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‘Onkel’ Stern’s list

How a Valley City German immigrant saved more than 125 German Jews from the Holocaust

By C.S. Hagen
FARGO – In 1933, “Onkel” Herman Stern received a coded letter from a relative called “The Chammer.” Postmarked Venlo, Holland, containing one word, typed in capital letters and double-spaced.

U N B E L I E V A B L E

A warning followed: “Before saying one more thing – I must warn you never to refer to it in a letter… Whenever you write just say ‘I’m in receipt of your letter from Holland and glad to learn that everything is okay’”

Herman Stern 1929 – photograph provided by Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library UND

The Chammer spent his savings to travel by train from Nazi Germany to Holland, where outgoing mail was still safe from prying eyes, and described in detail the atrocities he had witnessed in his German hometown. Four Jews shot and killed, no arrests, no police interference. Six Jews in one day committed suicide. Forty-five Jewish bankers arrested. A Jewish friend in Worms was locked in a pigpen. Doctors were quitting. Lawyers no longer had access to their black legal garments.

“The Jehoodems [are] done for in Germany and this is what happens every day,” The Chammer wrote. “Never say anything that you are sorry you heard about the cruel treatments. If you do write this and the letter happened to be censured, they will be SHOT to death, SHOT, SHOT to death.”

The letter was just one, still safely guarded at the UND’s Chester Fritz Library Department of Special Collections, that alerted Stern that the Nazi threat against Jews was more than hate speech.

A radio program on WCCO in 1933 led by Rabbi Albert Yannow also put the situation into focus for Stern. One listener wrote in to the radio station saying: “I am with Hitler for trying to put Germany again in the sun, out of which France, and indirectly the Allies have forced it. The Jewish question, to me, is the outcome of a hysterical condition there. Injustice has ever been the Jew’s lot. That seems to be his fate – to suffer and endure.”

The youngest of eight children born to a poor Jewish family in Aberbrechen, Germany, Stern rekindled contacts involved with immigration and one by one, and began saving his family. Their names are scrawled in a well-worn ledger.

Herman Stern’s ledger – photograph by C.S. Hagen

In all, Stern saved more than 125 people from near certain death at Nazi hands. Showing foresight, he started early. As president of Straus Clothing Company, he had funds, some land, but more importantly, Stern was respected, and had a friend in the United States Senate in Gerald P. Nye, who quietly helped Stern obtain immigration visas for his German relatives.

During a time when anti immigration laws turned Jews away by the shiploads, Stern also found a friend in former North Dakota Governor John Moses, a Norwegian immigrant who campaigned for office speaking Norwegian, German, and English, and later defeated Nye for his seat in the U.S. Senate.

Fifteen boxes of paperwork at Chester Fritz Library tell the complicated story of how Stern saved his family, many of whom were distantly related. Some were smuggled out of Germany under blankets by the French Resistance, and routed to Cuba, Chile, or Panama to wait for U.S. visas. Another managed to escape to Paris, and then later on to Casablanca.

“He couldn’t save his brothers, and that bothered him for the rest of his life,” Stern’s grandson, Rick Stern, said. “He tried, or they were too late.”

Herman Stern’s grandsons look over a well-worn ledger with a list of those who were saved – photograph by C.S. Hagen

Stern’s story has had little media attention, and virtually none during his lifetime (1887-1980). Recognized for many awards, perhaps the most prestigious for Stern being the posthumous Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award and the Boy Scouts of America’s Silver Buffalo award, little was said about him saving more than 125 Jews from Nazi internment. A monument was also erected for Stern at the Veterans Memorial Park in Valley City in October 2016.

Since the movie “Schindler’s List,” Stern’s story has been gaining attention, including a book written by Moorhead resident Terry Shoptaugh entitled “You Have Been Kind Enough to Assist Me.” Additionally, a documentary on Stern’s life will be released this month by Visual Arts Studios in Fargo entitled “The Mission of Herman Stern.”

While on his deathbed in Fargo, 1980, Rick read the Silver Buffalo award to his grandfather, one of the only early mentions of him being a Holocaust rescuer.

“During World War II you helped more than 100 persons who were in great danger of concentration camps or death in Europe to come to this country,” the biography on the Silver Buffalo award said of Stern.

They were the last words Stern heard, Rick said. His reply, like the way he chose to live, was simple, honest, and humble.

“Well, that’s nice,” Stern said.

“I was there when it was time,” Rick said. “Have you ever been with someone when they passed on? This was so beautiful, so magnificent. We were just talking, he coughed a few times, and then I felt his spirit rise.”

Petitions for help from German Jews 1930s to 1940s – letters provided by Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library UND

Stern remembered
Stern committed one dishonest act to fulfill his dream, Rick said. He ran from a clothier apprenticeship in 1903. In those days, an untrained apprentice’s contract had to be purchased. His family was poor. His father worked in a packaging company and had many mouths to feed, and Stern was a dreamer.

Herman Stern after arrival in North Dakota – photograph provided by family

“All Grandpa could think of was coming to America, that was the land of opportunity,” Rick said. “Grandpa was a little like Jacob, he was sent by the Almighty here so he could rescue his family. And he did.”

Stern never spoke about anti-Semitism in his youth, Rick said. “That’s why it was so disturbing for him when it came up. His only tangible brush with real hate came while he was walking with his wife in Valley City, and came upon a Ku Klux Klan rally cross burning at a local park. “It gave him the creeps,” Rick said.

In 1903, still a teenager, Stern boarded a ship to America. Morris Stern, Herman’s uncle, and a position in Straus Clothing awaited him in Casselton. By 1908, Stern moved to Valley City, married Adeline Roth in 1912, and by 1920 was owner and manager of Straus Clothing in Valley City, the place he would call home for the rest of his life.

