American Experience (1988) s06e08 Episode Script

1
KURT KLEIN:
"We hope you got our postcard
KURT KLEIN:
of November 12th,
and our excitement has subsided somewhat
since then.
We trust you can do something for us
over there in the near future
which would serve to calm down Mother,
especially.
We're sure you'll let us hear something
about that soon.
Regards to all the relatives
and many to you
straight from the heart,
Your father.
I received this in Buffalo, New York,
about a week after it happened,
and it was mailed
from my little home town,
Waldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany.
It was the time
my parents' home was invaded
by former classmates of mine
who vandalized the place,
smashed everything,
terrorized my parents
and imprisoned my father.
It was Kristallnacht.
NARRATOR:
November 9, 1938,
Kristallnacht,
the night of broken glass,
the night the campaign
against the German Jews
turned violent.
Across Germany synagogues burned.
Jewish businesses, homes destroyed,
thousands arrested
and sent off to prison camps.
The shattering climax
to five years of Nazi policies
designed to force Jews out of Germany.
As Jewish life crumbled,
tens of thousands,
including Kurt Klein's parents,
Ludwig and Alice,
would look toward America
as a haven of safety.
And the question becomes,
What would America do?
In June of 1937,
more than a year before Kristallnacht,
Kurt Klein at age 17
had his first glimpse of America.
KURT KLEIN:
The first thing that I remember seeing
when I got close to the American shore
was a huge billboard
advertising Wrigley's Chewing Gum.
Somehow that seemed free and easy
and seemed to typify the new country.
After that,
the Statue of Liberty came into view
and I had a sense
that I was personally secure.
I had done what the Nazis wanted me to do,
namely, leave Germany.
NARRATOR:
Born in Waldorf,
a small village near the Rhine,
13-year-old Kurt Klein
celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1933,
the year Franklin Roosevelt
took office in America,
and Hitler came to power in Germany;
the year the Nazis began their assault
to purify German culture.
KURT KLEIN:
Each year after Hitler came to power,
the situation grew worse
for the Jews in Germany.
By 1935,
the Nazis passed the Nuremburg laws
which effectively stripped
many Jews of their jobs
and their positions
within schools and universities,
and generally restricted our lives.
NARRATOR:
The campaign to force Jews out of Germany
gathered momentum.
Jews were expelled from professions,
their property and savings confiscated,
Jewish businesses boycotted.
My family knew
there was no future for us in Germany,
and we began to make preparations.
We children would leave first for the U.S.
and our parents would follow.
My sister, who was a nurse,
could no longer practice her nursing
because she was Jewish
and was, in fact, the first one
who left in 1936.
That made it possible for me
also to follow her in 1937,
and by 1938,
my brother had also arrived in the U.S.
We hoped at that point, of course,
to establish ourselves
to the point of
where we could support our parents
and also have them come over.
NARRATOR:
But the sudden violence of Kristallnacht
ignited a new urgency for the Kleins,
for all German Jews.
In Washington, the response was immediate.
1st NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
Reporters rushed the news to the nation
and the President's statement is read by
Felix Belair of The New York Times.
FELIX BELAIR, The New York Times:
The news of the past few days from Germany
has deeply shocked public opinion
in the United States.
I myself could scarcely believe
such things could occur
in a 20th-century civilization.
NARRATOR:
Newspapers played up the story
and American Jews organized large rallies.
RALLY SPEAKER:
We say to the President,
You spoke alone
among the world leaders.
That was good.
NARRATOR:
It was hoped Washington
would do more than condemn the Nazis.
In Germany, thousands of Jews
looked to America to save them.
HERBERT KATZKI, Refugee Relief Worker:
Overnight the American consulate
HERBERT KATZKI, Refugee Relief Worker:
and other consulates
were inundated by people who felt,
"Well, now it's time,
really, we ought to do something about
making plans for leaving the country."
They didn't expect
that they would have to leave
the day after tomorrow,
but certainly they wanted to have
a form of insurance in their pocket
so that when the time came to leave
that they might be able to do so.
In December of 1938,
my father writes:
"Unfortunately,
things aren't moving that fast,
even if you have the best of papers.
To obtain an appointment to apply
for a visa,
you have to receive a waiting number.
At present,
the American consulate in Stuttgart
is being besieged to such an extent
that the waiting number
for Mother and me
indicates
there are 22,344 cases ahead of us."
That meant that possibly
two and a half years would elapse
before it would be my parents' turn,
unless the authorities
would ease
or change the immigration procedures.
NARRATOR:
The Kleins and tens of thousands of others
were now facing America's
formidable system of immigration laws.
2nd NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
The dream of almost every one
of Hitler's victims
is to emigrate to the United States.
NARRATOR:
In 1938
while Americans held dear
the traditional image of the nation
as a haven for the oppressed,
they were also secure
knowing the doors
would not be too widely opened.
U.S. immigration laws
reflected blatant bias and prejudice.
From 1924 on,
yearly quotas
allowed four times as many people
from Britain and Ireland
as from all of eastern and southern Europe.
In the midst of the Depression,
many Americans called for
further restricting immigration,
even to extremes.
REP. MARTIN DIES:
Our unemployment problem
was transferred to the United States
from foreign lands,
and if we had refused admission
to the 16,500,000 foreign-born in our midst,
there would be no serious
unemployment problem to harass us.
NARRATOR:
To gain entry,
each newcomer needed an American sponsor
willing to sign an affidavit
of financial support
promising the immigrant
would not become a public charge.
It wasn't easy
to get affidavits of support for my parents
because, of course, in those days
we had no money.
We were willing to take any jobs,
work on several jobs day or night
as my sister did,
and I worked as a dishwasher
aside from my regular job
just to be able to make some extra money
that would help us with our parents.
NARRATOR:
"Keep refugees out,
they'll take American jobs,"
was the argument,
but often the real concerns
went deeper than employment.
HARVEY STOEHR, Patriotic Order Sons of America:
The main thing that
HARVEY STOEHR, Patriotic Order Sons of America:
we thought of was not economics.
It's a
a moral responsibility,
as we call it,
of America to have
America for Americans.
And
anything that disrupts that
that
by having masses of immigration
disrupts the whole idea of the nation.
NARRATOR:
This was the threat for many Americans,
the growing number of jewish refugees,
including tens of thousands of children.
From time to time,
a handful squeezed through the quota system.
