In the spring of 1941, there is fighting on all fronts: in the North Atlantic German U-boats sink British passenger liners; the British Gibraltar Squadron shells Genoa; in Eritrea, Italian and Indian troops wage a seven-week war of attrition. The British Army captures Benghazi; the Germans invade Bulgaria; Australian and New Zealand divisions land on Greek islands; the German Afrika Korps transfers from Naples to Tripoli. Torpedoes pursue their targets in the Denmark Strait, the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea; warships cruise by the coasts of West Africa and the Seychelles. The German–British air war still rages. In the spring of 1941, the German Luftwaffe bombs Portsmouth, Bristol and London and in retaliation the Royal Air Force carries out air raids on Cologne, Hamburg and Kiel.
In Warminster, not far from the English Channel, Gabriele Herrmann, who in 1939 was rescued on a Kindertransport from Germany, has been desperately longing for more than a year for any indication that her parents are alive. The 17-year-old is meanwhile living in an Anglican sisters’ home.
Gabriele did not find it easy to adjust to living in England. She was afflicted with deep homesickness soon after her arrival in Plymouth as an au pair girl. Every day she wrote home and received mail back from Berlin almost daily, but since the war began the link with her parents has been severed.
During the previous year, Gabriele decided to become a nurse and consequently ended up in the sisters’ home. Life here is almost unbearable. She has to do heavy work from early morning until half-way through the night for what is pocket money. The tough working conditions have undermined her health; Gabriele is undernourished and she feels worse with each succeeding week. Sometimes she coughs throughout the night.
Mistrust of her as a foreigner from Germany has subsided now. However, the harsh regime of the nuns and the unrelenting punishment for the slightest slip-up increasingly take their toll. She feels utterly lonely and yearns for someone who is close to her. Gabriele longs for her beloved parents and their tender affection. Recently she caught a few sentences about concentration camps. Since then she has been even more worried about them. Sometimes she thinks of Peter Dane, whom she last saw in London. Where might he have ended up?
What Gabriele Herrmann does not know is that Peter Dane is interned in the Australian desert in a hellish climate:
It became insanely hot there sometimes during the day; at night on the other hand it was very cold. When it was really hot – shortly before rain came – the atmosphere became electrically charged. People got really on edge; in some cases to the extent of a person being ready to murder someone. Once, the cook hurled an enormous frying pan at a man; another time, he put a man on a red-hot oven – I pulled him off immediately. A third time, a friend of mine attacked another and knocked two teeth out … two older men from our midst – one was a doctor, the other a chemist – tried to commit suicide. We younger ones convinced them afterwards with great difficulty that it was worth staying alive.
Many of the prisoners do not understand the world any more: they have summoned all their courage and scraped together the last of their money to leave Germany and now they are banished to the Australian desert, as if they were lepers. Peter Dane tries to detach himself from the atrocious conditions. The 20-year-old uses the time to study and in fact manages to pass university entrance exams in the Australian camp. He throws himself almost fanatically into his studies at the Camp School, which the internees organise for themselves. He is studying mathematics and philosophy.
In the New Zealand internment camp on Somes Island, the situation is not as relaxed as at the start of the war. An increasing number of the new inmates experience a rabid revival of German nationalistic sentiment with the victorious advance of Hitler’s troops. There are nearly 170 inmates assembled on Somes Island in 1941 – Italians, Japanese and Thai, as well as Germans. The number of Germans reaches seventy-five during the coming months. Among the internees is a businessman from Auckland: Hans Nathan, who fled Hamburg.
It is a mystery to him why he of all people – a Jew and a confirmed opponent of the Nazi regime – is interned. Is it because of the swastika shown on his passport when he arrived in New Zealand? The lack of a ‘J’ in his passport, because he had emigrated to England prior to this requirement, would obviously make him more suspect.
In the camp, Hans finds himself confronted with a group of Hitler devotees, who – demanding their rights under the Geneva Convention – finally get their way and are allowed to freely articulate and present their political opinions. Soon afterwards, pictures of Hitler are hung on the walls of the common rooms; some of the internees wear home-made swastikas on their clothes. Hans Nathan and other opponents of the Nazis urge the camp superintendent to accommodate them separately.
Hans Jottkowitz is not interned – he is sent to the countryside against his will. He is placed on an inland farm, near Cromwell. There he has to prove himself in the sheds and in the fields. To be honest, he doesn’t. The quite delicately built city-dweller has to heave sheep weighing sixty kilograms into a shed, drag them to an electric shearing machine and jam them between his legs to render any resistance futile. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t manage this …
The 23-year-old is also wracked with mounting anxiety for his parents, who have been left behind in Germany and assigned by the Nazis to forced labour. In October 1941, the Cromwell postman hands him a Red Cross letter from Germany, written by his parents in Berlin in the twenty-five words allowed. The card is dated May 1941, which means it has been on its way for half a year. His parents write that they are well, but how can he know that this is still the case, six months later?