He lived through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, two world wars, and came out on top, but never flaunted wealth. He was active with the Boy Scouts, war bond recruitment drives, later with the United Way, the Rotary Club, Masonic Lodge, the Greater North Dakota Association, which became the Greater North Dakota Chamber, and much more. A memorial was erected in his honor in Valley City in October 2016.

“Whatever was positive for Valley City. Boom. He was there,” Rick said.

In the home, German was reserved for Stern and his wife. His sons never learned the language, it was forbidden when the German Kaiser Wilhelm II waged the First World War.

Before the Second World War, Stern founded the North Dakota Winter Show, the state’s oldest agriculture and livestock show.

“On that day, I remember the dedication,” Rick said. “They pulled this thing down and a big banner dropped revealing the ‘Herman Stern Arena.’ He was so upset, he fell off the stage, and he had two questions afterward: how much did it cost, and who authorized it.”

Herman Stern – photo provided by family

Shortly after Stern’s death, snow collapsed part of the building’s roof, destroying the commemoration sign. “People said, ‘That was grandpa,’” Rick said. “He never liked that sign. He was humble.”

Stern kept himself busy until just before his death at 92 years old.

“He was righteous,” Mike Stern, Rick’s brother said. “I remember I disappointed him once, and I still feel really bad about it.” While coming home from Camp Wilderness, Mike stopped at Lake Melissa to say farewell to friends. He arrived home 30 minutes late, and found his grandfather worried he had been involved in a car accident.

“When your grandfather that you worship says, ‘I’m very disappointed in you,’ that’s something you can’t forget,” Mike said.

The “blessed grandson,” Rick, once borrowed a car and slid on ice, smashing in the rear end. He was able to drive it home, but Stern reacted differently, which ended in a family joke. Stern offered to sell Rick the vehicle, and Rick reminded him not to set the price too high as it had been involved in a bad accident.

Both brothers’ first memory is their grandfather, sitting cross-legged, bouncing them up and down on his knee while humming a German tune.

“We all compare ourselves a little to those who passed before us,” Rick said. “But I feel we all fall so incredibly short of him. We do our best, but it just can’t compare.”

Straus Clothing Store – photograph provided by Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library UND

Holocaust rescuer
America eventually opened its doors to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazis, but the help came too late in 1944. Many European Jews were forced to return to Europe after arriving in the United States. China was one of the only countries that allowed Jews to enter, accepting nearly 23,000 Jewish refugees who found relative safety in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945.

A page in Herman Stern’s ledger – provided by family

Even after World War II finished, liberated Jews emerged from concentration camps and from hiding, ill, exhausted; and discovered a world that seemed to have no place for them.

Stern’s efforts started in the 1930s, years after he brought one of his brothers over from Germany. He needed to prove himself, and show he could support every refugee he vouched for; personal affidavits of his financial worth were needed for every case.

He had a net worth of $50,000, was a shareholder of Straus Clothing Company, owned 320 acres of farmland near Valley City, another net worth of $5,000, according to affidavits filed with the American Consul General in Stuttgart, Germany.

Letters of repute were also needed – for every single case. He obtained these from Fred J. Fredrickson, mayor of Valley City. “During all this time Mr. Stern has been one of the most progressive and substantial citizens and businessmen of our city and state,” Fredrickson wrote.

At first, his petitions seemed to fall on deaf ears. He needed to change the narrative, and find influential people who could help persuade refugee legislation. Correspondence between the National Refugee Service, National Council of Jewish Women, Jewish Welfare Society, Hebrew Sheltering and Immigration Aid Society of America, was frequent.

In 1938, Stern wrote to the American Consul General in Germany, hoping to relieve bureaucratic worries. Some affidavits were rejected, as in the case of Dr. Rudolf Mansbacher, a nerve specialist from Germany who had an affidavit written by an American doctor and was not recognized by the American government.

Senator Gerald Nye – mid 1930s – who quietly helped Herman Stern obtain immigration visas for German relatives – photo provided by Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library UND

“My sponsorships may seem perhaps excessive to you compared to the financial statement, but I can assure you, my dear Consul, that all the immigrants have and will be properly received who are coming in my care. Every immigrant has received a proper home, not alone through my efforts, but also through the assistance of my friends.

“You may be satisfied without any doubt whatsoever that I shall continue to carry out the pledge and that none of the immigrants sponsored by me will become a public charge, but on the contrary, will become useful citizens.”

And many of Stern’s family did. Some joined the war effort. Others found work on farms. Stern searched out hospitals, nursing homes, and area doctors willing to offer qualified refugees work.

Doctors were needed in American hospitals, a 1939 pamphlet from the American Medical Association reported. From 1934 to 1938, during the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist regime, 1,528 physicians migrated to the United States, of which 75 percent were Jews. During the same years, the United States had 170,000 physicians, which meant one doctor for every 784 people.

Despite the need for qualified doctors, the system was rigged against him. Few doctors from Europe could pass American medical standard tests, and needed further training. Stern began looking into medical schools.

“After making further canvass I am still of the same opinion that fifty doctors could be placed in our state, but at present our hands are tied,” Stern wrote to Charles Jordan of the Central Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians on July 1, 1939. “All we can do is to interview our prominent doctors all over the state and see if we can in some way influence these men so they will gradually recommend modifying the rules and attitude of the National Organization.”

Stern found an empathizer in Dr. Irvine Lavine, who assisted placing refugee doctors around the state.

ND Governor John Moses

Fresh off the boat after journeys circumnavigating the globe, many stayed at the Stern family house in Valley City after they first arrived. Gustavas Straus traveled through Trinidad, Hans Wertheim through Chile.

