“I am wondering if you could get any information for me with reference to the whereabouts of Alfons Isack, Martha Marchand, and Norbert Hecht.” The instructions, written two weeks after the German surrender in May 1945, came from Arnold’s younger brother, Stephen Hatch.
Arnold had died of a heart attack on October 20, 1943, the very day the strike at his plant had been settled. Perhaps the stress of the labor dispute aggravated his medical condition and contributed to his early death at the age of fifty-five. Having cared so long for many of his relatives, he himself did not live to see the end of the war. Stephen had taken over both the business and the family responsibilities. “I presume,” Stephen added in his note to Luzie, “that these people are all in Germany, and I am desirous of ascertaining if they survived the war.”
Alfons Isack, who had been the most persistent in his efforts to leave, was first imprisoned in his town of Essen and later deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia on July 21, 1942. He managed to survive in the ghetto for slightly over two years and was once again deported, this time to Auschwitz-Birkenau, on September 29, 1944. He was, according to Yad Vashem records, murdered at Auschwitz.
Martha Marchand had pleaded for assistance in taking the Trans-Siberian route out of Germany. In trying to advance Martha’s case, Luzie argued to Arnold that many had taken the route and survived.
In fact, some did successfully manage the Trans-Siberian route, but their number was not great. Moise Moiseff, vice president of the Jewish community of Kobe, Japan, in his report “Jewish Transits in Japan,” recorded that from July 1940 to May 1941, a total of 4,664 refugees had entered Japan, of which 2,498 were German Jewish refugees.1 With the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941, this exit route, which had brought a few thousand refugees to safety, was closed.
Martha and her family were never able to leave Germany. Martha, her daughter, Ruth, and her husband, Alfred, were transported to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, which is listed as their place of death in the Yad Vashem Archives.2
Luzie’s Aunt Paula Steinberg also remained trapped in Germany, unable to fulfill her wish of joining her children in Palestine. Her daughter, Erna Mendels, submitted a page of testimony to the Yad Vashem Archives citing Paula’s date of death as April 27, 1942. No place of death was provided.
When Luzie and her younger cousin Herta Stein had set sail for America in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, each left behind her parents, promising to assist them once settled in the United States. In actuality, as the one with more age, life experience, and access to Arnold, it was Luzie who largely shouldered the burden of attempting to bring Herta’s parents, Salomon and Elsa Stein, out of Nazi Germany. Their plan had been to go to Cuba, and Luzie had forcefully pleaded their case to Arnold, hoping that he would grant financial assistance. Yet the couple never made it to this Caribbean Island nor to any other refuge. They are listed on the October 5, 1942, deportation from Thuringia, Germany. Although no specific camp is cited, it is believed that they both perished.
An estimated 160,000–200,000 German Jews perished in the Holocaust. Alfons Isack, Paula Steinberg, Martha Marchand Harf and her family, Salomon and Elsa Stein, and Dora Hecht, who died in Vichy France, were part of this horrific statistic. Repeatedly, they had asked Luzie for help. Her failure to rescue them remained with Luzie for the rest of her life. There were probably times, many times, when she tried to subdue this dragon of guilt with logic and reason. What power did she really have to alter their circumstances? After all, she was a young, single woman existing on a modest income, adjusting to a new life in the United States, while worrying about her family members caught in the Nazi vise. And Luzie, like thousands of other Americans attempting to rescue relatives abroad, found herself struggling with a range of complicated and unwelcoming immigration laws. Were these not compelling reasons for her failure? Yet, when logic and emotion duel, the latter can be an indomitable force.
Of course, Luzie included her great success in bringing her stepmother, father, and half-brother, Rolf, to the United States. Her father, having arrived in New York at middle age, would never again work as a department store executive. He became a factory worker, and his wife, Helene, had to work as a housekeeper. In 1943, Luzie’s young brother, now named Ralph, received what he called “a message from the President of the United States,” or “greetings from the draft.” He entered the army in February 1943 and after training was sent to the Philippines. Like thousands of GIs, Ralph benefited from the GI Bill and pursued a college education after returning home. He became a social studies teacher and taught history and geography from 1949 to 1984.