In 1939,
a bill proposed special sanctuary
for 20,000 children
outside the quota.
The Wagner-Rogers Bill
would become a litmus test
for how Americans really
felt about Jews.
The need for this kind of legislation was
desperately pressing.
The
children being smuggled out
of Austria and Germany
were already separated from their parents,
which was traumatic enough,
and
it was essential to get them into
individual homes and
a sense of wellbeing.
NARRATOR:
But there was immediate opposition
to the bill.
HARVEY STOEHR:
The law that we had from
1924 that we thought was good.
Why don't we just support the written law
and
not seek for ways to
uh,
circumnavigate around it
and uh
just to benefit certain
large groups of immigrants.
Dr. VIOLA BERNARD:
They were afraid,
for example, of the argument that
Europe was trying to dump all its Jews
on the United States and
anti-Semitism
certainly was a powerful ingredient,
frequently covert instead of overt.
NARRATOR:
More than 100 patriotic societies insisted,
"Charity begins at home."
A cousin of the President,
Laura Delano Roosevelt, commented:
"Twenty thousand charming children
would all too soon
grow into 20,000 ugly adults."
The President was aware that the bill
was not politically popular
and, pressed for his opinion,
he elected to take
no action.
The bill eventually died in committee.
A year later,
legislation making it possible
to admit non jewish children
from war-torn England
passed with enthusiasm.
In Germany, by early 1939,
Ludwig and Alice Klein
were forced to abandon their home
and move to one small room over a stable.
The campaign against the 200,000 Jews
waiting to exit the Reich
was intensifying.
3rd NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
Sign posts at city limits bear the legend,
"Jews not wanted,"
"Jews keep out."
Even in parks, if Jews are allowed at all,
special yellow benches are set apart,
labeled, "For Jews."
KURT KLEIN:
We found people generally
were aware of the situation in Germany,
but somehow
we couldn't get the urgency
across to them
that something should be done
immediately.
NARRATOR:
Nazism was now marching on local soil.
This rally outside New York City.
ARNOLD FORSTER, Anti-Defamation League:
As Hitler became important,
imitators grew up here in this country,
and a lunatic fringe
frightened the entire American people
into the possibility
that what was happening in Europe
could happen here.
NARRATOR:
The German-American Bund
never totaled more than 25,000 people,
but it added fuel
to the anti-Semitism
smoldering in American society.
These years would see anti-Semitism
reach its peak in American history.
4th NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
This Los Angeles book shop
of the Silver Shirts,
dispensing anti-Jewish propaganda,
is one of many that have recently
opened all over the country.
Note the name:
Aryan Bookstore,
and nearby
a newsboy shouts his wares,
the Silver Legion Ranger,
a propaganda newspaper.
NEWSBOY:
The Silver Ranger, late paper.
Just out, late paper.
NEWSBOY:
Silver Ranger, late paper,
NEWSBOY:
free speech stopped by Jew riot.
NARRATOR:
The anti-Semitic campaign
was conducted by over 100 organizations
across the country,
blaming Jews for all the ills in America.
LEWIS WEINSTEIN, Attorney:
Here in Boston, I heard
anti-Semitic remarks by a speaker
and I heard
yelling by the group around him,
"We've got to get rid of the Jews.
They don't help us, they kill us.
They kill us financially,
they own everything,
and we're stuck with their victims."
NARRATOR:
Father Charles Coughlin,
a Roman Catholic priest,
was the most influential
anti-Semitic spokesman in the country.
His weekly radio broadcasts
reached more than three million people.
Father CHARLES COUGHLIN, Roman Catholic Priest:
The system of international finance
which has crucified the world
to the cross of depression
was evolved by Jews
for holding the peoples of the world
under control.
KURT KLEIN:
On Sunday nights
we would always listen to Father Coughlin
and it brought back shades of
what I had recently experienced
within Germany,
but there was one difference.
People could and did speak out against that,
and also
it wasn't the official policy
of our government to be anti-Semitic.
NARRATOR:
But during the 1920's and '30s,
anti-Semitism was a way of life
in much of America.
Many places open to most Americans
were closed to Jews.
RUTH FEIN, American Jewish Historical Society:
When I was maybe seven, eight years old,
we had recently moved to Washington,
and on a hot day,
we decided to go to the beach.
And people told us
that there was a lovely beach
somewhere in Chesapeake Bay,
and we drove down there.
And I still remember the sign,
because as we drove up,
we saw the sign, which said:
"No Jews or dogs allowed."
NARRATOR:
There were restrictions in job opportunities.
"Dear Miss Cohen,
We are sorry to inform you
that it is our policy
not to accept students of Jewish nationality."
SOPHIE WEINFIELD, Secretary:
I had just finished college.
The first position I was sent to
it was a one-man office
and he
hired me immediately.
And then, at about 11 o'clock, he said to me:
"What church do you go to?"
I said, "I don't go to a church,
I go to a synagogue."
He said: "I wouldn't hire a Jew.
You're fired."
And I went back to school, crying,
and Mrs. Kerwin,
who was the teacher
who sent us out on positions, said:
"You're going to find that out a lot.
You might as well get used to it."
ARTHUR HERTZBERG, World Jewish Congress:
Jews could barely get jobs in engineering.
The telephone company hired no Jews.
The insurance company,
aside from insurance agents
within their structure
hired no Jews.
The big three auto industry hired no Jews.
Oh, you could become a distributor
or something of the sort,
but you couldn't go to work
in their bureaucracy.
In American academic life,
Jews were systematically
excluded.
You could not
get into the medical faculties
very easily.
That was part of the reason why
Jewish hospitals
became important in the 1930's.
They offered places for Jews to practice.
LEWIS WEINSTEIN:
The situation was just as plain as this:
"You can get a job here.
We can't pay you as much
as we're paying our other associates,
but you'll have a steady job here for a while,
but don't count on ever becoming a partner,
because we have no Jewish partners
and we will not have any Jewish partners."
NARRATOR:
A 1939 public opinion poll
showed how Americans felt.
In Washington,
FDR's New Deal
seemed to offer hope
the country might be moving
towards a more equitable society.
Many of the new government agencies
had hired Jews.
Even some of the President's close advisors
were Jewish.
By the time that we came to the late 1930's,
there were a considerable number of Jews,
but not in the old-line agencies.
