The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler

A desperate Paula resolved to get her children to safety, even if it meant doing the unfathomable: sending each one to a different foreign country, alone. In Jewish tradition, her oldest son was expected to carry on the family name, which meant Manfred would leave first. Information about emigration was flowing freely in Jewish communities, and Paula heard about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), an organization based in the United States that helped unaccompanied children under sixteen get out of Germany. Due to increased demand, and in the interest of fairness, the group accepted only one child per family. When she signed up Manfred he was just shy of fourteen.

A deluge of paperwork followed: five copies of his visa application; two copies of his birth certificate; a certificate of good conduct from German authorities (which became increasingly difficult for Jews to acquire from Nazi officials and was eventually eliminated from U.S. immigration requirements); proof of good health from a physician; and signed documents from HIAS as well as from Paula’s sister, Minna, and her husband, Morris Rosenbusch, who had left Germany in 1936 and were living on Chicago’s South Side. They had agreed to take Manfred, who knew little English, into their home.

In June 1938, Manfred’s U.S. visa came through, and an early-July departure date was set. He was to take a train to Hamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, which connected to the North Sea by the Elbe River. An HIAS escort would meet him there, and he would join other German Jewish children aboard an ocean liner for the trip across the Atlantic to America.

As part of an agonizing round of farewells, Manfred bicycled fifteen miles to visit his grandmother’s brother. Manfred had an idea this would be the last time they would see each other, and his elderly granduncle seemed to share his feelings. As they said good-bye, the old man reached into his pocket and took out a crinkled U.S. ten-dollar bill that he carefully smoothed out and handed to the boy. “To help you start a new life in America,” he said.

Paula had been warned that Manfred could bring very little cash with him, so she sewed the bill into the cuff of a pair of his pants. Other Jewish families who had sent loved ones abroad gave her another idea. She purchased two seventy-five-dollar Leica camera lenses and placed each one at the bottom of a talcum-powder can, covering the valuable lenses with talcum. She tucked the cans under some folded linens in Manfred’s steamer trunk, which was sent ahead to the ship in Hamburg. She advised her son to sell the lenses in America when he needed money.

Early on the morning of his departure, Manfred said good-bye to his sister and brother and the other relatives who had come to see him off. It was particularly hard leaving his little brother, Herbert, who idolized Manfred in the way younger brothers are inclined to do. They even looked alike; Herbert, although a head shorter, had the same open, pleasant countenance as Manfred.

Herbert always followed his big brother around like a shadow, wanting whatever Manfred had or did; “ich auch” (me too) was a common refrain. As a junior partner in work and play, Herbert was always happy to help with the chores and anything else to get his big brother’s attention and please him.

Manfred held his grandmother’s long, tight hug, understanding that it was likely to be their last. Then he was off, still feeling her teary kisses on his cheeks as he looked back to see her sadly waving good-bye with both hands.

He and his mother bicycled to the rail station in Halsdorf, where they boarded a train for the ten-mile trip to Kirchhain. Once there, Paula bought her eldest son a one-way ticket on the express train to Hamburg. She handed him a folded white handkerchief and ran through some final instructions: keep the handkerchief in his pocket until arriving in Hamburg, then take it out and hold it in his left hand. He would see a lady on the platform with a white handkerchief in her left hand. She would be his escort, and she would take him to where the other children were gathering to board the vessel.

When his mother had no more instructions, she began to cry. She kissed Manfred and hugged him tightly. She had told him that she was very happy and relieved he was getting out of Germany, and that he would soon be safe in America. But even at fourteen, Manfred understood that what his mother was doing was a cruel opposite to her most basic instincts and to the nature and desire of every Jewish mother he knew: to love, protect, and care for her children.

“Auf Wiedersehen, Mutti,” he said, bidding farewell with more brightness than he felt. After so many heart-wrenching good-byes, this was the one he dreaded the most. He did not want to reveal to her his worst fear, which had been gnawing at him ever since he learned of his upcoming move to America.

