THE ROMANIAN SOLDIERS IN THEIR sand-colored uniforms and large sloping helmets came together with the plainly dressed civilians on a warm summer weekend in the midst of World War II. They gathered on the streets of Jassy, Harry’s Romanian hometown, in late June 1941, not to celebrate or to protest or to even shoot at the Russian bombers intermittently attacking their city. They were there for one reason: to kill the Jews living among them.
The pogrom had been planned days before, maybe even weeks or months before, the tension hanging over the city like a dark storm cloud. The fascist Romanian government, which had joined the Axis in 1940, claimed they were worried the Jews would conspire with their enemies, the Communists, and so ordered their deaths. Over three days, Romanian and German forces fired machine guns at all Jews found walking on the streets. Some soldiers laughingly tossed hand grenades into basements where Jewish families hid huddled together in darkness. Though the Nazis were there to help cleanse Jassy of its Jewish population, the anti-Semitism had run deep for centuries. It was the reason Harry and his family had left long ago.
Using rifle butts to knock their neighbors’ doors in, the Romanian police invaded home after home after home, shooting those inside. As men, women, and children tried to flee, their fellow citizens stabbed and beat them to death with clubs and crowbars, their blood staining the walls of the city and running onto the cobblestones in large puddles. The victims were people their murderers had seen every day, the baker, the grocer, the tailor, and had said hello to in passing for years. Their bodies now lay dead in the streets, stripped of jewelry, watches, and, in some cases, their clothes.
Local police officers, once the purveyors of law and order, forced hundreds of Jewish residents into their headquarters’ courtyard at gunpoint, and then shot them all to death, their bodies moved to large piles in the local churchyard. It took two days to remove all the bodies. Some were buried and others were thrown into the Bahlui River.
On Sunday and Monday, thousands of massacre survivors were crowded onto two trains, like the ones that had once passed Harry’s apartment on Riverside Drive. Instead of pigs and cows, they were full of humans, headed for a concentration camp. But the trains moved so slowly and stopped for so long in the intense summer heat that most of the passengers, denied water or air, suffocated to death.
Perhaps news of the twelve thousand massacred that week reached Harry in New York through relatives and neighbors that he and his family had left behind.
Similar purges were taking place throughout Europe. All but two hundred of the Jews from the Schulzbachs’ native city of Kolomyia were murdered. Jules’s sister Golda, who had been thrown out of her apartment on Kristallnacht, tried to flee Poland once she got there, but quotas in the United States were tightened. She was placed on a six-year waiting list. Regretting their decision not to leave for Palestine when given the chance, she and her husband, Simon, tried to arrange escape through Cuba, but it was too late. In March of 1941, they, along with thousands of other Polish Jews, were sent to the Kraków ghetto, along with their younger son, Paul.
Golda’s older son, Don, the teenage engineer who had had to quit high school in Berlin because of the Nazis, was not with them. He had left Poland long ago. His story, like all the stories of Jewish refugees, was more dramatic than any Hollywood screenplay Billy Wilder could ever dream up.
Don, like Jules, was intent on leaving for America. Because of his Dutch birth, quotas were still open to him in 1939. However, he had no copy of his Dutch birth certificate, only his Polish passport. He visited the American embassy in Warsaw, where they assured him his papers were on their way from Berlin. He returned again and again, but was finally told by the American consul that the United States didn’t need people like him.
After waiting for weeks for his Dutch papers to arrive, he returned to Berlin to retrieve a copy of his birth certificate. But it had been sent to Warsaw weeks before. Halleck Rose, the American vice-consul in Berlin who had helped Jules, was sure it had been stolen and sold by the corrupt anti-Semitic American diplomats in Warsaw. Rose issued Don an exit visa. But the next day, Germany declared war on Poland. Don, a Jew with a Polish passport, was trapped in enemy territory.
Scrambling for a way to escape, in mid-September Don boarded a train in Berlin to Sassnitz, Germany, where he hoped to catch a ferry to neutral Sweden. As soon as he got on the train, he surveyed the car to see if there was any way he could blend in with the other Aryan passengers. If the Germans discovered he was a Polish Jew, he would be arrested.
In one compartment, he noticed an old German farm woman with baskets of fruit and potatoes at her feet. She also had a bottle of vodka and was already feeling no pain. Don, very handsome and blond, sat down next to her and asked if he could have a sip. After a while, he pretended to be drunk as well, and started singing German songs with her. Don made sure she kept drinking and put his arm around her, swaying back and forth to the music they were making. At one stop, the compartment doors opened and a member of the Gestapo, dressed in black leather, entered.
Don sang louder. The farmer by this time was soused, swinging her bottle as they sang together. When the Gestapo asked for her ID, she didn’t even hear him. Don, only pretending to be drunk, heard him quite clearly but ignored him. When the Gestapo officer asked again, the conductor stepped up and tried to help.
“These two are drunken pigs,” the conductor said to the Gestapo agent, shaking his head. “Let’s just move on to the next compartment.” And miraculously, they did.
The train approached the German coast, and Don disembarked a few stops later to catch the ferry to Sweden. He showed the border guard his visa. But when he saw Don’s Polish passport, the guard jailed him in a small blockhouse near the railroad tracks. Don tried to convince him that the Germans wanted him to simply leave the country, but the border guard insisted on calling Berlin.
While he waited, Don noticed an old German railroad worker walking past the jail. “Pssst,” he called out through the bars. “Pssst.” The railroad worker was afraid to approach at first, but slowly made his way over.
“What are you doing in there?” he asked Don.
“You know these young guys, they don’t know what they’re doing,” said Don, shrugging. Many older Germans were resentful of the young Nazis among them. “They’re checking on my papers, but I’m going to miss my ferry.”