In the old-line agencies,
it had been hard to get in
and the Jews had
one way or another been restricted.
NARRATOR:
The State Department
was an old-line agency.
Staffed with career diplomats,
it reflected a conservative bias
forged before World War I.
These crafters of U.S. foreign policy
believed in the superiority
of white, northern European stock.
In the atmosphere of an exclusive
gentlemen's club,
they often reflected
the anti-alien sentiments
of American society.
The fate of tens of thousands of Jews,
including Ludwig and Alice Klein,
would be directly tied
to the attitudes of these people.
The State Department
probably had a greater degree
of anti-Semitism than others
and particularly
in the immigration section
because they felt the Jews were not
like them.
I would hesitate
to characterize the State Department as
anti-Semitic.
On the other hand,
the State Department was
tended to focus on Arabs' problems
and the opportunities for the United States
uh to uh
protect its interests in the Mideast,
and uh
the refugee problem
and Jewish problems was tended to be
pushed to the side.
The State Department
never was willing to recognize
that the threat to the Jews,
the life threat to the Jews
was as great as it really was.
Their attitude was,
"If we're patient,
we'll find that
the problems of the Jews in Germany
are not really life-threatening."
NARRATOR:
For those trying to escape Europe,
piling up at embarkation ports,
the State Department's attitude
proved a deadly obstacle.
In the field,
the American consulates
held the final word on visas.
DAVID WYMAN, Historian:
In regard to American consulates in Europe,
anti-Semitism was widespread.
There's no doubt about it.
We have clear evidence.
I learned, in my own research,
that particularly it was seen in Zurich,
in Oslo,
in some consulates, in Vichy France
and in Lisbon.
In fact, the situation was so bad in Lisbon
that American Jewish groups had to go
to the Quakers
and request that they send a non-Jew
to Lisbon
to try to persuade
the American consulate there
to stop the obstruction
of Jewish immigration.
My brother, sister and I
set to work.
Day and night,
it became our preoccupation to
get immigration visas for our parents
so that we could get them to safety,
but it was a frustrating struggle.
NARRATOR:
May 1939
while the Kleins were still
awaiting their visas,
other German Jews
were able to board a ship for Cuba.
5th NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
And so over 900 of these unfortunate people,
all with visas for Cuba
and many with quota numbers
for the United States,
leave Hamburg on the St. Louis
happy in anticipation of a new life
far from Germany
where their experiences under the Nazi regime
will only be a sad, sad dream.
NARRATOR:
But when the ship arrived in Havana,
the Cuban government refused
to honor the refugees' landing certificates.
Friends and relatives
watched as despairing passengers
waited aboard ship
during a week of futile negotiations.
The passengers telegraphed President Roosevelt,
requesting temporary haven.
Their plea fell on deaf ears.
Finally, the ship was forced back to Europe,
sailing first for days along the Florida coast.
America would make no exception
to its rigid immigration laws.
The most logical haven for Jewish refugees
was now Palestine,
the historic homeland of the Jews.
Britain controlled Palestine.
Until the late '30s
had allowed Jewish immigration.
But as German Jewish refugees increased,
so did longstanding tensions
between Arabs and Jews.
To keep peace with the Arabs,
who controlled the area's vast oil reserves,
in 1939
London decided to issue a white paper
that strictly limited Jewish immigration:
15,000 people a year for five years,
then no more.
For Jews trying to escape the Reich,
the door to Palestine
was now virtually shut.
With the German invasion of Poland,
the situation grew ever more dangerous.
"If Jews again drive Europe into war,
the Jewish race in Europe will be destroyed."
In the spring of 1940,
the fate of European Jews
now fell into the hands of a new
Roosevelt appointee,
assistant Secretary of State
Breckinridge Long.
Long's policies
would directly control
the future for the Kleins,
for all those
cramming into consulates across Europe.
Long endorsed
the anti-alien bigotry of the times
and also feared
German agents might enter America,
posing as refugees.
Pres. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:
Today's threat to our national security
is not a matter of military weapons alone.
We know of new methods of attack:
the Trojan horse,
the Fifth Column
that betrays a nation unprepared
for treachery.
Spies,
saboteurs,
and traitors
are the actors in this new strategy.
National security was, of course,
a legitimate issue,
but what Breckinridge Long did
was to exaggerate the problem,
then use it as a device
to put into force the anti-alien policies
of the State Department.
To what extent anti-Semitism was involved,
we're not clear,
but what we do know
is that as a result
immigration was sharply cut.
In 20 years of research,
probably the most disgraceful
document that I've ever run into
is this memorandum
written by Breckinridge Long,
in June 1940,
in which he outlines
the means by which consuls,
secretly and illegally,
can cut very sharply
into immigration.
NARRATOR:
"We can delay and effectively stop,
for a temporary period of indefinite length,
the number of immigrants into the U.S.
We could do this
by simply advising our consuls
to put every obstacle in the way
which would postpone
and postpone
and postpone
the granting of the visas."
At the end of August 1940,
my father wrote the following:
"Dear Children,
A few days ago
we received the following notice
from the American consulate in Stuttgart"
- and I quote -
"Due to a change of circumstances,
it is now necessary
to reassess those immigration applications
that had already been approved
as being insufficient.
In many cases,
this approval will
undoubtedly have to be rescinded.
We are therefore advising you
not to make any preparations for such a trip
or, if you have already made
such steamship reservations,
to cancel them
until you hear from this consulate again.
That should avoid financial losses
for you or your guarantors.
American Vice Consul."
End of quote.
And my father continues:
"As you can see,
our emigration will not go as fast
as imagined,
and we regret you will be disappointed."
NARRATOR:
The Kleins
were now victims
of calculated bureaucratic delay.
Then, for several months,
Kurt Klein heard no word from his parents.
In October 1940,
he learned they had been deported
on an hour's notice
without their passports
to Vichy France
along with all the Jewish people
in their region.
In Marseilles,
they would have to take up their case
with the American consulate
all over again.
They were now being held
in a detention camp called Gurs.
HERBERT KATZKI:
Gurs was a terrible place.
In walking through the streets
- there weren't streets, they were roads -
mud literally up to your ankles.
The people, they lived in hutments.
Blankets were in short supply,
food was in short supply.
The French had this kind of an arrangement,
the director of the camp
received a per-capita amount
in order to feed the people.
