EXIT BERLIN

How One Woman Saved Her Family from Nazi Germany

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Berlin Beginnings

It is ironic that Luzie Hatch came to this country, and left the world, on the heels of an evil wind. She fled Nazi Germany in 1938, one week after the Kristallnacht pogroms had torn through the Jewish community leaving 267 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses burned to the ground or destroyed. Ninety-one Jews were murdered and nearly thirty thousand Jewish men were incarcerated. In her letters, Luzie referred to Kristallnacht as "the terrible days."

She died on September 16, 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks, when terrorists had transformed an ordinary means of transportation, passenger planes, into weapons, killing thousands. On occasion, Luzie had taken visitors to see those two great World Trade Center Towers stretching skyward. In fact, in this book there is a photo of Luzie and her friends standing before the Towers. But after the attack there was just a gaping crater spewing an acrid smell that lingered for months. These events, Kristallnacht and September 11, were the bookends of her life in America.

When she sailed into the New York Harbor in November 1938, she thought she had left evil behind her. Luzie was young, only twenty-seven, but she was far from young when she passed away on September 16, 2001, at the age of eighty-nine. She had no children, and her estate executor, attorney Stephen Solomon, made the frequent visits to her bedside as her days diminished. They had known each other for decades.

Following Luzie's death, the task of dealing with her personal belongings fell to an associate of Stephen Solomon's, the attorney Roger Blane. While at her studio apartment, inventorying items to be sent to a Connecticut auction house—the usual possessions, furniture, books, and bric-a-brac—he stumbled on a collection of more than three hundred World War II era letters written by Luzie, her family members, her friends, and Berlin business colleagues. He insisted that I examine the collection.

Luzie Hatch, who had worked as an administrative assistant in a number of departments at the American Jewish Committee, retired long before I came to the AJC Archives, so I knew very little about her except for one important fact. She had spent a lifetime at AJC. How could I, the director of the archives, refuse to at least look at her letters? And so, on a brutally hot summer day, out of respect for her memory, I took the subway to Luzie's studio apartment in Forest Hills, New York.

Entering the apartment, I was immediately struck by the fact that it was "bursting" at the seams. How could it be otherwise? Luzie had lived in this studio apartment for sixty-one years. Every inch of the apartment was full. The bookshelves were packed so tightly that some books appeared to be popping out of the shelves. And she had put more than books on the shelves; they were amply dotted with tchotchkes: figurines of animals, children, and ceramic flowers.

It seemed as though Luzie Hatch had saved everything. There were maps and travel brochures from across the country, theater programs from decades ago, dozens of old medical and utility bills, and a 1975 Macy's department store receipt documenting the return of a sofa. The file cabinet drawers were so full and heavy that they seemed to resist my efforts when I first tried to pull them open.

The black and battered binder containing her years of correspondence was also tightly packed. Letters that had yellowed and grown brittle over the years protruded out beyond the binder's edge. They had probably been tucked away for decades before being pulled out of the cabinet drawer.

I had been skeptical of Roger Blane's enthusiasm for the letters. But that changed as I turned the pages and saw that Luzie had not only saved incoming letters but frequently made a copy of her outgoing letters. I realized I was holding a rare collection of matching correspondence. Turning to Roger, I told him that the AJC Archives would accept the collection. Pleased with my response, he left me to read the letters. In an effort to stave off the suffocating August heat, I tugged at the cord of the kitchen ceiling fan and was drawn into the Hatch family story.

"You can't imagine how this city devours you. You really barely have a moment to yourself. The distances in Berlin are not at all comparable to the ones here—and then we all have our heads too full and also have so much disappointing and sad correspondence to write that everything else takes a back seat." This was one of the first letters Luzie sent back to Germany after her arrival here in November 1938.

And there had been much correspondence to write. Week after week there were letters from her parents, aunts Paula Steinberg and Martha Marchand, cousins Alfons Isack and Dora Hecht, work colleagues, and others. But before introducing these relatives and friends, there is Luzie's immediate family, the Hechts of Berlin.

In many ways, the Hechts typified German Jewry. Like most German Jews, they made their home in an urban center. Luzie, her father, Edwin, stepmother, Helene, and half-brother Rolf, were part of the one-third of German Jewry who resided in Berlin.

By chance, when visiting the city, I had booked a room in a district adjacent to the Hechts' Wilmersdorf neighborhood of West Berlin. Filled with the excitement of a first-time visitor, I had darted in and out of my modest pension a number of times before noticing a plaque indicating the building had been home to ORT's Berlin headquarters from 1937 to 1939. Had Luzie and her family been among the hundreds of German Jews who had come to the ORT office desperate for a vocational training course that would provide them with a marketable skill in a new land? Perhaps, for my hotel was a short ten-minute walk to the Hecht residence.