He feels that he has lost the battle for an entry visa for his parents – at over fifty they are considered too old by the New Zealand authorities; furthermore, hardly anyone is getting out of Germany at this time.
Minna Kohane, who was likewise classified as an ‘enemy alien’, has meanwhile been assigned a job in a cigarette factory. The reason for this is a government act, whereby women now have to take on jobs important to the war effort. ‘Are cigarettes important to the war?’ she asks herself angrily. Her two-year visa as a domestic worker has long since expired and she needs a permanent visa. She succeeds in getting transferred from Wellington to a cigarette factory in Auckland, where her sister Regina has moved after her engineer husband obtained work there.
Fritz Bruell and his wife Lilly have an easier time than others establishing a new life because they were classed as ‘friendly aliens’ in England and ‘non-enemy aliens’ in New Zealand. The couple possess nothing but the firm determination to succeed in whatever they undertake. Shortly after her arrival, Lilly, a tailor’s daughter and fashion designer in her own right in Vienna, finds a position as a fashion designer in a clothing firm. Fritz (or Fred as he calls himself in his new country) is able to utilise the occupational experience he gained in his uncle Siegmund’s paperware factory in Linz – he becomes a manager in a packaging firm that has recently been established.
The classification as an ‘enemy alien’ hits the Berlin doctor Alfred Heppner hard. Like other German and Austrian refugees who had to requalify at Otago University despite their practical experience, he is still classed as so suspicious that he is not allowed to possess a radio with shortwave reception or a camera. The doctor likes taking photos but all of his equipment is confiscated. There are even more absurd prohibitions for ‘enemy aliens’ in particular categories: the right is reserved to prohibit refugees from living in a house with a view of the harbour. Heppner could be giving signals to German U-boats that might surface.
Alfred Heppner bears these prohibitions with dignity. His real concern is for the emotional state of his wife, Lotte, who is still striving desperately for an entry permit for her parents and brother in Oppeln in Upper Silesia – without any prospect of success.
Together with nearly a dozen doctors who have fled Germany and Austria, Heppner completes a further medical examination in Dunedin in 1941. Some of the refugees volunteer for the New Zealand Army, among them Alfred Heppner – he wants to contribute to the war effort against the Nazis and signify his gratitude and allegiance to his new homeland. These offers are turned down with thanks; in this critical phase of the war suspicion of ‘enemy aliens’ is too deep-rooted. The authorities fear that someone somehow could have slipped in as an enemy spy after all.
The government does, however, take up another offer from those who have passed their exams: the doctors are willing to go anywhere the Ministry of Health considers their services needed and so they are sent to all corners of the country, mostly to very remote areas. Alfred Heppner is fortunate. Together with a colleague, a Jewish doctor from Vienna called Hans Hersch, he is seconded to Auckland. The area to which they are assigned is Freemans Bay – then a very poor, dilapidated area of the city, inhabited mainly by Maori. They decide to open a joint practice.
What Alfred Heppner does not succeed in doing, Ernst Neuländer accomplishes – he is accepted into the New Zealand Army. He and his wife Herta are now living with their little son Oliver in their bach in Plimmerton, directly by the sea. They are happy but news coming through from Europe is getting worse and worse and so one day Ernst Neuländer volunteers for the army. He is interrogated by the Enlistment Commission and asked about his motives for wanting to fight against his homeland. Ernst explains that New Zealand has become his home and as such needs defending. His motives are believed and so the Jewish man formerly from Breslau becomes a soldier in the New Zealand Army with the Royal Engineers.
In the previous year, compulsory military service was reintroduced in New Zealand and the country started to send larger contingents of troops to Egypt. This is the base from which New Zealand and Australian troops were sent to battle in the Balkans or to defend British bases in Crete and on the Greek mainland.
One of the confrontations that claims many victims has the enchanting name ‘Marita’. It takes place in April 1941 and is conceived by Hitler as part of the Balkan campaign. As a result of this operation, the British are driven from the mainland of Greece. Shaken, New Zealanders follow events on their radio receivers at home as entire units are wiped out. The poorly equipped soldiers from the Dominion have nothing to counter the German machine-gun salvoes and the notorious aerial dive-bombers. Anyone who cannot hide or reach safety in time is mown down. Many New Zealanders are killed in the retreat from Greece and a great number end up in captivity in Germany and Italy.
