but we got a car! The Yiddish word is chutzpah.

When we ran away from Holland we took only what we were wearing. September came and we had no warm clothing, so we wrote ourselves passes and went south, by military trains, of course. We wanted to be close to Spain, but from the Spanish border north for about 80 or 100 kilometers was a restricted military zone. So we stopped about 60 kilometers south of Bordeaux, and there split into two groups.

One day when we met with the other group, they told us they had noticed two young men living in little wooden houses, one right up against the other. They were pretty sure they were Jews. The problem was how to make contact without giving anything away; we couldn't figure it out. Finally one day, when he was within earshot, one of our men whistled "Hatikvah." They whistled "Hatikvah" back! It turned out that the two men were brothers, Hungarian Jews named Greenbaum, who had run away from Paris. We became friends, and later they came with us to Spain.

To Spain: Joop Westerweel and his group arranged for us to cross over the Pyrenees into Spain in February '44. He made connections with a Jewish group in the French Maquis, and they had connections with smugglers who knew the mountains. Joop's Dutch organization paid the smugglers so much for every head. As in all the underground groups, you only knew what you needed to. They told you on a certain day, at a certain hour, you have to be here. You didn't ask questions. So many things we only learned about afterward. Joop came all the way to the Pyrenees to say goodby to us. On the way back he was caught, because of a false name; he had the papers of a man the Germans were looking for. It was very stupid. Why did they catch him and not me?

We crossed at the highest point in the Pyrenees--about 3,000 meters--near a point called Pic de Montvalie. The smuggler guides brought us half-way, pointed out the direction to Spain, and left us there. Then the thirty-four men in our group had to climb the mountain.

The snow was so high, when my little brother took a step he sank up to his chest--he almost disappeared. Another group crossed over the next summer, and found the track we had made in February; the snow was so deep it was still there five months later.

We had a French police officer with us, a non-Jew who was in trouble and had to run away, I don't know why. Nobody asked anybody anything. If you were part of the group, fine; we all went together. Fortunately, this man was experienced in the mountains. During the day the marching kept us from freezing, but when night came, we were on top of the mountain: it was snowing and very cold. He showed us how to bury ourselves in the snow to stay warm through the night. Some people didn't trust him at first because he was a policeman, but we were lucky to have him: we were wearing only light clothes, and might have frozen to death otherwise. We didn't have much food: each man had eight or ten cubes of sugar and a little bit of raw meat. For water we had snow. When we were hungry we put a little bit of meat in our mouth and chewed on it.

We marched for three days, but--it's amazing--I didn't feel real hunger. I knew I was climbing the mountain; I saw the clouds, and they were beneath me! There was ice and snow, snow and ice everywhere; the sun was shining. How did I feel? I don't know!

It was a very hard thing to do, but once we started there was no other choice. We were thirty-four men, and we all made it. There was one old man with us--he was about sixty--and the rest were all boys of nineteen or twenty. Before we began the march they told us, "Don't expect help along the way. If you fall down, you cannot expect help." At a certain moment the older man and a young Dutchman, who was very heavy, fell behind. We had stopped for a rest, sitting down for half an hour or so, when far, far behind us we saw these two men crawling on all fours. We talked it over and said, no, we won't let them die in the mountains. We sent a few of the strongest back to get them. After that, we pulled and pushed them all the way for two more days, and they made it.

In the evening of the third day we came to Mohgarri, on the Spanish side of the border. We spent the night with a man who was very kind: he cooked soup for us; we gave him watches and fountain pens. People in the village asked where we were coming from. When we told them Pic de Montvalie, they said, "No, that's impossible! No one could come from there in February." But we did.

The next day, two boys whose feet were bad stayed behind, while the rest of us went on to Esterri. As we left, we saw fresh ski tracks pointing away from the village; we knew that someone went off to warn the Spanish police about us. By then we were so exhausted we didn't even care; whatever would happen would happen.

We walked all day--ten hours--until we came to Esterri. The police were waiting for us. They locked us up for the night. The next day four or five policemen were asking our names--things like that--but only one of them could even write. Well, he didn't so much write as paint the letters.

Of course we had thrown away our papers before we crossed the border. Later they gave us a meal at a little restaurant. There was not much food available, but the wine was plentiful.

To Palestine: At that time the Spanish government was accepting refugees from Nazi-occupied countries who made their way into Spain. My group went first to Lerida, then to Barcelona where we hoped to sail immediately. But we had just missed the Portuguese ship, Nyassa, which departed at the end of January, carrying seven hundred and fifty immigrants to Palestine. We waited eight months for the next opportunity. From time to time small groups of French and Dutch Young Pioneers who crossed the Pyrenees in subsequent treks, joined us. We were supported with funds provided by the American Joint Distribution Committee and The Jewish Agency. Finally, in October 1944, the S.S. Guine sailed from Cadiz for Palestine carrying one hundred seventy-five young Jewish refugees who had illegally crossed the Pyrenees. I was among them.

We landed in Haifa on November 4, 1944. I have been here since that time and there has always been war, more or less. C'est la vie.

Joseph Heinrich gave this interview in his home in Aja Not, Israel, April 10, 1988. He passed away on November 17, 1992 at the age of sixty-eight. He is survived by his wife, Rachel Heinrich.

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