for someone to stay with the two younger children, both of whom cried brokenheartedly when Günther left—went to the Hildesheim railway station and boarded a northbound train for Bremerhaven. One of Germany’s most vital ports, Bremerhaven had become a hub of emigration from Europe.
After a daylong train trip, the Sterns arrived in the late afternoon and checked into a boardinghouse. Early the next morning, Günther and his parents met at a designated spot on the pier with the other children, their parents, and the chaperon from the Jewish organization. Looming above them was the ocean liner that would take the children to America, the SS Hamburg, a steamship nearly seven hundred feet long that could make a speedy twenty knots at sea. They could clearly see the large German flag flying high above its bridge.
It was time to say good-bye. Günther’s mother was weeping and dabbing her eyes with a hankie. They hugged and kissed. Determined not to feel helpless and hoping to make his mother a little less sad, Günther promised ardently to do everything he could to find someone in America to sponsor them. They would be reunited in America, he vowed, no matter what.
Hedwig nodded as she fought back more tears.
Günther turned to his father, who gave him a hug and a firm handshake. Throughout the Nazi years, Julius had hammered home the need for Günther to remain inconspicuous, to keep unwanted attention from being drawn to him. “You have to be like invisible ink,” he had cautioned many times. “You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, the invisible ink becomes visible again.”
For several weeks, as his beloved son’s date of departure drew closer, his concerned father had imparted such pieces of wisdom and a litany of instructions. Now, as he draped his arm over his son’s shoulders and drew him close, he had a final word of advice. Speaking softly, so none of the others could overhear, he reminded his son that he would be on a German flagship. He would not leave Third Reich territory until he set foot in America.
The last words his father spoke to him were familiar ones.
“Remember, Günther, be like invisible ink.”
Manfred Steinfeld was born in 1924, between two world wars, in the town of Josbach, located in the very heart of Germany. He would carry with him just two vivid memories of his father, Abraham, both from before he was five years old.
He remembered sitting next to his father, who wore a white robe over his clothes, and watching him as he prayed at synagogue on Yom Kippur.
And he remembered overhearing his father and his uncle Solomon discussing der Krieg (the war). At the time, the little boy didn’t understand much of what they said. Years later, Manfred learned that they had been talking about World War I, and that the Steinfeld brothers had fought in a far-off place called Macedonia, where Solomon won the Iron Cross for battlefield bravery. And that their younger brother, Isador, had been killed in the Battle of Verdun in France in 1916; growing up, Manfred had often wondered about the uncle he never knew whose name was engraved on the town’s stone war memorial.1
A short time later, Manfred lost his father. Abraham died of pneumonia at age forty-four, leaving his wife, Paula, with their three children—Irma, six; Manfred, five; and Herbert, three. She took over her husband’s dry goods store, which was the family’s only means of support. They were already living in the house of her mother-in-law, Johanna Hanschen Steinfeld, who helped Paula take care of the children.
Josbach was a town of 419 residents, just sixty miles from Frankfurt, one of Germany’s largest cities, but a world apart. Most of Josbach’s citizens were subsistence farmers, working the land with plows pushed by hand or pulled by cows or oxen; few could afford horses for the task. No one had tractors or other farm machinery, and there was only one automobile in town. The wealth of a German farmer could be measured by the size of his manure pile, which was indicative not only of how much livestock he owned, but also of how much fertilizer he had available to spread on his fields.
There were only six Jewish families in Josbach: three Steinfelds, two Kattens (Paula’s kin), and one Fain. Abraham’s and Paula’s ancestors had settled there in the early 1800s, and by the 1920s, the only retail business not Jewish owned was the tavern. In addition to the Steinfeld store, which sold shoes as well as material and ribbon for home dressmakers, there was a hardware store, a livestock trader, and a confectionery shop. The tradesmen—the town’s carpenter, painter, shoemaker, and tailor—were all gentiles. This collection of businesses and trades provided the townsfolk with all of their basic needs.
Manfred’s childhood home was located next to the town well, and it was the only house in Josbach with running water, thanks to Abraham’s ingenuity: in the 1920s, Manfred’s father had run a pipe the short distance from the water pump to their house. The first floor had a living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms, one of which Manfred shared with his grandmother. There was a third bedroom on the second floor. A root cellar was used to store potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables from the garden during the winter months. During the summer harvest, Paula canned fruits and vegetables, stocking the pantry. She went to the community bake house on Friday mornings, which by town tradition were reserved for the Jewish women to make challah and cakes for Shabbat.
For Manfred, the absence of his father was filled by his extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and especially his grandmother, with whom he was especially close. She loved helping him with his homework and was overjoyed the day he came home and announced he was the best student in his class and the first to know all his multiplication tables.
“The teacher says I’ll probably be a finance minister when I grow up,” Manfred reported.
Serious minded and hardworking at an age when many boys were not, Manfred seemed older than his years. He had a classically proportioned face, twice as long as it was wide, and symmetrical features, making him look mature for his age. A willing harvester of apples and plums for his mother’s canning, he earned his first money picking and selling blueberries by the basket. He also made deliveries on his bicycle to his mother’s customers in surrounding towns.
Education for the children of Josbach took place in a two-room schoolhouse, with grades one through four in one room and five through eight in the adjacent room. Out of seventy students, ten were Jews. There was only one teacher, who went back and forth between the two classrooms. Although Josbach had its own synagogue, they were one Jewish male shy of the minyan required to hold communal worship. Worshippers walked two or three miles to the synagogue in Halsdorf for weekly services instead. Occasionally, arrangements were made for a tenth man to come to Josbach from another town so local services could be held for bar mitzvahs and High Holidays.
When Manfred was nine, his grandmother became ill. After several days, a physician was summoned. Manfred waited anxiously with the rest of the family for the arrival of Dr. Heinrich Hesse from Rauschenberg, eight miles away. It had been snowing all day, and the doctor finally showed up in late afternoon. He examined Johanna and left some medication for her chest congestion. What Manfred would never forget about this day had to do with what the doctor told them as he was putting on his overcoat to leave.
The date was January 30, 1933. With a cheerful lilt in his voice, Dr. Hesse announced, “Something wonderful has happened today. Adolf Hitler has been made the new chancellor!”
The changes wrought by this news came more slowly to isolated hamlets like Josbach—in those days in Germany, there was a little village every few miles. But it was only a matter of time before the quiet, rural town felt the brunt of Nazism. Manfred’s family first became aware of the anti-Semitic fervor sweeping the country during the twenty-four-hour boycott of Jewish businesses two months later on April 1, 1933. Even in neighborly Josbach, many customers observed the boycott and stayed away from the stores owned by Jews, although there