Luzie’s friend and business associate Stefan Pauson would eventually once again be involved in the basket trade. He and his wife would remain in England for the remainder of their lives. His son, Peter, who due to his small frame and spectacled face had been teased and called “professor” by his German classmates, did, in fact, go on to become a professor, teaching organic chemistry at Strathclyde University in Scotland and garnering international recognition for his research work. Pauson’s daughters, Eva and Hella, would find their way to the United States, where they would marry, work, and raise their families.
The Friedländer family, the Hechts’ Berlin neighbors, would also make their way to the United States, but not before enduring a tragedy. The young man whom Inge had married in 1940 died two years later after he contracted typhoid. She would eventually remarry and leave for the United States in 1946 with her second husband and infant son, settling in New York City and reuniting with her parents, who had arrived there a few months earlier.
Hans Hirschfield, Luzie’s close friend from L. S. Mayer, had arrived in Canada neither through design nor desire but through the winds of good fortune. Hans soon found it to be an environment that suited him well. He would remain in Canada, marrying a Canadian Jewish woman and raising three children. His prior experience at L. S. Mayer was put to good use. For more than thirty years he ran his firm, the Horizon Company of Canada, importing giftware, housewares, and stationery. Business matters would take him to various parts of the world, including his native city of Berlin.
Although many immigrants such as Luzie and Hans’s brothers changed and anglicized their names, Hans refused to do so. He would always remain Hans Egon Hirschfeld, firmly declaring, “I lived my life as myself.” Hans Hirschfeld died in the late 1990s.
In Luzie’s early years in New York, she had always thought that, like Hans, she would eventually return to merchandising, a world she loved. However, when Luzie entered the American Jewish Committee in 1938, she had found her professional home. Her entire career, from 1938 to 1977, with the exception of two brief interludes, was at AJC.
It was her German heritage that had first helped Luzie to secure her position. A native German was needed to assist in reading, translating, and organizing the incoming German newspapers, articles, and documents that would be used to write the White Book. After the war, her German background continued to be of use. Within the institutional world of American Jewry, it was Luzie’s employer, the American Jewish Committee, that was at the forefront of building a roadway to reconciliation with Germany.
In 1960, a group of visiting German educators who had traveled to four American cities to observe American methods of teaching social and civic education, concluded their trip with a daylong conference at the American Jewish Committee. Throughout the 1960s, AJC would remain involved with these educator missions. It is highly likely that Luzie, due to her background, had some involvement with these conferences.
Ironically, her major work on reconciliation would be four years after her retirement when, in 1981, AJC and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation of Germany launched an exchange program that exists to this day. German participants take part in a ten-day course on the American Jewish community while their American counterparts have a similarly intensive look at Germany.
It was natural that Luzie assist in this work. In addition to her fluency in German was her ease and comfort in being with Germans. Gerri Rozanski, the AJC staffer responsible for organizing the missions recalls, “Remember this was the eighties, not many in the Jewish community were so willing to meet with Germans. At the time it was a challenge for us to fill missions to Germany. We were not so far removed for the war. The nature of the loss was much more direct.”3
And so it was Luzie Hatch who greeted the incoming German delegations and traveled with them not only in New York but to their visits to other parts of America. “Luzie helped make them feel more comfortable in the U.S. She was everyone’s familiar grandmother,” notes Rozanski. Just as important, she explains, although their parents were reluctant to speak about Nazi Germany, Luzie was willing. “Luzie enabled them to have a conversation about prewar Germany that they couldn’t have with their family back home.”4
There was another reason why the young visiting Germans took to Luzie: she accepted them. Her anger was with the Nazis, not the German people as a whole. Yet this very element of her personality that obviously appealed to visiting German delegations was problematic for some of her Jewish colleagues, who believed she exaggerated the distinction between the Nazis and the German people in terms of both degree and numbers. She was, in their opinion, too quick to forgive.