Her last words to him, “Be quiet and do not draw attention to yourself,” would stay with him throughout his rail and sea journeys. Stepping into the train compartment, he found a window seat. He and his mother waved to each other as the train pulled out of the station. He could see that she was sobbing now, standing there alone on the platform. His train gained speed, and his mother grew smaller and smaller, until he could no longer make out her figure.

Manfred Steinfeld was deathly afraid he would never see her again.

For Paula Steinfeld, sending her oldest son away, alone, across an ocean to a foreign land to live with others, had been an agonizing decision. Now she prayed this move would save his life and ensure his future, even if she never saw his sweet face again. With a heavy heart, she returned home to Josbach and began to plot how to save her other two children.

Stephan Lewy was seven years old in 1932, when his father, Arthur, a widower for the past year, left him at the Baruch Auerbach Orphanage for Jewish Girls and Boys in Berlin. Stephan’s mother, Gertrude, had been an invalid for several years, and for a time after her death, Arthur had been able to care for his son with the help of a woman he hired to run the household.

The boy missed his mother terribly. She had been a soft and gentle presence in his life. When he did something well, it was his mother who hugged, kissed, and praised him, while his father slapped or spanked him for his transgressions. One of Stephan’s earliest memories was of his mother saying the blessing over the Shabbat candles on Friday night before the special meal she had prepared. But he had many more memories of her bedridden, due to a weak heart. They both enjoyed her reading to him as he snuggled up next to her, and Stephan liked doing things for his mother that she was unable to do herself.

Three months after Gertrude’s death, her younger brother, Ewald, defaulted on a sizable loan that Arthur, a tobacco merchant with his own shop, had guaranteed, against his wife’s advice. In satisfying the debt, Arthur lost the family’s savings and even their household furniture, which Stephan watched being taken away by movers from his perch on a windowsill.

Arthur could no longer afford the hired woman to care for Stephan while he was at work, and none of Gertrude’s relatives were willing or able to help with the little boy. Arthur’s parents and seven siblings were all dead by 1902, wiped out by some contagion, leaving him the only surviving member of the family at the age of nine. A Jewish organization had brought a frightened Arthur to the Auerbach Orphanage, where he remained until he was eligible to leave at age sixteen. Drafted into the German army in 1914, Arthur saw combat on the western front, including the second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, in which the Germans used mass poison gas attacks for the first time in history, killing thousands.

Stephan Lewy with his mother, Gertrude, shortly before her death in 1931. (Family photograph)

After he was discharged following the armistice, Arthur was invited by an army buddy to a dinner party. There, he sat next to a charming young woman dressed in pale gray chiffon; as Arthur would later tell friends, he fell in love with Gertrude between the soup and the apple strudel. They were married several months later.

While still in her twenties, Gertrude endured a near-fatal bout of rheumatic fever that left her heart damaged. A doctor warned her that the rigors of childbirth would endanger her life, and Gertrude and Arthur agreed not to have children. But within a year she was pregnant. The doctor repeated his dire assessment and offered to terminate the pregnancy.

“I’m going to have this baby,” she told the doctor and her worried husband. “And we’re both going to survive.”

Near the end of her life, Stephan saw his mother growing weaker, but even when she was hospitalized for the last time, he was too young to seriously consider the possibility that she would really die and leave him for good.

He was with his father, packing boxes in the back of the tobacco store, when the hospital telephoned. His father hung up the phone and said heavily, “She’s gone, my son. Your mother is dead.”

They sat down together on a wooden crate and cried. It was the first time that Stephan saw his stern father show any emotion.

“We are all alone now,” Arthur said, weeping. But, he reassured his son, they would be all right, because they had each other.

Then came the loan default, bill collectors, and furniture movers. Arthur lost their two-bedroom apartment in downtown Berlin; he could afford only a sparsely furnished room that came with kitchen privileges and a shared bathroom.

Sitting his son down for a talk, Arthur said in his most serious tone, “Do you remember what I told you about where I grew up?”