While not wealthy, the Hechts were solidly middle class, if not upper middle class. Luzie's father had taken the typical career path for a German Jew. More than 50 percent of German Jews were employed in business or commerce, and so was Edwin Hecht. He worked as a merchandise manager at H. Joseph Company, a Jewish-owned department store. Like her father, Luzie also entered the business world. In January 1933, at age twenty-one, she secured a position as an assistant to a top executive at the prestigious firm of L. S. Mayer. At its founding in 1822, the company dealt in dry goods. By 1933, when Luzie joined the firm, its line had expanded and included leather goods, jewelry, and finery. With offices in Berlin, Frankfurt, Pforzheim, Paris, and New York, and with strong connections to L. S. Mayer Ltd. in London, the company sold its products to department stores, specialty stores, and wholesalers in North America, Europe, and the British colonies.

Henry Rodwell, a former employee of L. S. Mayer Ltd., recalls that the company was "a very well-considered and good employer in Germany and every Jewish father wanted his son to become an apprentice, if you like, with L. S. Mayer." Edwin Hecht was probably delighted with his daughter's success. There is no doubt that the work suited Luzie's personality. She loved communicating with various customers, vendors, and offices in different parts of the world. When penning her reference letter an executive noted that "she was especially qualified to meet German and foreign customers hereby making use of her knowledge of the English and French languages."

Working at L. S. Mayer, Luzie was able to peek at the new trends in leather goods and jewelry before these items filled shop counters and windows in Berlin, Paris, and London. At times, Luzie did more than just assess the new merchandise. A former colleague wrote teasing her with a reminder of how Luzie used to take the new items and put on a little fashion show in the office. So her employment at L. S. Mayer was more than a paycheck, it was a passion.

Life at 12 Zähringerstasse, the Hecht residence, was typical for the time. Luzie's stepmother, Helene, was a housewife, busy with all the normal household chores and the task of watching over her very lively nine-year-old son, Ralph.

The family was not deeply religious. They did not eat only kosher meat, keep separate dishes for meat and dairy, or strictly observe the Sabbath. But neither were the Hechts totally cut off from their religious roots, and this was in large part due to Helene. "My mother was not a fanatic," recalls Ralph, "but she did have an identification."

Although it was only on occasion that Helene walked to the neighborhood synagogue for Shabbat services, she made sure that the major Jewish holidays were always observed at the Hecht household.

"Highly assimilated" is the term often used to describe German Jews. Yet perhaps it is more accurate to speak of the Hechts as "highly acculturated." They did choose to live in Wilmersdorf, after all, a neighborhood with a significant Jewish presence; and their friends, as well as a large number of their coworkers, were mainly Jews.

Although Luzie lived in the same Wilmersdorf building as her father, stepmother, and brother, by the time she left Berlin in 1938, she had moved out and was renting a room from another family in the building. She was, of course, old enough to be independent, and her relationship with her stepmother, Helene, was rather strained. Johanna Hecht, Luzie's mother, had died when she was a child. Her father remarried when she was nine, an age where a warm relationship between child and stepparent might have been forged. But no such bond ever developed between Luzie and her stepmother. Ralph asserts that Luzie had always worshipped her mother and resented Helene's entrance into the family. He also recalls that when Luzie lay in hospice there was a large photo of her mother, along with a smaller one of her father, at the bedside.

This is the basic outline of Luzie's family, the Hechts of Berlin. And the picture that emerges is of a family that was quite representative of Germany Jewry in terms of professions, home life, residence, and high degree of acculturation. They were certainly, in the 1920s and up to the rise of Hitler, quite at home in Germany.

After the war, after knowledge of the death camps was public, the horrifying photos printed, the individual nightmares told, people wondered, almost in disbelief, why German Jews hadn't recognized Hitler's threat from the start. Why didn't they leave earlier? How could they have stayed? Didn't they see what was happening?

When I broached this topic with Luzie's brother, Ralph, he leaned forward and bellowed, "Who could have thought they would put people in ovens? Who would have thought such a thing? My parents had been born there; my grandparents had been born there. My father fought in the German Army in World War I. And who the hell wants to leave their homeland?" Ralph had answered my questions with force and sincerity, and no one can argue with the merit of his response. Yet there were additional reasons why so many were slow to recognize the Nazi danger.

When German president Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, there had been no great panic among German Jews. They did not rush to foreign consulates for visas, start contacting relatives abroad, or make plans to sell their homes and businesses. Many believed that the responsibility of actually governing rather than simply rabble-rousing and performing at rallies, the presence of conservatives in the new government, and pressures from the outside world would somehow curb Nazi excesses.