Well, if he didn't
spend all the money on the food,
it remained in his pocket,
and you could be sure
that he didn't spend all the money
that he got in order to feed the people.
My father writes:
"Our daily rations consist of the following:
In the mornings,
there's some black, so-called coffee,
at noon a thin soup
mostly of cabbage, carrots or turnips.
In the evening again coffee or tea
along with 260 grams of bread
which has to last the entire next day.
On that alone nobody can subsist."
HERBERT KATZKI:
It was a technical nightmare
to get out of France.
You had to have a French visa to sortie
- that's an exit visa from France.
You had to get a Spanish transit visa,
you had to get a Portuguese transit visa.
You had to have your American visa
either promised or stamped
into your passport,
and you had to have a boat ticket
or onward transportation.
All of these things had to happen
within a four-month period.
If any of it fell by the wayside,
you had to start over again
in order to get everything lined up.
By the end of 1940,
Long's "postpone and postpone" directive
was having its full impact.
During the year that followed his order,
immigration was cut in half.
When we ran up against
these new obstacles,
we became so desperate that I
decided to go to Washington,
trying to see someone
at the State Department.
I was young, of course,
and inexperienced
and didn't know what to do,
so I got as far
as someone's secretary
who promised to take up the matter
with her superior and later came back
and brushed me off
with the usual platitudes.
Kurt Klein had now entered a deadly maze.
For many American Jews,
it was a familiar experience.
ARNOLD FORSTER:
American Jews
ARNOLD FORSTER:
had very little influence
in the United States in those years,
and they hadn't yet established themselves.
They had no infrastructure,
they had no tensile strength
as an organized group.
They were disparate people
trying to learn to make a living
in a community that was by way
a way of life opposed to their intrusion.
They didn't want Jews
living alongside them,
eating alongside them,
going to school with them,
living in their houses.
These were people
who were on the outside
and they were not really of major concern.
So a weak Jewish community,
a non-caring non-Jewish community
is a formula for disaster,
and that's what we had.
NARRATOR:
For years,
in spite of their politically weak position,
Jewish leaders had organized rallies
to protest Nazi persecutions.
Many were sponsored
by a friend of the President,
who would later become
one of the first Americans to learn
the full extent of Hitler's horrors,
prominent rabbi Stephen S. Wise.
Rabbi STEPHEN S. WISE:
I would say that the conscience of America
rejects Hitler's power.
NARRATOR:
Wise and his followers
were ardent Roosevelt supporters,
but in the anti-Semitic
atmosphere of the times,
many Jews were frightened
and reluctant
to press the administration too hard.
I remember a sermon,
a bitter sermon of my father's.
The year was 1940.
It was Yom Kippur
of 1940,
the Day of Atonement in the fall of 1940.
He got up in the synagogue and he said:
"Our brothers are being killed
in Europe
by the Nazis."
The murders had already begun
on a small scale.
He said: "If we had any Jewish dignity,
we would, at the end of this fast,
get into our cars
and go from Baltimore,
where we live, to Washington.
We would pick up the White House
and we would demand of the President
that he uses his influence
on the Nazis,
as the great neutral power,
to stop the killings."
And then he added:
"And the reason why you hesitate to do this
is that sons and daughters of yours
have jobs in the New Deal agencies
which are now open to Jews,
and you are afraid
that you are going to rock the boat."
That night,
within an hour after the end of the fast,
my father got a note
from the board of this little synagogue
firing him
for his disrespect for the President.
NARRATOR:
During the presidential campaign of 1940,
Roosevelt never promised help for refugees.
Still, he received 90 percent
of the Jewish vote.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
The results now conclusive:
Roosevelt wins.
DAVID WYMAN:
Early in Roosevelt's third term
in 1941,
the refugees in Europe
still held hopes of coming to the U.S.
They had the illusion
that they might perhaps
find safety here.
But at the same time,
Long and the State Department
once again were devising
even higher barriers:
more regulations,
more documentation,
more paper walls
that meant the difference between
life and death.
In the summer of 1941,
using the exaggerated issue
regarding subversion among the refugees,
the State Department set up yet another
group of regulations.
Among these,
all immigration decisions
were centralized in Washington,
processed through
an impossibly complex
system of review committees.
In a matter of months,
immigration was so severely curtailed
that it was virtually shut down.
I love America.
I've always loved America,
and even during the time when
when we were so desperately
trying to get our parents here,
that didn't interfere with that love at all.
But it did make it very difficult
to understand
why this country,
which had been so good
to my sister, to my brother and to me,
couldn't also permit them
to get here and join us.
In the middle of July of '41,
I received this letter from my mother.
"You'll have to start anew
with respect to our immigration.
We were enlightened today
about the new decrees
and, regretfully,
everything has now become invalid
and we are back to square one.
And the worst thing is
that Father and I are compelled
to be separated
for such long periods of time.
Much of what I was able initially
to be enthusiastic about
is no longer of any consequence to me."
NARRATOR:
Summer 1941,
the Nazis invaded Russia.
In newly-conquered areas,
a secret policy was put into action.
Political enemies,
undesirables,
and all Jews
were rounded up by special forces,
Einsatzgruppen.
This rare footage
filmed secretly by Germans
documents the physical start
of the genocide of the Jews,
the Holocaust.
By the end of 1941,
more than half a million Jews
would be murdered.
This was the final solution.
In October of 1941,
once again
everything seemed in readiness
for my parents
to be able to leave France.
Passage had been booked
on a Portuguese ship
that would leave Lisbon
the day after Christmas.
The only thing we were still waiting for
was approval of the American consul
in Marseilles
to grant their visa.
NARRATOR:
A few weeks later
from Gurs,
Ludwig Klein wrote again.
"December 6, 1941.
My dear children,
we were at the American consulate
on December 3rd,
at which time
our visas were supposed
to have been issued.
Although everything was in readiness,
they could not be handed over to us
because no more German quota numbers
were available.
However,
they ought to be available again
within a few days."
NARRATOR:
But at home in Buffalo, New York,
Kurt Klein,
reading about the attack on Pearl Harbor,
realized America's entry into the war
could further hamper his parents' escape.
Two days before they were set to sail,
Kurt Klein received this cable:
"Passage uncertain.
Try to find out other lines."
KURT KLEIN:
Once more everything fell apart.
Aside from all the red tape,
the tragedy of Pearl Harbor got in the way.