Mike remembered stories his father told him of frequently having dinner with relatives he had never known. “Our dad was a little upset sometimes – he was young – because he couldn’t get seconds or thirds,” Mike said.

Nobody went hungry. Stern’s wife, Adeline Roth, 22 at the time, never wavered in her support for her husband’s efforts, Rick said.

In 1939, Stern had a scare. A medical report from the Dakota Clinic in Fargo reported no disease had been found on his heart after X-rays. The pain he was experiencing then was probably stemming from muscle or nerve issues, or more likely, although the medical report made no mention, from the stress of trying to save his family.

On March 27, 1941, two years after World War II started, Stern wrote to the National Council of Jewish Women in St. Louis, Missouri.

“I am endeavoring to gain admittance of four adults and two children into Cuba as a temporary quarter until it is possible to gain visas for them to come to the United States of America. The relatives in question are now living in Paris. They are not French citizens, but are refugees from Germany.

In order to obtain permission to travel to Cuba, Stern was told to deposit $2,000 per person in a Cuban bank, with $500 bond placed with the Cuban government, also for each person, plus two round trip tickets, and lawyer fees up to $250.

Records safely tucked away in box nine at UND’s Chester Fritz Library Department of Special Collections, end before 1944, and Stern had already found ways to bring more than 125 refugees to North Dakota. Most dispersed across the nation, few remained behind, Rick said.

Most of the letters to Stern are in German, written by hand in impeccable penmanship reminiscent of a medieval scribe translating holy texts. Other letters are typed, but there’s little need for a translation.

The Talmud translates best: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” a letter written by Hans Wertheim in 1939 to Stern said. “You may be sure that we shall never forget your kindness and what you have done for us. We are glad to know that there are people who are willing to help us.”

“In later years people would say, ‘We owe you so much,’ but he would say, ‘No, you don’t owe me anything,’” Rick said.

Stern kept his efforts mostly quiet, except to his family. He never wanted the publicity or the acknowledgement, he only wanted to help steer men and women toward successful futures.

If Stern were alive today, sitting around the dinner with friends and family, Mike, his grandson said he would know how to answer questions about society’s recent polarization. He might pound the table dynamically with a fist, but his thick German accent would be impossible not to listen to.

“I think Grandpa would be welcoming immigrants and trying to get them plugged into the community, into Boy Scouts, or joining the church,” Mike said.

A short pamphlet Stern wrote and used to pass out, explains his views perfectly.

“Without strength of character, we are a ship without a rudder, lost in the sea of no return… Respect the views, practices, and habits of others. Be more than tolerant, be understanding. In dealing with people, learn to respect and understand their position. Judge an individual not on his race, creed, or economic standing, judge him for what is in him.”

Surviving the Nazis

June 22, 2016 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

By C.S. Hagen

JAMESTOWN – A local news broadcast finished with a clip of US presidential nominee Donald Trump standing before a giant NRA poster. The 2016 Republican candidate gripped a podium’s sides tightly, raised a bushy eyebrow before promising to bring back the American dream.

Lore Hornung recounting her days in Nazi Germany – photo by C.S. Hagen

Lore Hornung set her liverwurst on rye down, and pointed excitedly at the television set.

“The names we had for Hitler are like what we have for Trump,” Hornung said. “Names that I won’t repeat.”

Born in Bad Rappenau, Nazi’s Germany, the 84-year-old woman recalled the day Adolf Hitler declared war on Czechoslovakia in 1939. Huddled around the “people’s receiver” radio with her four siblings and parents, Hitler’s rhetoric then reminds her of Trump’s promises today to make a country great again.

“The hateful rhetoric is what is frightening,” she said. “At first we thought Hitler was a clown, and then he became real.”

Using words like fear, self-protection, power, national pride interchangeably with broken dreams, Hitler stirred a nation to hatred. At only 10-years-old when World War II began, Hornung had no choice but to don the navy blue dress, white shirt and necktie, and the brown Hitler jacket emblazoned with the Nazi badge. The only gifts she says she ever saw from the Nazi regime.

Lore Hornung (left) at the beginning of World War II in Nazi Germany

“We had a good life before the war and could even afford a maid and a cleaning lady,” Hornung said. The day after Hitler’s declaration of war against Czechoslovakia, her father, a railway freight manager, fanned local stores hunting salamis and storable foodstuffs. “I was 10-years-old when the war began, and for the first six months everything was quiet.”

And then the changes began.

Shoes became a luxury item, one new pair every two years. “You would be lucky if you got one pair of shoes a year.” Additionally, new clothes disappeared from store racks. Many goods, including coffee and chocolates, required ration tickets, which were issued by the government. At her young age, she received a small box of chocolates, also government issued, at Christmas. Older children received real coffee, a welcome break from the muckefuk kaffee, roasted corn and chicory sweetened with beet sugar. “To this day I put no milk in my coffee, and no sugar in it,” Hornung said.

Stylish new clothes were impossible to find. International radio broadcasts were replaced by propaganda and speeches by Hitler and party propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, as the Nazi juggernaut conquered one sovereign nation after another.

Lore Hornung as a child wearing Nazi jacket.

The paramilitary wing of the Nazi party marched into town.

“First, they came in uniforms, brown shirts, and riding boots,” Hornung said. “My dad even had one. They came marching into town singing. It was so stupid.”