The railroad man shook his head in sympathy.
“Can’t you unlock the door for me?” Don asked.
But the man shook his head again and walked away.
Ten minutes later, he was back. Don heard him turn the key in the door to the blockhouse. But he quietly told Don not to leave yet, since the guard was sure to see him. He whispered that a freight train would be passing by soon and not to open the blockhouse door until it was there. He instructed Don to jump onto the moving freight train and ride it just around the bend to where the ferry was waiting. The freight train would be his cover.
When the train came into the station, Don threw open the blockhouse door and made a run for it, jumped aboard, and hid between two cars. As he approached the ferry terminal, Don leapt from the train and ran toward the waiting boat. He snuck into the storage hold, where he waited in the dark until he heard the ferry doors close.
But there was a long delay. Don cautiously made his way to the upper deck. Some of the passengers had been on his original train and had seen that he’d been stopped by the German guard. They had implored the captain to hold the ferry for him. And now here he was. They were happy Don had made it. The captain welcomed him aboard. And set sail for Sweden.
With the help of a Jewish aid group, Don made it to Gothenburg, Sweden, and then to New York at the end of September 1939 on the SS Drottningholm, living with Mollie and David on the Upper West Side until he joined the war.
The news drifting over to America—from people like Don who had barely escaped the Nazis’ clutches—made Harry step up Superman’s game. The December 1941 issue of Action Comics—which went on the stands a month earlier—featured Superman battling a Nazi paratrooper midair. The Washington Post did a front-page story on Harry headlined “Superman to Sweep World for Democracy, His Boss Says.” Harry boasted that his comic book character was traveling to Germany and Italy “to clean them up.”
In return, Mussolini banned Superman comics from Italy. The pro-Nazi German American Bund protested outside DC’s offices and teamed up with the Ku Klux Klan for a rally in New Jersey. The Nazi weekly paper, Das Schwarze Korps, ridiculed Superman’s writer, calling him Jerry “Israel” Siegel, and making fun of his creation. (By this time, the Nazis had made Jews with non-Jewish-sounding names adopt the middle name Israel or Sarah to make it easier to identify them for persecution.) “We see Superman, lacking all strategic sense and tactical ability, storming the West Wall in shorts,” the Nazis wrote. “Woe to the American youth, who must live in such a poisoned atmosphere and don’t even notice the poison they swallow daily.”
Harry wasn’t the only big shot trying to make a difference in the prewar effort against the fascists. His old pal Margaret Sanger helped Jews escape from Italy, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Her former husband, William Sanger, was a Jew from Berlin who had left decades before. Sanger spoke out against Hitler as early as 1933, and he returned the favor, burning her books publicly in the vast bonfire of anti-Nazi and subversive literature that year. But in 1938, she took more direct action, signing affidavits for twenty Jews, most of them doctors, to come to America and work with her.
“We can scarcely stand by and have the opportunity to save a life from torture and not do it,” she wrote. But Sanger didn’t publicize her actions, worried the American public, still full of anti-Semites, would attack her. “The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews and the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here.”
Another high-profile American working to save Jewish refugees was Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle, the man who had helped Billy Wilder get his start as a screenwriter. Laemmle retired from Hollywood in 1936 to devote his time to helping fellow German Jews escape. He had had Hitler’s number early on when his All Quiet on the Western Front was banned from German theaters in 1930. In the buildup to World War II, Laemmle urged both William Randolph Hearst and President Roosevelt to take a stand against Hitler—though by the time they did, it was too late for millions of Jewish families.
Laemmle sponsored more than three hundred refugees and urged his friends to do the same, helping to finance the Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy in 1936. Cofounded by New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker, the league’s five thousand members held rallies, worked to promote anti-Nazi content in movies, and boycotted Hitler’s propagandist filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl when she visited Hollywood in 1938 to network with industry leaders. That same year, the European Film Fund was cofounded by Ernst Lubitsch, collecting 1 percent of members’ salaries to provide money for refugees and help them find work in Hollywood. Two years later, Lubitsch also formed a Hollywood committee with Marlene Dietrich and Billy Wilder to gather money and send it to Europe, hoping to liberate Jews from camps and bring them over. Edward G. Robinson, Harry’s old neighbor from the Lower East Side who had become famous playing tough guys and gangsters, personally donated more than a quarter million dollars to political organizations to fight Hitler.
Director Charlie Chaplin also bravely took up the anti-Hitler rallying cry. Chaplin had always felt an unfortunate connection to Hitler: they were born four days apart, and of course, the Führer had stolen his signature mustache. But the Nazis had hated Chaplin for years, thinking he was a Jew, calling him a “disgusting Jewish acrobat”—even though only his half brother was part Jewish. Chaplin knew from his Jewish friends in Europe the extent of the Nazis’ hatred toward them. After seeing Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which featured the Führer whipping his Hitler Youth into a frenzy, Chaplin decided to do something about it.
Chaplin started filming The Great Dictator, his first talkie, in the autumn of 1939, just after Hitler invaded Poland, and released it in 1940, making it the first feature to directly criticize the Führer. (The Three Stooges poked fun at Hitler in a short earlier that year.)
Chaplin played dual roles—the dictator and a Jewish barber/World War I vet who was a talking version of Jules’s beloved Little Tramp. The film climaxes with the barber being mistaken for the dictator and thrust onto the world stage to make a speech on the radio. Greed, he tells the crowd, has poisoned men’s souls, and technology seems to be pushing us further apart. But he pleads with the world to join together.
“Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!” his character proclaimed. “Let us fight to free the world—to do away with national barriers—to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!”