Stephan nodded.

“You are a good boy, and I am not doing this to punish you. But for your own good, I have decided to send you to the orphanage.”

“But, Papa, you said we’ll be all right, because we have each other.”

“This is not open for discussion,” said his father. He would not be dissuaded by sentiment or emotion. “I am familiar with the place. I feel sure you will receive proper care and supervision.”

A few days later, Stephan’s father took him to the Auerbach Orphanage. The ornate, three-story structure at Schönhauser Allee 162 was topped with a towering spiral; it had been built in the late 1800s as a beer brewery and still had a dank, dark interior. Stephan waited in a long hallway while his father went into an office.

When his father reappeared, Stephan could tell he wasn’t interested in a prolonged good-bye. He said Sundays were visiting days, bent down for a quick hug, then backed away and shook the boy’s hand.

Stephan, his heart beating rapidly, was left alone in the hallway.

An older boy soon appeared and led him to the boys’ dormitory, where Stephan unpacked his small suitcase. That night, he covered his face with a pillow so no one would hear him cry. When he woke the next morning to a clanging bell, his pillow was damp from tears.

One hundred children lived at the orphanage, all of them Jewish. Most had no parents, though there were some, like Stephan, whose single parents were unable to raise them for various reasons.

During the week, the children attended a public school, but other than that, they stayed at the orphanage. There were many rules, and if they behaved and had local relatives, they could visit them on Sundays, though they had to be back by 6 P.M. Having been raised in a home with a strict father aided Stephan’s adjustment to the authoritarian atmosphere.

Spring 1933 arrived; Hitler rose to power, and the orphanage, like the rest of the country, found itself abuzz with news of all the political happenings and the new anti-Semitic laws. The Nazis were banning Jews from holding public office and closing many professions to them, not only in civil service but in radio, newspapers, teaching, and theater arts.

“Stephan,” one friend said, “there will be nothing left for us when we grow up.”

When he heard about the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, Stephan worried about his father. Would he be able to keep his shop? He knew his father called himself a socialist. Although Stephan didn’t know what that meant—he was still only eight years old—the older boys who read the newspapers told him that socialists were among the people being rounded up by the Nazis.

Seven-year-old Stephan Lewy in the yard of the Baruch Auerbach Jewish Orphanage in Berlin, 1932. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Not long after, Stephan was called to the superintendent’s office. A grim-faced man behind a desk said, “I am sorry to tell you that you will not be allowed to go home for a Sunday visit until further notice.”

“But—what did I do?”

“The request came from your father.”

Stephan left the office weeping and confused. What had he done to make his father not want to see him? First his mother had died, and now this. He was alone in the world with no one who loved him. His wounded feelings soon turned to anger at Arthur, who he believed had completely abandoned him.

Months went by. Stephan heard nothing from or about his father. Then the mother of a friend from the orphanage, who had been bringing Stephan home with her son for Sunday visits, told Stephan the truth. The Nazis had arrested his father and were holding him in a concentration camp. The orphanage officials had tried to protect him from this terrible news, but she believed the boy should know why he was unable to see his father.

Arthur Lewy had been sent to Oranienburg concentration camp, one of the first detention facilities established by the Nazis after they came to power. Located in the town of Oranienburg, near Berlin, the camp’s initial purpose was to hold Hitler’s political opponents from the region, and by 1933, it was crowded with Social Democrats, socialists, and communists, along with others deemed “undesirable.” The SS took over the camp in mid-1934 and often marched the prison-uniformed inmates out for the day to perform hard labor.

Arthur was released from Oranienburg in 1935, after suffering a heart attack, and was admitted to a Jewish hospital in Berlin. Shortly after his discharge, he came to the orphanage to see his son. This time, he gave Stephan a big hug and kisses on both cheeks as they were reunited, standing in the same hallway where father and son had parted two years earlier. As overjoyed as Stephan was to see his father, he found his appearance deeply alarming. Arthur was missing most of his teeth, and his once solid build had withered.