How she came to this state of reconciliation is unknown. Did it take years, and were there certain events that pushed her in this direction? The documents she left behind offer no answers. But to those who knew her in her later years, it was clear that she retained a love of her native land. A neighbor from her apartment building spoke of Luzie as a German Jew who was very conscious of being German. Her colleague Gerri Rozanski recalls that Luzie once revealed, “I had a beautiful life in Germany. I love the life I had and I miss it. I refuse to think ill of the life I had because of what happened.” Her coworker wondered if perhaps there was an element of denial in Luzie’s thinking. “That is a question we will never have the answer to,” she states. “But I never judged her. I didn’t walk in those shoes. I adored her.”5
Those who met Luzie through the Konrad Adenauer Exchange also adored Luzie. After returning to Germany, many exchange participants maintained their relationship with Luzie through correspondence. Although she was a volunteer rather than a paid staffer, Luzie Hatch became the “face” of AJC’s involvement for those at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin.
In 1992, the Federal Republic of Germany recognized Luzie’s work on building bridges between American Jews and Germans. She was awarded its Order of Merit. In a letter to Luzie, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany wrote:
For many years now, the American Jewish Committee, in cooperation with political foundations in Germany, has organized exchange programs and meetings between young people on this and the other side of the Atlantic. The many young Germans who were privileged to meet you through these programs became attached to you. Thus, a large number of friends will be with you in spirit as you are presented with The Cross of the Order of Merit.6
When Luzie received this honor on September 24, 1992, at the German consulate in New York, she noted in her response:
Today, almost 60 years after the Holocaust and the events leading up to it, what happened is history. Nevertheless, I feel that no meaningful shape can be given to the future without acquainting the younger generations with the past. They are burdened with the past, but one cannot hold young people responsible for the sins of their parents and grandparents.
There are some in my generation who feel that I am wasting my time—but I believe that if there was any reason for my own survival, it was to help bring about some kind of reconciliation . . . This kind of reconciliation cannot be achieved through evasion or denials; the past cannot and must not be forgotten. Only if we acknowledge and confront it honestly will we be able to build that bridge between past and future.7
In 1943, five years after Luzie arrived in New York City, she had written to her friend Hans Hirschfeld informing him that she was applying for her citizenship papers. “I know how much I owe this wonderful country and I am really thankful for the chance of living here—and I hope to become a good American citizen soon.” In September 2001, Luzie Hatch died. She had been a good citizen.
I visited Luzie’s studio apartment on a number of occasions, each time hoping that within her file cabinets and desk drawers I might find documents that could provide context to the letters. On my final visit, as I closed the door and glanced at the packed bookshelves and the table right next to her bed with a small TV from the 1970s, I thought, “My God, a lifetime was spent right here in this small space.”
Did the sales clerks at the nearby bakery or newspaper store wonder, “What happened to that gregarious old woman with the German accent? She hasn’t been here in a while.” But I knew that thought, if it had occurred at all, would have been fleeting. As I walked to the train station, I could not help but think that although she had walked these streets for decades, the memory of Luzie Hatch would in a short time fade away.
These were the thoughts I had before I delved into the correspondence. In truth, her life was never in any way confined to her apartment or neighborhood. During the war years she had been a hub, sending and receiving messages from distant locations: Bolivia, England, France, Germany, Shanghai, and Canada. And following the war, her work at AJC reconnected with her former homeland. Her living space had been small; her reach had never been limited.
In researching this book, many of Luzie’s old connections were, in some way, revived. To the best of my ability, I reconstructed her old network of family and friends—not with the original correspondents, most of whom have died, but with their descendants. Time and again, individuals were stunned to answer the phone and learn that the person on the other end was holding World War II correspondence from their parent, grandparent, or cousin. And as they gave me information, I also offered them new material and details of their family history. Once again, Luzie was a focal point connecting people wide and far.
I had thought that Luzie would simply melt into the abyss of lost memory, but with the publication of Exit Berlin, I realize that this is not to be.