Dieter Adam also wants to fight against the Nazis; he feels blind rage when German victories are announced. After a short term on the Isle of Man, he is now considered a ‘non-security risk’; the entire Adam family receives a ‘friendly aliens’ classification, which opens the way for a military career for 17-year-old Dieter. His uncle and both older brothers are already serving in British units; he wants to join them – as a Jew he wants to contribute to Hitler’s defeat. He enlists with the Royal Air Force but has to wait until his eighteenth birthday before he can begin his training as a pilot.
For Karl Wolfskehl, his own life is almost burden enough. He seems to have overcome his persisting exhaustion, however, not least because of Margot Ruben’s care. The 71-year-old poet feels stable enough to leave his home at the foot of Mount Eden and travel to the South Island alone, despite his progressive blindness. He traverses almost the entire length of New Zealand by train to get to Dunedin, 1400 kilometres away from Auckland. It is an extensive nearly two-month long trip. As an ‘enemy alien’, Wolfskehl has to report to the local police station and give details on where and how long he intends staying but he does not have to comply with any further restrictions. He stays for several weeks with Caesar Steinhof and his wife in Dunedin.
Caesar is a Jewish scholar and thinker and a prayer leader in the local Jewish congregation. He has set up a religious school for Jewish children. Desirous of conversation, Wolfskehl meets with other Jews who have fled Europe and makes contact with university lecturers. The persecution of the Jews and the current state of the war are the subject of constant debate. Triumph and depression, anger and feelings of powerlessness alternate, almost without transition. Although harrowing, these meetings are extremely important for the refugees – they dull the sense of isolation in a country to which they are grateful for their acceptance and salvation – but nevertheless a country with cultural traditions that are quite foreign to most of them.
During this journey, Karl Wolfskehl blossoms. He is not always caught up in discussions about politics. Compensating for his almost total blindness, he has a keener sense of the cool landscapes of the southern South Island. ‘Dunedin,’ he writes to a Swiss friend on his return,
is located in a particularly beautiful setting in a hilly area whose slopes begin almost at the shoreline of the endlessly blue sea, which appears to be illumined here by the light of Antarctica. With gardens and patches of native forest, which are now of course interspersed with beeches and oaks and houses, which are often more than one storey high, dotted over the hills or nestling in valleys, it conjures up images of central and sometimes even southern Switzerland, thus reminding one of home …
A month later, Wolfskehl arrives in Christchurch, a small idyllic university city with wide tree-lined avenues, rivers and canals meandering through the city and well-tended gardens and parks, which flower all year round. Here, too, close friends await the poet – Otti and Paul Binswanger, friends whom he knows from Germany – and many discussions take place. Through his friends, Karl Wolfskehl also meets the New Zealand poet and publisher Denis Glover, who will remain a lifelong friend, as well as the poet Allen Curnow.
One family whom he knows from Italy and catches up with in Christchurch is the Muenz family, who arrived in New Zealand via Palestine and Italy, again after a real odyssey. Eighteen-year-old Peter Muenz, his younger sister and his mother arrived in Wellington totally penniless. They had decided on Christchurch beforehand, mainly because of German friends already living there. The Canterbury Education Board chairman from Methven, without whom they would not have reached New Zealand, helps them once more: Peter is able to study at teachers’ college and he receives a scholarship of £6 a month. At this time £6 is a considerable sum of money, sufficient to feed the three of them.
How should they handle problems arising from the German family name of Muenz? Their forefathers have been called this for centuries but people find it difficult to pronounce. The Muenz family changes it to Munz for short. However, henceforth they are called ‘Manz’ and for the rest of his life Peter has to insist on the German pronunciation of ‘Munz’.
Karl Popper, who also lives in Christchurch, is not interested in a meeting with Karl Wolfskehl. To him, the poet belongs to those ‘self-important German intellectuals’ who prepared the ground for the National Socialists. He has never had a feeling for poetry. Two people could not be more different than Popper and Wolfskehl. This is not only because the short, quite stocky philosopher Karl Popper is only half the age of the very tall poet Karl Wolfskehl – Popper is only half as needy of harmonious relationships.
To put it bluntly, the Viennese philosopher is notorious for his feisty manner. His university colleagues experience this. Popper is thought incapable of compromise, and seen as aggressive, intolerant and self-centred. His political involvement belies some of the accusations: he gives himself selflessly to save quite a few refugees. He also wanted to join the New Zealand Army, to make a stand for the country that had accepted him and to fight against Hitler – but, like so many other refugees who tried to enlist, he was turned down.