Even though we continued our
attempts to get our parents out,
because we knew
that they were in the unoccupied
part of France
which was still
not totally under German control,
everything we attempted to do for them
turned into nothing.
NARRATOR:
By spring 1942,
rumors moved through western Europe:
entire villages,
cities being emptied of Jews,
massive deportations
somewhere to the east.
While the Nazis kept the final destination
a well-guarded secret,
the transports themselves
were impossible to hide.
They were noted as far away as Washington
by Eleanor Roosevelt
in her weekly radio broadcast.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, First Lady:
How utterly without mercy
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, First Lady:
or regard for human life
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, First Lady:
is the German fuhrer.
How otherwise can we explain
the reports of sending
numberless Jewish people
from Berlin and other cities
at an hour's notice,
packed like cattle
into trains
with their destination either Poland
or some part of occupied Russia?
NARRATOR:
That the trains were heading
to killing centers,
fully operating by spring of '42,
was still a well-guarded secret.
But that summer in Switzerland,
the Nazi plans to exterminate
all the Jews of Europe
were leaked by an anti-Nazi
German industrialist.
His information was passed to
Gerhart Riegner,
the representative of a Jewish organization
in Geneva.
Horrified,
Riegner related it to the State Department,
requesting they alert Rabbi Stephen Wise
in New York.
But skeptical State Department personnel
dismissed the report
as a wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears
and suppressed the information.
Two weeks later,
Wise received the same information
through an independent source in London
and approached the State Department.
He was asked to remain silent
until the department verified the reports
that millions were slated for death.
Months went by without any progress
whatsoever
until in September of '42
some of the letters
we had sent to our parents
were returned to us
stamped
"Return to sender,
moved,
left no forwarding address."
We feared the worst,
but of course didn't know the details.
NARRATOR:
By November,
the horrifying puzzle
was being pieced together
by the State Department
from press accounts,
refugee workers,
the Red Cross,
the Polish government in exile,
the Vatican.
60,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands;
3,600 Jews from France
sent eastward,
exact destination unknown;
16,000 arrested in Paris.
Two trainloads of Jews
departed toward their doom
without anything further heard from them.
"Evacuated whole Warsaw ghetto,
murdered 100,000 Jews.
Mass execution of Jews continues,
killed by poison gas in chambers.
Convoys of Jews led to their death,
seen everywhere."
The State Department had finally
confirmed the systematic annihilation
of European Jews.
November 24, 1942,
Stephen Wise, after three months,
was released from his pledge of silence.
At a press conference,
Wise revealed the Nazi plan
to exterminate all the Jews of Europe.
The news was carried by major newspapers,
but not prominently.
Over two million people were already dead.
KURT KLEIN:
I'll never forget November of 1942.
It was the time when I was drafted
into the American Army,
which gave me a measure of pride
to be serving the country
that was fighting this evil.
It was also good to know
that I was finally doing something concrete
- however small that might be -
that would help in that effort.
But November '42
was also a time
when we received a letter
from the State Department.
"With reference to your interest
in the visa case
of Mr. Ludwig Klein and his wife Alice,
I take pleasure in informing you
that after further consideration of the case
in the light of existing conditions,
the department has given
renewed advisory approval
to the appropriate American officer
at Marseilles
for the issuance of immigration visas
to the applicants.
Very truly yours,
H.K. Travers,
Chief, Visa Division."
The tragedy was
that this letter came
two and a half months
after my parents'
deportation
to an unknown destination in eastern Europe.
NARRATOR:
Serving with the American Army in Europe,
it would be three more years
before Kurt Klein
would discover
the fate of his parents.
Near the end of 1942,
with four million Jews still alive in Europe,
Stephen Wise and other Jewish leaders
presented a document to President Roosevelt
detailing the Nazi plan for extermination.
The President acknowledged
he was well aware
of what was happening to the Jews.
But he limited his response
to a statement threatening the Nazis
with accountability for war crimes.
Spotlighting the tragedy for the public
remained the burden of American Jews.
Rabbi STEPHEN S. WISE, 1942' Archive:
In Hitler's Europe within this year
the number of Jews slain in one or another
inhuman way
stands between
two and three million.
NARRATOR:
Wise's American Jewish Congress
and other major Jewish organizations
challenged the government's position
that nothing could be done
short of winning the war.
Rabbi STEPHEN S. WISE:
We may move our country
and the United Nations to act now.
NARRATOR:
They called for revised immigration procedures
and actions at an international level.
In coming weeks,
40 rallies were mounted across the country
by Wise and allied organizations.
In early 1943,
reports on the ongoing
extermination of the Jews
continued to arrive at the State Department
to be passed on to American Jewish leaders.
But in February,
the department ordered its Swiss legation
not to accept any further reports
intended for private citizens.
Vital information
about the death of tens of thousands
was cut off for 11 critical weeks.
The State Department
was actively blocking information
about the genocide.
Roosevelt refused to focus on the issue.
the American churches were largely silent,
a fact that particularly
pains me, as a Christian,
and the press had little to say
and buried that little on the inner pages.
So it fell to Jewish activists
to bring the information
to the American public.
One of those activists,
a person not connected
with the mainline Jewish organizations,
who would later
come into sharp conflict with them,
was a newcomer to America
from Palestine,
Peter Bergson.
NARRATOR:
Bergson had arrived in America in 1940.
He was a member of the Irgun,
the underground organization in Palestine
willing to use violence there
to press for a Jewish state.
On what Bergson would call
the most traumatic day of his life,
he read Stephen Wise's November announcement
on page six of The Washington Post.
Immediately he embraced a new commitment:
to move the story from the back pages
to the front page of public awareness.
WILL ROGERS,Jr. U.S.Congressman(D-CA)1943-44:
When I first met Peter Bergson,
my impression was that
the Jews were being kicked around
in Europe,
and the United States
should do something about it,
and the other people
should do something about it,
whether they were Jews or Cherokees
or whatever it was.
And, eh,
it was on a Jewish basis at all,
whatever the
I was either approached by Peter Bergson
or agreed to go along in the Bergson group.
NARRATOR:
Will Rogers, Jr.,
was one of the politicians,
actors, authors, journalists,
Bergson and his colleagues enlisted
for a campaign of public awareness.
There was a touch of genius about Bergson,
but a touch of genius,
I think, lay in his
being a master of publicity
uh,
or what we later came to call
the art of public relations.