Young teachers were drafted to the frontlines. Older, stricter teachers wielding bamboo sticks for punishment replaced them. The school’s new headmaster was a fanatic, but mostly avoidable. He walked into school in the mornings with a Nazi salute. Living in a town of 2,500 people, a tourist spot for its brine hot springs, Hornung wasn’t subdued to the brainwashing techniques many other students her age in larger cities endured. Her years in the Hitler Youth, known as Jung Mädel for children up to 14, and later in the League of German Girls or the BDM, were spent primarily crafting wooden elves as Christmas presents, marching in formation on Sundays, listening to speeches, helping workers in the field, and singing nationalistic songs such as the Horst Wessel. Once a month her entire school of 18 students – four girls – watched a motion picture featuring German victories and the ever-present propaganda.

French prisoners, bedraggled and under guard, began appearing in town. Many were assigned day duties in the fields before returning to a nearby prisoner of war camp, she said.

Lore Hornung and her father pre World War II

One night, a nearby commotion piqued her interest. Her father rushed to discover what was happening. He returned with frightening news.

“I had never seen my dad so mad,” Hornung said. “And dad almost got into trouble. He said three Jewish families in town were attacked. Windows were smashed in, and rocks were thrown at them.”

In 1933, ten Jewish families lived in Bad Rappenau, according to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust. In 1938, four Jews were killed and a Jewish shop was destroyed in Bad Rappenau, according to the Jewish Cemetery Project. By October 22, 1940, no Jews remained; all were deported to the Gurs Concentration Camp in southwestern France, according to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust.

At a time when anything but mass conformity was persecuted, she wore a bikini to practice diving. “I was a tomboy,” she said. Chuckling at the memories, she said she used to climb cherry trees for a snack, stole away from Hitler Youth duties to swim. To Hornung, the Hitler fanaticism passed her by.

“Once I had made plans to swim,” she said. “Diving was my favorite sport. I could do flips even, but this night, my classmates tried to pressure me into going to help pick peas. I had already made my plans to go swimming, and I told them no.”

She was worried what her father would say, but his response surprised her.

“Never lie,” Hornung said her father told her. “Hitler says don’t lie, so you do not lie. If you made plans to go swimming, then you need to stick to those plans.”

Her father was a member of the national socialist party for the first year after war broke out, Hornung said. “For the first year or so my father supported them, and then he left the party and refused to wear his Nazi pin.”

When the Allies began bombing campaigns in Germany, Hornung and her sisters refused to leave the upstairs open window. They knew their small town of 2,500 would be of little interest to the invaders.

“We would open the window up and start counting how many airplanes. When they left we also counted, and sometimes as many as 60 or 70 were missing.” Her father would encourage them to go downstairs into the basement for safety, but usually end up watching the spectacle with them, Hornung said.

Her town was hit once by Allied bombs, forcing her and her family to spend the night in their basement. Little damage was caused however, but she worried, as everyone knew an armaments factory was nearby. The nearby city of Heilbronn, however; was devastated by bombing raids. On September 10, 1944 Allies dropped 1,168 bombs on the city, killing 281 residents, according to the World War 2 Database. Within one half hour on December 4, 1944, more than 6,500 residents died during a second bombing raid, most of whom were buried in mass graves, according to the World War 2 Database.

The Americans invaded Hornung’s town first, she said. From her kitchen window she watched as a tank parked into her front yard. A large man asked for English speakers, of which she was one.

Neiboring city of Heilbronn after Allied bombing and during invasion of US troops

Neighboring city of Heilbronn after Allied bombing and during invasion of US troops

“He asked me if there were any German soldiers, and I said no,” Hornung said. “Then he filled his steel helmet with potatoes, and that just didn’t go well with me. I said ‘you potatoes, me meat.’ And then he spoke a lot of English I didn’t understand and took me toward another tank. I thought, ‘Oh no, they are going to take me away,’ but he gave me a large tin of ham.

Once, while riding her bike she came across chickens, and in her hurry to stop her chain broke. She crashed in front of a group of US soldiers.

“I was so afraid they were going to hit me for running over a chicken,” she said. “I was afraid the Americans would kill me, but instead they helped bandage my scuffed arm. They were good to us.”

The tomboy in Hornung refused to let the US soldiers have free reign with local swimming pools, which, according to Hornung, became property of the US Army and local residents were not permitted to swim. She defied the rule, however, and went swimming anyway.

Heilbronn destruction after World War II

“I said come and get me, and he did not. Maybe he couldn’t swim, I don’t know.”

German surrender on May 7, 1945 brought inflation, a scarcity of food, and horrid revelations to Hornung. She and her family had no idea of how Jews had been treated across Europe. “We did not know about it, not until the newspapers began reporting on it and then we saw the people coming in. Some of them walked for two weeks surviving on what farmers fed them.”

“We were so glad when it was over, we hardly kept anything to remember those days,” Hornung said. “I did not live in a big city, just in my hometown with two thousand or so people.” The majority of Germans in her area shared her relief, Hornung said. “But there were some then who were like those today crazy about some politicians,” she said. Small gangs formed. Some took advantage of the lack of a functioning government, looting and robbing. Devastation in nearby Heilbronn, was difficult to imagine, she said.

Hornung and her mother, a Swiss national, escaped some of the post war hardships by traveling to Switzerland, and did not return until they heard father was seriously ill. He died soon after they returned home. Nearly seven years after the war ended, Heilbronn still resembled a war zone.

Private Glen W. Hornung, now a staff sergeant, in Germany after World War II

She met her future husband, Jamestown native Staff Sergeant Glen W. Hornung, at Café Mayer, in 1952. “A most beautiful café,” Hornung said. At the time Glen was sent to West Germany as a Jeep mechanic.

“It was all rubble,” Glen, who was a private when he set foot in Germany, said. “The houses were bombed out, streets were full of rubble ten-feet high. People had nothing to work with.” He too was a self-admitted ‘outlaw,’ and spent his first years in the military drinking, and chased Hornung for nearly two-and-a-half years before she agreed to marry him.

