William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Previously published as Sons and Soldiers
First published in the United States by William Morrow in 2017
Copyright © Bruce Henderson 2017
Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey
Bruce Henderson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008180478
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008180492 Version: 2018-04-20
For them all
Contents
About the Publisher
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he declared war on his country’s half million Jewish citizens. They were stripped of their most basic rights. Judaism was defined as a race, not a religion, and Jews were excluded from German citizenship. Restrictive edicts put in place by the Nazis affected Jews of all ages and in all walks of life, and even Jewish children were forced out of public schools. A harsh reality for German Jews was the growing realization that neither they nor their children had a future in the country. This fear culminated in November 1938 with Kristallnacht, known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were ransacked by Nazis. Nearly a hundred Jews were killed that night, and up to thirty thousand were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them died within weeks of their arrival. Though by then tens of thousands of German Jews had already immigrated to the United States, this was the final confirmation anyone required that Germany was no longer safe for Jews.
But departing meant leaving behind their ancestral home, relatives, friends, and life savings, and there was no guarantee they would be able to get past restrictive U.S. immigration quotas, and those in other countries, which made it difficult for more Jews to immigrate.
It was often impossible for an entire family to get out of Germany, and many faced an excruciating decision of splitting up, perhaps forever, when parents discovered they could get only one child, under age sixteen, to safety through the efforts of Jewish relief organizations in America and England. Who went and who stayed often meant the difference between life and death. By the time Germany went to war with the United States in 1941, the Nazis’ determination to create an Aryan Germany had switched from a policy of forced Jewish emigration to one of mass annihilation of those Jews still in the