He seemed to've grown up with this capacity,
perhaps with his mother's milk,
I don't know,
but he was so good at it.
I think the most effective thing
that we of the Bergson group did
was our advertising and our ads.
These were written by Ben Hecht.
They were full-page ads.
They appeared in The New York Times
and they were extremely shock.
One of them, I recall,
was:
"70,000 Jews for sale."
NARRATOR:
The ad drew attention
to an American press account
that Romania might release
70,000 captive Jews.
Ben Hecht, its author,
was an eminent screenwriter
and Broadway playwright.
He wrote simple,
direct,
declarative sentences
that went straight to the point.
The Ben Hecht ads
did more than any other single event
to stimulate
the Americans that wanted to save Jews
to saving Jews.
And by some merciful gift of history,
his talents became available
for a cause like ours.
NARRATOR:
In March,
Hecht's theatrical talents were put to use
as the campaign moved beyond the papers.
6th NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
The pageant, We Will Never Die,
is New York's Jewish protest
against Nazi massacre
NARRATOR:
Forty thousand attended the spectacle
staged by some of the finest talents
in the American theater.
LEONA ZARSKY, Physician:
I remember going to New York
to see the pageant.
I just remember my own sense
of being so overwhelmed and feeling
an enormous link
with everybody on the stage.
SYLVIA SYDNEY: "We Shall Never Die"
Here the Germans turned machine guns on us
and killed us all.
Remember us.
I wept all through it.
My father wept with me.
It was very moving.
But again, I was never sure
that non-Jews saw it
as anything
but a wonderful theatrical spectacle.
PAUL NIUNI: "We Shall Never Die "
There are four million Jews
surviving in Europe.
The Germans have promised
to deliver to the world,
by the end of the year,
a Christmas package
of four million dead Jews,
and this is not a Jewish problem.
It is a problem that belongs to humanity
and it is a challenge
to the soul of man.
NARRATOR:
In following weeks,
the Bergsons intensified their campaign
to awaken America.
The pageant toured five different cities,
playing to more than 100,000 people.
At the same time,
other Jewish organizations held rallies
around the country.
The government attempted to quell
the Jewish outcry
by announcing a joint
British-American rescue conference.
And we Jews became very excited
that finally two great governments
were meeting to solve the problem,
if indeed it could be solved.
NARRATOR:
The closed-door conference
met in a remote Bermuda hotel.
The American delegation
arrived with secret directives
from the State Department.
The Bermuda conference
was a conference set up to not
to not accomplish anything,
and the people who represented the U.S.
there
were given those instructions.
NARRATOR:
The results soon leaked out.
ARNOLD FORSTER:
The Bermuda conference was a failure.
Because the real result
was that they decided,
the two powers,
that first the war had to be won,
and then Jews
could be taken care of.
I must tell you
it discouraged the American Jewish community.
It broke the hearts of the leaders
who had been involved
in trying to make it happen.
It made us feel once and for all
that all was lost.
Jewish leaders,
after the hoax at Bermuda,
were plunged into despair.
They now recognized that America and Britain,
the two great western democracies,
Hitler's enemies,
were deeply committed to a policy
of not rescuing Jews.
JAN KARSKI:
I was summoned to the White House
by President Roosevelt
on July 28, in 1943.
He kept me approximately one hour 20 minutes.
NARRATOR:
Jan Karski was an agent
for the Polish government in exile.
A Christian,
he brought information in and out of Poland.
One secret assignment:
to witness the death camp in Belzec.
JAN KARSKI:
I made him my opening report.
"I saw
what was happening to the Jews
in the Warsaw ghetto.
I was
saw concentration camp in Belzec.
I saw terrible things."
He listened.
The conclusion of that part of the report
was his statement.
I was supposed to go back to Poland
at that time.
"You will tell your leaders
that we shall win this war.
You will tell them that the guilty ones
will be punished for their crimes.
You will tell them
that Poland has a friend
in this house."
And he tendered his hand.
I was impressed with this.
"Poland has a friend in the White House,"
President Roosevelt.
Only - if you are interested -
when the ambassador took me to the limousine
eh, eh, by the eh side door,
he whispered on the street,
"Well, the President did not say much,"
because these were generalities.
NARRATOR:
In the second half of 1943,
the government's longstanding policy
of not rescuing European Jews
was challenged
simultaneously on two fronts,
the first,
in a branch of government
normally not involved with refugees,
the Treasury Department.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau,
a Jew,
had a 30-year working relationship
with Franklin Roosevelt
and was a close personal friend.
DAVID WYMAN:
It would be Henry Morgenthau
and some non-Jewish
Treasury Department staff members
who eventually would uncover
the State Department's
deliberate obstruction of rescue.
NARRATOR:It began when Stephen Wise
came to Washington
with a plan for the U.S. Jewish community
to put up funds
to rescue 70,000 Romanian Jews.
To prevent funds from falling into enemy hands,
Washington required a special wartime license
to be approved by both State
and Treasury.
The State Department stalled the license
for 11 weeks,
but when the request finally reached
the Treasury Department,
it was approved within 24 hours.
NARRATOR:
Henry Morgenthau and his Treasury Staff
assumed that the first meager steps
toward saving European Jews were under way.
At the same time, the persistent Bergson group
launched an all-out campaign
calling for the establishment
of a government rescue agency.
In October
they held an unprecedented demonstration
in Washington.
Four hundred orthodox rabbis
arrived from around the nation,
two days before the most holy day
in the Jewish year,
to present a petition to the President.
RABBI:
We pray and appeal to the Lord, blessed be He,
that our most gracious president,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
consider and recognize
this momentous hour of history,
that he may save
the remnant of the people of the Book,
the people of Israel.
NARRATOR:
The petition called for the establishment
of a special government rescue agency.
The rabbis expected to meet
with the President,
but Jewish leaders
opposed to the Bergson group,
because of its flamboyant tactics,
advised Roosevelt against it.
Vice President Wallace received the petition.
White House spokesmen
claimed the President was too busy,
but a look at his appointment calendar
reveals he was free that afternoon.
A few weeks later,
the campaign for a rescue agency intensified.
Legislation designed by the Bergson group,
was introduced jointly into Congress
by Senator Guy Gillette,
and Representative Will Rogers, Jr.
WILL ROGERS, Jr.:
I just did what anybody would have done.