“I lost more stripes then than most people ever make,” Glen said. After a night with bad Thai whiskey however, he decided the drinking must end, and has never taken another sip of alcohol since. The gangs, or “local yokels,” as Glen described them, frequently created mischief. Fistfights with them were common, he remembered.

The Hornungs boarded the USS Upshaw from Bremen to New York City in 1956. From there, they moved their family around the world until eventually resettling into Glen’s hometown, Jamestown, not far from where his German ancestors, immigrants of more than a century ago, homesteaded.

Lore Hornung, German born survivor of Nazi Germany, and her husband Staff Sergeant Glen W. Hornung, in their Jamestown home. – photo by C.S. Hagen

Tientsin’s Jewish Struggle – Tientsin at War – Part IV

April 24, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

This is the fourth article in the “Tientsin at War” series, stemming mostly from books, interviews and actual government and newspaper reports. Many of the shocking details were revealed by an anonymous Jewish refugee on a typewriter in 1937, desperately pleading for help from the US government. His pleas fell on deaf ears. Before 1940, some reports claim more than 5,000 Jewish refugees escaping Czarist pogroms and later Stalin’s purges, fled south through Manchuria and trickled down to Tientsin, where for a time, they thrived. Kept hidden since 1937, here is the story of Tientsin’s Jews.

By C.S. Hagen

TIENTSIN, CHINA – All around the main story was filler. Scabby headlines left fingers black: Hymn of the Triumphing Demon, and League of Nations: Organ of the World Jewish Super Government. The main story in the Czarist newspaper drew a crowd one early morning to the Victoria Café. Despite late summer heat, bad news chilled Tientsin’s Jewish community.

Although Tientsin’s Jews had their own newspaper, the Utro, founded in 1931, on Monday, August 23, 1937 it lay forgotten at the stoop. The aromas of fresh bread wafted from the bakery’s open window. Late night rickshaw coolies stopped on their way home to watch the commotion. A bent Ashkenazi Rabbi flattened the Czarist newspaper, Resurrection of Asia, a White Russian rag.

Most days the fascist publication was ignored, but recently, the Japanese anti-Semitic pendulum was swinging fast. No one could understand the Japanese Military Authority’s tactics. One day they welcomed, the next, they invested in White Russian anti-Bolshevik, Jew-hating rhetoric. The early-morning crowd tightened around the Rabbi. There were fur traders, jewelers and doctors. Two German Jewish dentists and a ballet teacher, all come to buy their morning bread. All stopped to listen.

“In connection with the large number of enquiries and requests from the Russian non-military emigrants—” The Rabbi was interrupted. Mister Zondovitch, the owner of a small fur trading company, stepped closer.

“What requests? Who’s been making requests?”

The Xiaobailou “Little White House” area of Tientsin where Jews lived in the 1930s and 1940s – photo by C.S. Hagen

“Maybe you have, Mister Zondovitch,” a cocky young student said. He held a newly released book called Red Star Over China. “After all, your good book says, ‘ask and you shall receive.’ In my book it says—”

“Feh! I wouldn’t ask those Czarist goyim for –”

“Quiet, quiet down,” a middle-aged orthodox Jew said. “If I wanted to hear squabbling I would have stayed home. Please Rabbi, continue.”

The Rabbi cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses and smoothed his cottony beard. The newspaper doubled over at the accordion fold and the young student hurried to help.

“Yes, here we are. In which the White Russian emigrants are in Tientsin, the Peiping-Tientsin District of the Far Eastern Military Union establishes…” He scanned the page. “A temporary civilian affairs department, and the above-mentioned White Russian emigrants may register with it.”

“Would that mean we can go home?” the orthodox Jew said.

“It’s not quite finished,” the Rabbi said.

“Will we have papers?” the ballet teacher said. “Ay-yay-yay.”

The State Hotel, in the “Little White House” area of Tianjin, also, I believe, the site for the Victoria Cafe (please correct me if I am wrong) – photo by C.S. Hagen

“Certainly not,” Zondovitch said. “Do you know who runs the Far Eastern Military Union?”

“It continues,” the Rabbi said.

“Let him finish,” the student said. Twelve Russian Jews huddled closer. All gathered could read Russian as well as some English, and they spoke mostly Yiddish but the news took a heavier, more meaningful form when read by the Rabbi.

“The right to register is granted to those White Russian emigrants who are firmly of anti-communistic views and who share the principles of the New North China and its brotherly Nippon and Manchukuo, but to those who intend to reside within the New North China not recognizing its laws and regulations this right of registration is not granted.”

“That leaves me out,” the student said.

This is no right, no privilege,” Zondovitch said. “It’s the start of another pogrom. Everyone knows what kind of a mad man Pastukhin is. Do you remember what happened to Mister Brenner?”

Aaron Brenner, a Jewish furrier for an American company in Tientsin, was kidnapped and held for ransom on November 11, 1929, according to the Binghamton Press. He was enticed by a blond White Russian woman named Yena Sverkoff, a manicurist, and married to a Japanese, who tricked Brenner to members of the Czarist “White Guard.” The Czarists demanded USD 500,000 in ransom. As time wore on, their monetary demands lessened, and when British police closed in, Brenner was released. Aaron Brenner and his brothers, Joseph and Herman, remained tight-lipped about the experience. The culprits were caught and most sentenced to life imprisonment by a Chinese judge.

