Rescue Board by Rebecca Erbelding

Author:Rebecca Erbelding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

15

Adrift

IN SURVEY GRAPHIC MAGAZINE’S September 1944 issue, John Pehle shared the story of a boy who had escaped certain death thanks to Ira Hirschmann’s efforts in Turkey. Under the heading “The Human Hunted,” young David’s story tugged at readers’ heartstrings. He had watched his parents die by Nazi firing squad in Warsaw, wandered in the woods for weeks, and hid with the help of a kindly Christian couple before being captured and sent to Transnistria. After Hirschmann saved the Jews there, David boarded a boat to Istanbul and, again thanks to Hirschmann, soon left for Palestine, arriving right before his thirteenth birthday.

As Ira Hirschmann told the story from the lectern at his April press conference—the one overshadowed by the free ports story—David’s little sister had also died, trampled to death in Warsaw. David hid in a water barrel, snuck in and out of a concentration camp, and drifted for five years, until an underground guide physically carried him into Hungary. After meeting the boy in Istanbul, Hirschmann had wanted to adopt David and bring him to New York, but “the Zionists already had their eye on him—he’s the kind of material they need in Palestine.”

David never complained about the discrepancies in these stories, because David was fictional. “We invented that one,” Pehle confessed privately to Morgenthau. When the Milka had arrived in Istanbul in March, Hirschmann was five hundred miles away in Ankara and never met any passengers on the only refugee ship to arrive during his stay. So to publicly demonstrate the WRB’s impact, the staff invented “David,” as well as “Leon and Ruth,” who, according to an NBC radio interview with Pehle, had escaped by foot over the Pyrenees with only the clothes on their backs in the middle of winter and were waiting to leave for Fedhala.

Over the summer, the very real Fort Ontario and Fedhala refugees reached their new homes, behind fences and watched by guards. But in the two months since Hirschmann had arrived back in New York, the relief situation in Turkey had descended into chaos, and few refugees were arriving. The three ships that had crammed 1,224 refugee passengers on voyages to Istanbul in March, April, and May had been nowhere to be found in June, when only 233 persons, almost all from Bulgaria and Greece, reached Turkey. The “bridge of ships” remained a dream. Luckily, Pehle had already negotiated with Bloomingdale’s to borrow Ira Hirschmann again.

Finally recovered from the life-threatening malaria he had contracted after interviewing Joel Brand in Cairo, Hirschmann spent his July 4 dinner taking stock of thirty-six-year-old Herbert Katzki, his new partner and the second WRB representative in Turkey. Pehle hired him to bring relief experience to Hirschmann’s operation, because Katzki had worked for the JDC since 1936, and had witnessed the Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940. Katzki had fled south, working with refugees in Vichy France (where he crossed paths with McClelland) and Portugal. His extensive connections brought him to the attention of the OSS, so his work in Turkey also included some light espionage.

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