I was not concerned with the outcome so much
as I was with making a statement
and that somebody makes a statement
and that,
and that my country makes a statement.
I did very much want
the United States,
as a country and as a nation,
to stand,
to protest and to stand for the rescue
of these people when it could be done.
NARRATOR:
Back at the Treasury Department,
Morgenthau's inner staff,
the general counsel to the Treasury,
Randolph Paul,
his assistant Josiah DuBois,
and the head of foreign funds control,
John Pehle,
discovered shocking information
about the license they'd issued
five months earlier
to rescue the Romanian Jews.
JOHN PEHLE:
When we issued the license
and gave it to the State Department
to transmit it,
we assumed that it would be carried out.
And when we heard from the
Jewish agencies that were involved
the license had never been received,
and when we discovered they had been held up,
we of course made inquiries
and they were told
they were consulting with the British.
NARRATOR:
With 70,000 lives at stake,
the Treasury began to investigate the delay.
At the same time on Capitol Hill
pressure was building
against the administration's inaction.
WILL ROGERS, Jr.:
I find it very hard
to try and explain
why the administration had not moved,
more rapidly,
toward saving Jews in Europe,
especially when situations developed
that they knew they could get
some of these people out,
and they knew they could do something.
The only excuse that I can give,
and it's a pretty weak one,
is that they were tangled up
with oil,
with the Arabs,
with the British,
with the mandate,
with Palestine and with everything else,
and they were trying to look down the road.
Meanwhile
these people are being killed back here
and they're looking at 50 years
or 25 years in the future.
NARRATOR:
The rescue resolution
sponsored by the Bergson group
received unusual bipartisan support
in the Senate,
but there were problems in the House.
DAVID WYMAN:
In the House hearings,
the worst problems occurred
when Breckinridge Long appeared
and gave closed-door testimony.
NARRATOR:
Long's grossly misleading statements
made it look like the State Department
was doing an outstanding job,
bringing 580,000 Jewish refugees to America
since the start of the Hitler years.
Long impressed the House committee
and called into question the need
for a separate rescue agency,
but his statements were false.
The truth was
that well under half the people he claimed
had entered America
and many of them were not Jewish.
His testimony stalled the legislation.
NARRATOR:
Jewish groups refuted Long,
and the State Department's policies
began to unravel.
The staff at Treasury
uncovered the smoking gun
when they pressed the State Department
and the British
to explain the license delay.
The American embassy
went to the British authorities and received
a letter saying
the reason the British were opposed
to issuance of the license
was of the difficulty of disposing
of any considerable number of the refugees
should they be rescued.
NARRATOR:
"The Foreign Office are concerned
with the difficulties of disposing
of any considerable number of Jews
should they be rescued
from enemy-occupied territory."
The words were characterized by Morgenthau
as "a satanic combination
of British chill and diplomatic double-talk,
cold and correct,
and adding up to a sentence of death."
The State Department's attitude
was equally horrifying.
There was always the danger
that the German government might agree
to turn over to the U.S. and to Great Britain
a large number of Jewish refugees.
Finally it was out in the open,
the real reason the British
and the State Department
were obstructing rescue:
the fear that large numbers of Jews
might actually be released.
NARRATOR:
Then the Treasury investigators
uncovered a copy of the State Department's cable
ordering its legation in Switzerland
not to pass along extermination reports.
We were advised by our friends
in the State Department
that the State Department
not only was not interested
in the refugee problem,
but that they were actively suppressing
information about the extent of the Holocaust
by sending instructions to their
legation in Switzerland
not to permit private Jewish agencies
to transmit any such stories.
Suppress information?
The government then becomes an accomplice
to what the Nazis were doing
by hiding information
from the American public.
NARRATOR:
The Treasury investigators next discovered
a State Department attempt
to cover up this cable.
When we discovered
that not only had the State Department
suppressed information
of the extent of the Holocaust
but had tried to cover it up,
we then felt that
this should be brought
to the President's attention.
What was so shocking
uhhh had to be remedied.
NARRATOR:
Outraged by their discovery,
the staff at Treasury
immediately wrote a report
to Secretary Morgenthau.
They chronicled
the State Department obstructionism
and urged their boss to go to the President.
Josiah DuBois spent Christmas Day 1943
drafting
"Report to the Secretary
on the Acquiescence of this Government
in the Murder of the Jews."
Secretary Morgenthau,
who valued above all else
his relationship with the President,
nevertheless felt that he had to put himself
on the line
and be the spokesman on this issue.
NARRATOR:
January 16, 1944,
the Treasury Report
indicting the State Department
was presented
at an unusual Sunday meeting
in the White House.
JOHN PEHLE:
We met with President Roosevelt
in the Oval Office,
Secretary Morgenthau, Randolph Paul and I.
The President didn't read the report,
but Morgenthau asked me to
outline why we were there
and why we felt that a separate agency
outside the State Department
was essential.
And at the end of the meeting,
the President said,
"We'll do it."
NARRATOR:
Six days later,
FDR officially reversed
the government's policy of obstruction.
He signed Executive Order 9417,
creating the War Refugee Board,
which was instructed
to take all measures to rescue
victims of enemy oppression
in imminent danger of death.
The real reason
Roosevelt established the board
was not because
of a sudden moral awakening,
after all,
he'd been aware of the basic facts
all along,
it was a political decision.
Finally,
the forces on two different paths,
the developments in the Treasury Department
and the Bergson-led rescue resolution
in Congress,
came together.
What Roosevelt realized
was that he was confronted
not only with the revelations in the Treasury,
in the Treasury,
but also
that it was only a matter of days
before the rescue resolution
would come to the floor of the Senate
for debate,
and when that discussion occurred,
it was almost certain
that some of the shocking revelations
that he'd seen in the Treasury Department
were going to come to the forefront
and be brought clearly
to public attention.
Confronted with this nasty scandal,
Roosevelt made the move,
established the War Refugee Board
and thereby cut off
further discussion in Congress.
NARRATOR:
Morgenthau,
along with Secretary of State Hull
and Secretary of War Stimson,
became the nominal heads
of the War Refugee Board,
and at Morgenthau's recommendation,
John Pehle took charge as acting director
JOHN PEHLE:
I remember
the day the executive order was signed.
And I came home and the telephone rang
and there was a woman on the phone
who identified herself
as the wife of a prominent physician
in Washington.
And she said, "Are you Jewish?"