The “Little White House,” which had a sordid history, once known to be a brothel area in the early 1900s, was burned down, rebuilt and later occupied by Jewish refugees. – photo by C.S. Hagen

Whispers of Tientsin Pogroms

White Russian pogroms began long before World War II, shortly after the Czar’s humiliating defeat by the Japanese and before Bolshevists murdered the Russian royal family. Records from American and British consulates date back to 1896, when Jews fled south to Manchuria, hoping to escape persecution from Cossacks.

But the Cossacks, beaten by Bolsheviks, followed.

Stateless, disillusioned and angry, the Cossacks, referred to as White Russians (opposed to communist Reds) in most newspapers of the time, became rickshaw pullers, and bodyguards. Many joined Chinese warlords in the 1920s to further their anti-Semitic and imperialistic goals. Violent men such as Marshal

White Russians – online source

Chang Zong-chang of the Fengtian Army, nicknamed the “monster” because of his size, was once a coolie, then a self-declared murderer-white-slave-runner-bandit-turned-warlord, The News reported on February 27, 1927. He hired as many White Russians as he could find.

“I have my plans,” Marshal Chang said in an interview. Marshal Chang liked to boast, especially when it came to his harem, which numbered fifty. He once held up the Tientsin-Pukow Railway for three days while a train containing thirty new members of his harem arrived. “I have four thousand White Russians. They are wonderful fighters. My personal bodyguard is composed of eight hundred of them.”

Tientsin’s Jews did not flinch.

“Due to the critical situation now prevailing in Tientsin, many young Jews have enrolled as volunteers in the foreign town militia,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on June 26, 1927. “It was learned that many of the Monarchist Russians are serving in the Chinese army. The enrollment of the Jewish group in the town militia was viewed as a precautionary measure to prevent any anti-Jewish excesses which may be started by the Czarists.”

When the warlord era finished so did fascist attempts at a Jewish pogrom, but the White Russians turned to their one-time sworn enemy, Japan.

A newspaper called Nashput, meaning “Our Way” began attacking Jews in Harbin, a northern Manchurian city and one of the first inhabited by Jewish refuges. The newspaper spat anti-Semitism, calling for local Chinese to rise up against the Jews.

“So violent has been this paper’s campaign of vilification of the Jews, that many of them here… are living in a state of terror,” a 1929 Foreign Office Files report for the British Consulate stated. The Russian Fascist Party published the newspaper, frequently depicting Jews as “hangmen,” “bloodsuckers” and that they “used blood for rituals.”

Tientsin Troop, National Organization of Russian Scouts, 1938 – source Pinetree Web

“The late publishing[s] of the paper Our Way have assumed a distinct character of the campaign for the Jewish ‘pogrom,’ i.e. assault on the Jews,” the British Foreign Office files reported. “The campaign engenders panic in the Jewish population of Manchukuo [Manchuria], and is compelling many Jews fearing for their lives and property to leave the state.”

Many did leave. They packed up their meager belongings and migrated 700 miles to Tientsin. Not long after their arrival however, Captain E. H. Pastukhin, a Cossack officer who served in the Czarist armies attempted a new pogrom, according to American Consulate records from 1937. Backed by Japanese money and military, he began publishing the Resurrection of Asia to spur locals against Bolshevists and Jews living in Tientsin.

By 1937, the Japanese Military Authority was running most of Tientsin, excluding the concessional areas, and they recruited stateless White Russians for three dollars a day into their military. Although the Japanese initially protected Tientsin Jews, Pastukhin persuaded some officials into believing all Jews were communists, and he was allowed to establish a militant “Anti-Communist Committee,” known as the “supreme arbiter over the lives and souls of all White Russians in North China,” according to a U.S. Embassy at Peking report on August 30, 1937.

“The Russian monarchists in China are now trying to take advantage of the strained situation between the two countries [China and Japan],” the Jewish Criterion reported on April 11, 1930. “They [White Russians] are now taking a very active part in the work of persecuting Jews, or spying on them and of inciting the authorities against them.”

A decrepit stand alone building in the old Japanese Concession, near Suma Street where the White Russian Anti-Communist Committee had their headquarters – photo by C.S. Hagen

Pastukhin was also head of the local Far Eastern Military Union, and was known as a devout follower of the “Mad Baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a brutal Czarist warlord. According to the book Shanghai on the Metro by Michael B. Miller, Pastukhin, with nowhere to go, was a crook and a brute, a man sold out to Japan. While in Siberia, Pastukhin slaughtered countless victims from armored trains named Merciless, the Terrible, the Master, the Horrible, the Ataman and the Destroyer.

In Tientsin, Pastukhin’s headquarters and Japanese-funded printing press was at 15-16 Suma Road, Japanese Concession, which is near present day Shenyang Road, but he lived in an ex-German Concession mansion, grandiosely nicknamed the White House. Pastukhin was “ready at a moment’s notice, to rise to fight the Comintern – to fight for Nationalist Russia,” British Foreign Office files stated about the Czarists. “They believe that every means must be employed to free Russia from the clutches of the Red Devil.”

The Jews of Tientsin passed through a dark period, according to the Far Eastern Information Bureau in New York. Owing to the fact that the vast majority of the Tientsin Jews were stateless Russian emigrants, meaning no country protected them and they were subject to Chinese courts and laws, the Anti-Communist Committee exerted heavy pressure on Jews to join its ranks and pay exorbitant membership fees.

Some Tientsin Jews, comprised mostly of furriers, restaurateurs, watchmakers, doctors and dentists, said no.

White Russian fascist cliques, such as Tientsin’s “Forty-Seven Group” traveled in a special train furnished by the Japanese, according to Office of Strategic Services records named the China Card Files, and took matters into their own hands.