A friend had kept the tobacco shop running in his absence, Arthur told Stephan, but the new laws made it difficult for Jews to own businesses, and he was being pressured to sell out for a low price to a non-Jew. “People are taking advantage of the situation,” he lamented. Now he was back to living in a rooming house.

As they talked, Stephan could not believe how his father had changed. Not only physically, but he had a warmer, less stern manner about him.

Stephan had changed, too. In the institutional setting of Auerbach, the little boy who had always tried hard to please had become proficiently mischievous. He was rarely caught doing anything wrong, however, even when he carried off pranks like leading boys through airshafts to spy on the girls as they took showers. And for the most part, Stephan obeyed the rules. He also did well in his studies.

As a reward, in early 1938, shortly after his bar mitzvah, he became a shamus, which meant he would be responsible for opening the synagogue, which also served the local Jewish community, on the top floor of the orphanage. Each morning, Stephan reset the Torah scrolls for the day’s reading and turned on the electric organ to warm it up. The older boys at the orphanage attended services three times a day. They learned to conduct services, too, and studied Hebrew so that they could read the scriptures. Surrounded by their religion, they lived Judaism at Auerbach Orphanage—in Stephan’s case, more fully than he had at home.

The neighborhood school had a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish students, with the boys and girls segregated. One day, a group of adults entered Stephan’s classroom: a nurse, a doctor, a policeman, and a Nazi official, all in their respective uniforms. The official announced they would be taking “Aryan measurements,” and ordered all the Jews—there were ten or twelve in the class, most from the orphanage—to stand in one corner. The other forty boys formed a wide circle, with the adults in the center. One by one, each stepped forward so the doctor could use a mechanical device to measure the size and shape of his skull. The doctor made other measurements, such as the distance between their ears and the length of the brow and nose, calling out the figures to the nurse, who wrote them down in a book. They used a board filled with color samples to match and document the color of each boy’s skin, eyes, and hair.

Off in the corner, Stephan and the other Jews were ignored.

In the fall of 1938, Stephan’s father remarried. His new wife was Johanna Arzt, and Stephan had played a role in how the couple met: Johanna was the sister of the woman who’d brought Stephan home with her son on Sundays while his father was in the concentration camp. After Arthur’s release from Oranienburg, father and son attended several Sunday dinners with the Arzts, and it was at these dinners that Arthur and Johanna were introduced.

Stephan, starved for a mother’s love, quickly grew close to Johanna, a nurturing and kind Jewish woman like his mother. Soon, he felt close to her and was calling her Mutter without reservation.

By then, Arthur had lost his shop. At night, he went out to knock on the doors of old customers, taking tobacco orders. He turned these over to an Aryan tobacconist to fill and received small commissions. Johanna worked as a bookkeeper. They still lived in a tiny rented room, so Stephan stayed at the orphanage.

As he was returning from school one day in early November 1938, Stephan saw a banner headline at a corner newsstand.

JEW KILLS GERMAN ATTACHÉ IN PARIS

Stephan knew immediately that this was big news, and he dug into his pocket for the change to buy a newspaper.

A week earlier, more than twelve thousand Polish-born Jews, who had resided legally in Germany for years, had been expelled from the country. Forced from their homes in a single day, they were taken to the nearest railroad stations and put on trains to the Polish border. Four thousand were allowed into Poland, but the remainder were denied entry and found themselves in limbo, trapped on the desolate frontier between the two countries. They spent a week in the rain and cold, enduring a lack of adequate food and shelter. Then, on November 7, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old boy living in Paris, the son of two Polish Jews who had been rounded up, walked into the Third Reich embassy there and shot the diplomat. He wanted to avenge the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, and his family in particular.

At the time, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, were reveling at the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, which commemorated Hitler’s first attempt to seize power in 1923. Within hours of hearing the news, they had plotted a response. They viewed the killing—Nazi propaganda called it the “first shot of the Jewish War”—as an opportunity to unleash a long-planned, violent mass action against Jews. Later that day, Goebbels outlined to wildly applauding party leaders the nationwide pogrom that would become known as Kristallnacht.