And I said no.
And she said, "Why are you doing this?"
And I tried to explain to her
what we were doing,
but here was somebody
calling on the telephone
and saying why did I
agree to be head of the War Refugee Board?
Well, it's a sampling of some anti-Semitism.
NARRATOR:
Pehle and the board
faced a difficult road.
Government funding was meager.
Most costs were paid
by private Jewish organizations.
Other government agencies
refused to cooperate,
as in late 1944.
The board endorsed a proposal
from American Jewish leaders
to bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz,
but the proposal was sabotaged.
JOHN PEHLE:
The Jewish agencies themselves
weren't sure
that they wanted us to arrange this.
Bombing railroad lines is not very effective
'cause they can be rebuilt overnight,
so it involved
wiping out the extermination facility.
And finally after much soul-searching,
we recommended this to the War Department.
NARRATOR:
Auschwitz was located in a strategic
oil-refining district in Poland.
The refineries were no farther than 45 miles
from these crematoria.
JOHN PEHLE:
After we recommended to the War Department
that the
extermination facilities at Auschwitz
be bombed,
we were told that this was not possible.
When we pursued this further,
we were told that this would involve
bombers being sent from England
and that jet fighters could not escort
bombers that far,
and therefore
it was not possible to do this.
Later, perhaps after the war,
we discovered that
at the very time we were recommending this,
bombing all around Auschwitz
was going on from Italy,
and we had been misled.
NARRATOR:
Some 2,800 bombers
targeted the oil refineries
during the months
when 150,000 Jews were being gassed.
On two occasions,
fleets of heavy bombers
actually flew past the gas chambers,
aiming for the I.G. Farben fuel factory
less than five miles away.
A few bombs accidentally
hit Auschwitz itself,
killing 85 prisoners,
civilians and SS guards.
This photograph makes clear
the War Department refused
to consider the destruction of Auschwitz
as part of its mission.
These bombs flying toward I.G. Farben
were targeted for the fuel factory,
not the death camp immediately below.
With almost no cooperation
from other government agencies,
the board still managed
to truck critically-needed supplies
to a few camps behind enemy lines;
helped evacuate 15,000 Jews
from Axis countries to safety,
many in rickety boats across war-torn seas;
rescued 48,000 Jews in Romania
by threatening its government
with post-war punishments;
saved tens of thousands of Budapest's Jews
through the efforts of its agent,
Raoul Wallenberg;
and in America,
established just one refugee camp
at Fort Ontario,
an abandoned Army base.
JOHN PEHLE:
We felt that since we were urging
other countries to take in refugees,
we had to do something ourselves,
and therefore we did establish
a camp in Oswego,
New York,
but it was largely a symbolic gesture.
NARRATOR:
Nine hundred eighty-two refugees
arrived in August 1944.
The administration painted
a magnanimous picture
55,000 quota places for that year alone
went unused.
In the end,
the War Refugee Board played a vital role
in saving the lives of 200,000 Jews,
a very valuable contribution,
to be sure,
but the number is terribly small,
compared to the total of six million killed.
The board did prove
that a few good people,
Christians and Jews,
could finally break through the walls
of indifference.
The great shame
is that if Roosevelt
had created the board a year earlier
and if it had been truly empowered,
the War Refugee Board
could have saved tens of thousands,
even hundreds of thousands more,
and, in the process,
have rescued the conscience of the nation.
NARRATOR:
In the final days of the war,
in a small town in Czechoslovakia,
Kurt Klein,
with American liberating forces,
freed 120 young Jewish women
who were abandoned by their SS guards
to die in an old factory.
They were the last of 4,000
who for years
had moved from labor
to concentration camps
and, at the end,
were on a five-month death march.
Most had died along the way.
As I entered the factory courtyard,
I saw what I can only describe
as walking skeletons
going about their pathetic task
of pumping water
at a hand pump
in the center of the courtyard.
Over on the far side,
I saw a girl leaning against
the entrance to the factory.
I walked over to her
and I noticed that she seemed in
slightly better physical condition
than the rest of them.
I asked about her companions,
and she said,
"Come, let me show you,"
and we went inside.
What greeted me inside
was a scene of utter devastation.
Girls were lying all around the floor
on scraps of straw,
some of them obviously
quite close to death.
An extraordinary thing
happened at that moment.
My guide made a sweeping gesture
and said some words that
are indelible in my mind:
"Noble be man, merciful and good."
And I recognized that
as a line from
a poem by the German poet Goethe.
And to me,
this was a devastating indictment
of all that the Nazis
had perpetrated on these women.
Of course, we immediately set to work
to help
the girls get to the hospital
where I found that
the girl who had been my guide
had fallen desperately ill
and was listed in critical condition.
Nevertheless, when I approached her bunk,
she seemed quite lucid
and we had a lengthy chat.
When I was getting ready to leave,
she wordlessly handed me
a few sheets of paper
which were her
reflections on recent events.
"Freedom,
I welcome it in the rays of the golden sun,
and I salute you,
brave American soldiers.
You ask what we have suffered,
what we have lived through.
Your sympathy is great,
but we cannot speak the unspeakable,
and you might not understand our language."
GERDA WEISSMANN KLEIN: [reading]
"You are people of freedom
GERDA WEISSMANN KLEIN: [reading]
and we, are we human still or again?
Yes, they have tried to drag us
to the lowest level of human existence,
demeaned us
and treated us worse than animals,
yet something seems
to have remained alive within us,
for it stirs anew.
It is a soul which is sensitive
to the beauty of the blossoming spring,
the heart which beats in our breast
and pulses with being.
Pain surges through this new heart.
Slowly, the petrified shell
into which cruel barbarians
have cut deep wounds is mending,
leaving a vulnerable,
feeling heart.
I must tell you, good Americans,
my dying friends' words of farewell
were whispered from bloodless lips:
"Welcome them.
Welcome our liberators."
I know they are near.
I shall not see them anymore,
so greet them for me,
they who liberate you.
The girl who penned those
eloquent words
was Gerda Weissmann,
who has been my wife
for the past 46 years.
NARRATOR:
Following the war,
Kurt Klein received a message
in answer to inquiries about his parents:
"In reply to your letter,
we regret to inform you
that Ludwig and Alice Klein
were deported on August 19, 1942,
in the direction of Auschwitz
and, to date,
do not appear among our files
of repatriates.