“It was generally believed that what happened in Manchuria during the past six years could not take place here where the protection of the foreign concessions, the general atmosphere of security of Tientsin and the influential public opinion of the international communities would make the success of such a highly-political and forcible regimentation unlikely,” a letter written from a Jewish refugee and manager of Oppenheimer Casing Co. in Tientsin to the U.S. Embassy in Peking states. The Jewish manager remained nameless, but was vouched for by the sausage casing company’s U.S. corporate office in Chicago, the assistant secretary, Mister Jaffe.

“The Anti-Communist Committee, however, managed to dissipate such doubts very rapidly.”

Tientsin’s Jewry – “It Can’t Happen Here!”

At the outbreak of World War II, when Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, Tientsin’s Jewish population had surpassed 3,500 people, according to the Jewish Quarterly.

It wasn’t the first time China welcomed Jews.

Three centuries before Marco Polo’s arrival, Jews traveled the old Silk Road in western China and settled in a city called Kaifeng, in Henan Province. Time and inter-marriage assimilated the “Kaifeng Jews,” who, by the time World War II began were indistinguishable from their Chinese neighbors. According to a December 13, 1955 report published by the British Consulate’s Far Eastern Department, a small handful of people in Kaifeng still refused to work on certain days of the year, which coincided with Jewish holidays.

In 1937, however, Jewish dentist shops and clinics lined Tientsin’s streets. They built synagogues, restaurants, businesses and libraries; they came with little but the clothes on their backs and their skills.

Most Jewish accounts written about Tientsin life in the 1930s are filled with warm, safe memories, of Chinese Amahs’ lullabies, of kites and elephants of the Italian circus, concerts in the Hai-Alai hall. Even with 700 Germans in Tientsin before the outbreak of World War II, of which 98 were Nazis, Tientsin’s Jews had little to fear until the White Russians joined forces with their one time enemy, Japan.

Pogrom’s whispers materialized into damning posters, official mandates and a “White Guard.” Some Jews applied to the Anti-Communist Committee for identification papers and were turned down. Others made a beeline for the Soviet Consulate in Tientsin. A few, once again, began packing. Most Tientsin’s Jews, however, decided to resist.

“In the northern Chinese city of Tientsin, White Russian Guards fighting with the Japanese forces there attempted a pogrom among the local Jews,” the Jewish Chronicle reported in September 1937. The Jews countered, forming their own Jewish Defense Volunteer Organization, moved to the British and French concessions in the city and bypassed Pastukhin’s orders, appealing directly to friendly Japanese military authorities.

Not all White Russians sided with the so-called White Guard. And when they didn’t, Pastukhin flexed his muscles, perhaps using gangs like

Tientsin's northeast skyline used to decorated with Russian spires, today few Russian buildings remain - photo by C.S. Hagen

Tientsin’s northeast skyline used to be decorated with Russian spires, today, few Russian buildings remain – photo by C.S. Hagen

the “Forty-Seven Group.”

A prominent Russian disappeared from his London Road home. A week later his mutilated corpse was found floating in a creek under Elgin Avenue Bridge, Desmond Power wrote in his autobiography Little Foreign Devil. British authorities soon after began rounding up the White Guard for questioning, and then two more Russians were kidnapped in Tientsin.

“The consequences became apparent at once,” the Oppenheimer Casing Company letter stated. “Several of those who applied for membership and were refused (because the Anti-Communist Committee did not like their noses) were warned by the Anti-Communist Committee hoodlums to clear out of town whether they live in the concessions or not.”

By December 7, 1939, the Anti-Communist Committee had refused more than one hundred stateless Russian Jews for registration, and not because they were communists.

“The reason for refusal is usually given as suspected Soviet leanings, in reality, it is either anti-Semitism or dislike for the applicants’ decent job and clothes; for, paradoxically, these anti-Communists are violently anti-bourgeoisie and detest those who have succeeded in elevating themselves above the levels of the White Russian rabble.”

Some Jews, according to the Oppenheimer Casing Company letter, were arrested by the Japanese military on trumped up charges of espionage. A well-known transportation man was jailed for three months under terrible conditions before being shipped to Shanghai.

Tientsin’s Jews were trapped. They could not travel without identification papers, and most did not want to return to their motherland, the newly-formed USSR. The few who were accepted into the Anti-Communist Committee paid heavy dues. With monthly salaries under USD 100, they were forced to pay up to four dollars in fees, known as the “Voluntary Self-Taxation,” every month. Those with higher salaries were made to contribute up to five percent of their salaries.

The former Soviet Embassy, once raided by White Russians in the 1930s – photo by C.S. Hagen

A man named Mister Rubin, the owner of a grocery store on Dickinson Road, was forced to pay an entrance fee of USD 1,000 before being considered for enrollment. Older men who were allowed into the Anti-Communist Committee performed odd jobs around the committee clubhouse on Suma Road. Women were cajoled into spying on fellow members, Soviet citizens in Tientsin or newly arrived immigrants. Children and young men were forced to join the military scout units and trained mercilessly a short distance outside of Tientsin.

The Japanese Military Authority denied any knowledge when stateless Russian Jews were rounded up for military training, saying they did not interfere with White Russian affairs, according to the Biloxi Daily Herald on October 17, 1941. When eleven youths refused to go, the Anti-Communist Committee revoked their permits, leaving them once again, stateless.

There was little the United States could do to help in Tientsin, was chief of the U.S. Division of Far Eastern Affairs Maxwell M. Hamilton’s response.

Survival

Prior to World War II Japanese politics were split on the Jewish issue. One side, led by leaders such as Shioden Nobutaka and Navy Captain

A clock repair shop in the old Japanese Concession – photo by C.S. Hagen

Inuzuka Koreshige, called the Jews in Asia the “Jewish Menace.” After Japan became a member of the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936, Nazi Germany applied pressure to the Japanese public to accept anti-Semitism.