In fairness to German Jews, this assessment of Hitler's chancellorship was not limited to their community. With only two Nazis in Hitler's cabinet, it seemed reasonable to assume that his sphere of influence would be circumscribed. The makeup of the cabinet shows that Herr Hitler "had to accept significant restrictions." This was the opinion of the internationally well-known and liberal German newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung. Here in the United States The New York Times agreed: "The composition of the Cabinet leaves Herr Hitler no scope for the gratification of his dictatorial ambitions."

Early on, this was how many assessed Hitler's future, but Luzie's father, Edwin, was decidedly not part of this majority. While so many around the Hecht family attempted to maintain what they thought was a sense of reason, not to fall victim to fear, Edwin Hecht, from the very outset, recognized the impending Nazi threat.

Hitler's ascent to power coincided with a sharp career reversal for Edwin Hecht, probably the first one of his life. It was at this time that a letter arrived at the Hecht household from the Karstatt Department Stores, Edwin's future employer, stating that due to "political circumstances" they were withdrawing their offer of a high-level executive position. The timing could not have been worse; he had already resigned from his position at a Jewish-owned Berlin department store. With no warning and through no fault of his own, he was suddenly out of work.

Yet Edwin Hecht was able to overcome this setback. He had a good personality, connections within the retail world, was well liked, and had wit, a mix of traits that allowed him to become self-employed, working as a sales representative for various German leather goods firms.

Every morning, he loaded his Opel with the sample merchandise that now filled the household, giving it the feel of a warehouse, and set off for sales visits to stores in Berlin and the outlying areas. The loss of his position with the Karstatt Department Stores was unfortunate and unnerving, yet it did not ruin the family's wellbeing. Still, as Ralph would say, perhaps it was this experience which gave his father a "jolt, and made him see the handwriting on the wall from the very beginning."

In 1933, out of the total Jewish population of 525,000, roughly 37,000 Jews left Germany. Despite the strong reluctance of his wife, Helene, Edwin Hecht had wanted to be part of this initial emigration. With a mind of his own, it mattered little to him that his family and friends were not making plans to emigrate. But to leave their homeland, the Hechts would need to reconnect with Nathan Hatch, Luzie's great uncle, who had left Germany more than sixty years ago and lived more than four thousand miles away in Albany, New York.

From Hecht to Hatch

American Relations

According to family lore, Neuhaus, Bavaria, was simply too confining for Nathan Hecht. At the age of sixteen, he set sail for America on the Westphalia, arriving in New York City in June 1873. He had chosen a nation that was moving forward rapidly, expanding in all sectors: urban centers, agriculture, industry, and transportation. For someone who was unafraid of hard work and willing to take risks, with a creative spark and the blessing of good luck, opportunities were plentiful.

Little is known of Nathan's very early time in the United States. According to his obituary in the Cohoes American, he spent a short time in Schoharie County, near Albany, before settling in the state capital in 1878. The choice was a natural one, for Albany had a significant German Jewish population. Here he would find camaraderie with his compatriots, the advice of those already settled, and the possibility of finding a business partner. According to the Albany City Archives, in 1885, Nathan was working as a salesman at S. M. Valkenburgh and Company, a wholesale hosiery, furnishing goods, and notions establishment. One year later, according to the marriage records of Temple Beth Emeth, Albany's prominent German Reform congregation, Nathan, now twenty-four years old, married his employer's daughter, Ida Rose Valkenburgh. Although of German descent, Ida was not an immigrant but an Albany native. By the time of his marriage, Nathan had already anglicized his last name, changing it from Hecht to Hatch.

Eight years later, Nathan's sister Ida would also become part of the Valkenburgh family, marrying his brother-in-law, Adolphus Valkenburgh. Both marriages likely carried financial and social benefits for the young immigrants.

In 1892, Nathan began what would be a very profitable partnership with David Fuld. The two entrepreneurs started manufacturing knit goods in Albany. Within fifteen years, the Albany location could no longer accommodate the growing demand for their products, and a plant was erected in the nearby bustling industrial center of Cohoes, New York. Eventually, the entire business would be consolidated in Cohoes.

Their success continued. In 1914, Fuld and Hatch Knitting patented its one-button union suit. Full-page magazine advertisements touted the men's underwear as the top of the line: "It has only one button—one master button conveniently placed at the chest. It does the work of a whole useless row. No buttons to break or fall off, no buttonholes to get torn." Independent stores throughout the nation, along with two of the country's top retailers, Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, carried the Fuld and Hatch one-button suit.