Beginning at midnight, secret teletype messages from Gestapo headquarters in Berlin went out to military and police units across the country, ordering organized anti-Jewish demonstrations in cities, towns, and villages throughout Germany, encouraging the destruction of synagogues and other Jewish properties, and authorizing the mass arrest and detention of Jews.

In Berlin the next day, angry crowds filled the streets, chanting, “Down with the Jews!” Nazi gangs—many of them SA brownshirts in uniform or Nazis in civilian clothes—armed with guns, knives, crowbars, and bricks, assaulted Jewish men at random, made widespread arrests, and plundered and set fire to synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. Firemen stood by and watched as the buildings burned.

Early the next morning, a group of uniformed Nazis burst through the doors of the Auerbach Orphanage, taking the staff members, all of them Jewish, into custody. They went into the dormitories on the ground floor of the U-shaped building—one wing for the boys and the other for the girls—and rounded up the children, herding them all upstairs to the synagogue. The coverings on the bimah—a raised platform from which the Torah is read—had been ripped away. The holy ark where the Torah scrolls were kept had been torn off the wall, and other symbols were destroyed.

The terrified boys and girls filled the pews and lined up along the walls, waiting to see what horrible things the Nazis had in store for them. But the Nazis simply left the synagogue without saying a word, leaving the frightened children to exchange confused looks.

A few moments later, Stephan heard the jangle of keys and the sound of the door being locked from the outside. Then he smelled the gas. The eternal light (ner tamid), located in front of the ark and symbolizing God’s enduring presence, had been smashed; the gas line that fed the flame had been cut. A steady stream of gas was flowing through the broken pipe and into the synagogue filled with children. If they did not escape from the confined space—and quickly—they would all die.

Some of the older boys desperately tried to break down the heavy door, but it wouldn’t budge. When the children realized they couldn’t get out, their fear turned to panic. Many of them, crying and screaming, started coughing and choking from the fumes.

One of the older boys picked up a chair and began smashing it against the beautiful windows. Stephan and some other boys joined in, and working together, they were able to break out several tall panes. The openings allowed fresh air to come in and the fumes to begin to dissipate. The children remained locked inside the synagogue for the rest of the day, until a concerned neighborhood policeman came by and let them out.

Two days later, the orphans were directed by staff members to return to school. Those orphanage staff members who had been released from custody seemed eager to bring some normalcy back to the children’s lives. “Pick up your lunches and go to school,” they told the orphans. “Life goes on.”

The sights Stephan saw on that two-mile walk would stay with him for the rest of his life. Buildings were burnt shells; stores had been looted; Torah scrolls and prayer shawls lay crumpled in the streets. Armed Nazis patrolled corners and rooftops. Jewish men, forced to sweep up in front of their destroyed stores and homes, were beaten and jeered as they worked.

Shortly after Stephan and the other boys from the orphanage reached the school and took their seats in their classroom, a uniformed Nazi came into the room to lecture the children about the “mixing of our pure Aryan race.” He announced that Jewish children could no longer attend “Aryan state” elementary schools. “You have to leave this school now,” he said.

Puzzled but not daring to ask questions, Stephan and the other Jewish students quietly collected their things and left. Back at the orphanage, the administrators had also just been informed of this new policy. A building on Kaiserstrasse—about a forty-minute walk from the orphanage through downtown Berlin—was soon designated as an all-Jewish school.

By then, the children were all well aware that anti-Semitism surrounded them any time they ventured outside. There was no escaping it in Germany’s capital city and no way to prevent the inevitable: it followed them to their new school. On most afternoons, the students were confronted by uniformed Hitler Youth, lined up in rows on either side of the sidewalk for about one hundred feet. Swinging their leather belts overhead, they whipped the students—who were forced to run the gauntlet—with the buckle ends like cattle. Policemen stood by and watched, but did nothing other than stop the Jews from trying to defend themselves.