To the south in Shanghai, a city where nearly 20,000 mostly German Jews found a semblance of refuge in the Shanghai Hongkew ghetto, Colonel Josef Meisinger the “Butcher of Warsaw,” who was head of the Gestapo in China, tried to convince Japanese military authorities to load Jewish refugees on to ships in the harbor and have them sunk or starved.

“The Jews thus assumed the role of the antithetical Western “Other,” providing the Japanese with a tangible focus for their wrath against the wartime Western enemy,” according to ‘Japan’s Jewish Other’: Anti-Semitism in Prewar and Wartime Japan by C.J. Pallister.

Still other Japanese thought the Jews in Asia could be exploited to manipulate foreign governments. Historians later dubbed this plan the “Fugu Plan,” comparable to cooking the Japanese puffer fish called fugu, which contains lethal amounts of poison in its organs and must be carefully prepared.

In Tientsin three factors eased the Jewish community’s status: many White Russians including an unknown number of Jews, were sent north to fight the Soviet Union; Japan turned its interests elsewhere and began losing the war; and even though some White Russian fascists were arrested by British police, not all Japanese were sympathizers, and protected the Jews when they could.

The Leopold Building, now the Lihua building, known as a “skyscraper” in 1939 – online source

One Jewish man from Switzerland, Marcel Leopold, arrived in Tientsin during the 1930s and saw he could make quick money. He was a racetrack and gambling operator, married a White Russian woman and made enough money by 1939 to build a streamlined “skyscraper” on bustling Victoria Road, the British Concession’s main thoroughfare. The building was named after him, the Leopold Building, and is now called the Lihua Building. In his day the Leopold Building was used as office space and storefronts, selling everything from jewels to quick loans.

A former US Marine assigned to the 7^th Regiment to accept and organize Japanese surrender in North China, David D. Girard, wrote about once meeting a man who fits the description of Leopold.

Girard described Tientsin in his short story, “China 1945-1946” as a forbidding fortress with high stone walls topped with iron fences, and once during his stay in Tientsin he was invited to Leopold’s penthouse in his high rise building.

“He was very blunt,” Girard wrote. “He wanted us to get him and his family out of China on military or chartered aircraft. Hell, we couldn’t get ourselves out, let alone him, even for the generous price he hinted at.”

Four years after the end of World War II when Mao Zedong’s communist forces sacked Tientsin, Leopold was convicted of stealing and selling Japanese Navy armaments and sentenced to nearly three years in a Chinese gaol. Released in 1954, he turned to arms smuggling, quickly rising to become the “number one gunrunner in the world,” according LMS Newswire.

Leopold’s luck ran out however, in 1957 while boarding a plane to Tripoli with 130 pounds of explosives in his suitcase, he was caught, and then nine months later assassinated while out on bail by a homemade dart gun, The Caneberra Times reported. A six-inch metal dart severed a blood vessel near his heart, and he died in his wife’s arms in Geneva.

Other, not quite as ambitious Jews created projects of their own while calling Tientsin home. The B. Zondovitch & Sons Fur Company established in the 1930s, and headquartered in Harbin soon had branches in Tientsin, Shenyang and New York City.

According to the China Card Files, a fifty-year-old man named R. Abramoff, who was employed by Leopold, headed the Jewish Zionist military training in Tientsin.

The Victoria Café, established by a man named Bresler built the famous bakery and restaurant in the Xiaobailou “Small White Building” section and featured Russian styled Western food and top grade apartments on the upper floors.

Gershevich Bros., a leather company, was established by Leo Gershevich. He came to Tientsin with his father and five of ten siblings from Russia in 1924 and by 1950 had three generations under one roof.

Perhaps the most famous of Jewish endeavors was the Kunst Club, built originally in 1928 and then moved to Twenty-fourth Street, now Qufu Street, in the British Concession in 1937. The club had a library and a theater, which often held dramas, concerts and dancing performances. The Jewish Club also featured a restaurant, a chess room and billiards room, and sadly, was torn down in 1999.

The Tientsin Jewish School had a student body of ninety-five, of which seventy-six were Jewish in 1935. By 1936 the school reached 110 students and had fifteen teachers.

Among other endeavors the Jews built a synagogue, the Jewish Hospital, which healed both Jew and Gentile, a Home for the Aged, a Zionist youth organization, Betar, which engaged a rabbi who was in charge of all the religious activities, and a cemetery. The Tientsin Hebrew Association registered births, deaths, and marriages and was a unifying force for Jews in Tientsin.

Pastukhin’s white army didn’t make it far before surrendering to Soviet forces, and White Russian leftovers such as the “Forty-Seven Group,” were rounded up or slipped through the cracks of postwar confusion. The former Russian and many areas of the Japanese concessions are almost gone.

By 1947 only 900 Jews remained in Tientsin, according to the Jewish News Source, and by 1958 almost all of Tientsin’s Jews were granted identification papers by China’s communist party and had left for Israel or other Western ports. Today, Tientsin’s Jews are hardly more than a memory, and a well kept one at that, but they left an indelible mark on the city of Tientsin.

Tientsin's Jewish Synagogue, built 1939 - photo by C.S. Hagen

Tientsin’s Jewish Synagogue, built 1939, the Star of David is long gone. The building was purchased by the Tianjin Municipal People’s Government Tianjin Catholic Diocese. In the 1990s it became a karaoke of ill repute before being used as an art museum. The building is now a culturally protected site, after the Igud Yotzei Sin (Association of Former Residents of China) made a formal plea. – photo by C.S. Hagen