While still working on the theory of logic and probability, 37-year-old Popper feels drawn to political philosophy. He has been working for some time on a manuscript entitled ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, which establishes his reputation worldwide after the war. It is a response to Hitler and Stalin and a rebuff to ‘oracling philosophers’ and thinkers like Hegel, whose ‘dialectical’ method he sees as nothing more than paving the way for totalitarianism. He is to become one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Conditions for Popper’s intellectual work in Christchurch are not ideal; teaching methods and academic structures are antiquated and outmoded. Besides his research, he is responsible for the academic programme in the philosophy department and for a large number of students; he feels hemmed in. Still, the circumstances he bemoans are probably better than he portrays in his letters to Europe. He and his wife Hennie have just bought a house on Cashmere Hill in a top location. It has breathtaking views over the Canterbury Plains, which are rimmed with the snow-capped peaks of the Southern Alps.
Apart from the fact that Karl Popper constantly feels underpaid and in even more financial need than before because he has to pay off his house, he likes Christchurch. To him, New Zealand is definitely the best governed of all countries in the world but probably also the easiest to govern. Despite his positive appraisal of his host country, the philosopher from Vienna looks with interest at Great Britain, which is more of a centre for international philosophy than New Zealand. He would like to return to Europe some time! He and his wife have already made an application for British citizenship – it is rejected.
In 1941 the Silberstein family is still trapped in Steglitz, Berlin; escape is now impossible. Their situation deteriorates from year to year; when their store the Kaufhaus Boga was expropriated and their livelihood stripped away, the Silbersteins had to vacate their home. They moved from their spacious home in Hindenburgdamm to a smaller flat near Feuerbach Strasse, which they obtained through the Jewish community. Is this flat a temporary abode? The previous tenants have already been deported.
In November 1941, the transportation of Berlin Jews to a ghetto that was set up in the northern Bohemian garrison town of Terezin (Theresienstadt) commences. The systematic mass killing in German concentration camps and extermination camps has been underway since October.
The Silbersteins have no inkling of such things. They are, however, suffering increasingly painful discrimination in their everyday lives. From 1 September 1941 Jews in Germany have been compelled to wear the yellow star. Hansi – blonde and blue-eyed, as the ruler of the Third Reich would himself like to be – is stopped by an SS man one day and told that it was absolutely stupid of her to wear a yellow star in solidarity with ‘those people’.
Not wanting to succumb to fear, the 17-year-old tries to make the best of the situation and, in spite of the repression, she tries not to forget about living; she skilfully circumvents the prohibition against Jews going into a cinema by covering her Star of David with her handbag. She also ignores the evening curfew so that she can still meet her friends, but this is all very risky.
Jews are now issued with special ration cards, which greatly limit their selection of foodstuffs. Sometimes someone in the S-Bahn inconspicuously slips a ration card for ‘Aryans’ into Hansi’s pocket.
In spite of all this, the Silberstein family, particularly Hansi’s 14-year-old brother Fred, experiences hunger pangs, which Fred valiantly tries to quell. The family remains close-knit, which makes many things easier to bear. Other children terrorise Fred increasingly on the streets; often he comes home crying. He still attends school, while everyone else is doing ‘compulsory labour’ – his father as a platform worker with the railways, his mother weeding the Ufa property in Babelsberg and Hansi as an assembly line worker in the Borsigwalde Weapon and Munitions Factory in North Berlin.
‘The Jews are the lice of civilised humanity,’ writes the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, in his diary on 2 November 1941. ‘They have to be exterminated somehow.’ For some time now he and others of like mind have been extending this murderous programme from Germany to other parts of Europe. The anti-Jewish ordinances of the Berlin Reich Security Main Office, such as the registration of all Jews, their dismissal from the Civil Service and declaration of Jewish businesses, are in effect in Belgium. They are hardly distinguishable from those of the German region.
In Antwerp, where most of the Jewish immigrants from Poland and Galicia are living, more than 3000 non-resident Jews are issued with an expulsion order. Between December 1940 and February 1941 they have to assemble at the railway station at an appointed time, and then they are taken to a rural area in the Belgian province of Limburg. About seven months later Jews are required to move to four cities: Brussels, Antwerp, Liège and Charleroi. These measures were a kind of litmus test to see how the Belgian population would react to the harassment of Jews. They are the precursors to later mass deportations. With the help of L’Association des Juifs, Salomon Grynbaum’s mother has succeeded in getting Salomon into an orphanage in Brussels.
As 1941 draws to a close, it seems that nothing can stop the advance of the German war machine. The German navy rules the Atlantic and Hitler’s troops have also turned towards the East; the German attack on the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941. Within six days the Wehrmacht captured Minsk and large parts of Lithuania, as well as Latvia and the Western Ukraine. With the Japanese attack on the American base at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, the war now also extends to the Pacific arena, causing deep alarm among New Zealanders.