Preface
Last year, I wrote an essay about the hero who enabled my mother and aunt’s escape from Nazi-occupied Prague. Since that time, I have been fortunate to find family members of this hero now living in the U.S. and Israel. These relatives were able to provide more information and correct some of my assumptions. This new version of the essay answers many of the questions I had regarding Harry Roth’s escape from Prague to Palestine in 1939 and the true location of the subject photograph.
ESCAPE FROM NAZI OCCUPATION
This is a photo of my mother Iby (on the right) with her sister Alice (on the left) in 1939. The man in the middle is a hero named Harry Roth who cleverly fooled Nazi authorities to approve travel papers that allowed my mom and aunt and hundreds of other Jews to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The overjoyed trio are celebrating their successful escape before the two sisters are to depart on a transatlantic voyage to the United States.
At the time I started my research into my mother’s story of emigration, she was 103 years old and had Alzheimer’s. She recently passed away in October of 2022. My aunt Alice passed away in 1994, so I thought we had lost the opportunity to find out more about this photo, but in 2021, an opportunity presented itself that yielded important clues to reveal the story of the sisters’ journey to freedom.
Iby had a safety deposit box in her local bank that was not opened for years. In late 2021, I decided it was time to end paying the safety deposit box fees, so my youngest sister went to the bank and brought the contents to me. Hidden away in the safety deposit box was my mom’s Czechoslovakian passport issued in 1938. As I paged through the 83-year-old passport, I realized that the visas and various dates of the border crossings could reveal more details of the photograph and the sisters’ journey.
I hoped that the contents of the safety deposit box would yield the answer on the location of the photograph. I had assumed the photo was taken in Paris, which was the sisters’ first destination when they left Prague. Others in my family identified the location of the photograph, depicting the three walking on a European boulevard, as Prague. Prior to opening the bank safety deposit box, my family already knew key details about the two sisters’ escape from Nazi-occupied Prague. Mom told the story of her escape in an interview that was taped by one of my sisters in 1985. I donated this audio interview to the United States Holocaust Museum. In the interview, Mom tells the story (with the help of her husband (my father) and youngest sister Edith) about how she got out of Prague with forged papers. You can listen starting at 1:08 of Part 3 at this URL: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn607595
In the audio interview, Mom recounts how she left her small town in the Slovakian countryside and joined Alice in Prague as Nazi troops were preparing to take over all of Czechoslovakia. Alice had gone to Prague earlier to figure out a way to get out of the country. German troops, accompanied by Hitler himself, marched into Prague on March 15, 1939. Nazi tanks and infantry marched up and down the streets, while the stunned population of Prague looked on. Like many Jews, the sisters desperately searched for a way out. An article published on March 17, 1939, in the Jewish Telegraphic Journal described the panic that enveloped Prague:
“An undetermined number of suicides of Jews and anti-Nazis was reported from Prague as the Gestapo opened a drive to round-up elements hostile to the new regime. A Gestapo officer arriving in Prague indicated that at least 10,000 arrests would be made before German occupation was completed.”
The sisters’ father (my grandfather) had already immigrated to the United States (Chicago) years before, so Alice and Iby planned to immigrate to the U.S. They would need to have not only U.S. visas, but travel permits, usually obtained from the Nazis themselves. My mom was only 20 at this time and not considered an adult, so a U.S. visa for her was not restricted by the quota established for Czechoslovakian adults by the U.S. State Department. Alice was 26, and her place of birth was in Hungary, not Czechoslovakia, so the U.S. embassy did not want to issue her any kind of visa. Day after day, the two sisters pleaded with U.S. embassy staff to issue Alice a visa, with no success. One day, Mom happened to go into the U.S. embassy office alone. She tells the story in the audio interview:
“Naturally, we were crying all the time. So, on the day I was at the consulate by myself, this young man at the consulate asked me, ‘Now you show me on the map. Where is this place where your sister is born?’ I said, ‘Look: It is around here, but it isn’t written down because it was so small.’ Finally, they gave up on us and they gave us the visa. I pointed at a wrong place inside the Czech border. Whatever it was, he knew, but he closed his eyes, and finally, he just let us go.”
With their U.S. visas secured, they still had another major obstacle: They had to get a travel permit from the German authorities who were now controlling all aspects of life. But at this point, the sisters were no longer citizens of the occupied Czech state. On March 14, 1939, with Hitler demanding that the Czechoslovakian state be terminated and Nazis marching to take over the Czech state, a new fascist state of Slovakia was established which was allied with the Germans. With their hometown located in this newly declared Slovakian state, their travel permit would have to be issued by this new Slovakian government, which had an office hurriedly set up somewhere in Prague. This was the next location that the sisters would go to and where they would wait in line for days. The newly established Slovakian consulate likely did not have enough employees to process the requests from huge crowds trying to obtain travel permits. The lines of panicked people surrounded this Slovakian consulate office for days.
On the audio interview, Mom says:
“At that time, we had this friend, Harry Roth. We saw each other almost every day because we all had this same problem. Jews from our area came up to Prague in order to try to leave.”
Alice and Mom knew Harry Roth well from a neighboring Slovakian town. Harry ran the local movie theater, and Harry himself was the projectionist. Harry spoke Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, German, and several other languages fluently. On the audio interview, my father assisted my mother’s story by reading a newspaper article from the Norwalk Hour of Norwalk, CT that told the story of Harry and the Slovakian embassy (Harry later became a resident of Norwalk, CT in 1956):
“Harry found hundreds of stranded countrymen milling about the Slovakian embassy in Prague. Realizing that it might be days before his permit might be approved, Harry went across the street to a stationary store where he purchased a book of tickets numbered one to one hundred. A short time later, a surprised Nazi officer opened the door to the embassy to find the crowd neatly lined up with Harry at the head of the line. Upon learning which ingenious man was responsible creating order out of such chaos, he immediately assumed Harry to be an employee of the embassy and pressed him into service reviewing visas. For weeks, he blandly reported to the embassy each day, putting the Nazi stamp of approval on every visa he could get hold of, systematically helping hundreds to escape the Nazi tentacles closing in around them.”
Because Harry knew the sisters, he grabbed them as the first people in line and brought them into the embassy and stamped their permits for travel back to Slovakia. Mom says on the audio interview:
“Harry comes to us and says, ‘I got you a permit.’ Now that permit was for us to go back to [our hometown of Királyhelmec, and he knew it, but he said, ‘You try this to go out of the country.’ We were the first ones he brought permits to. The Germans didn’t know what it was, and naturally, the Germans had to sign it, so they signed it. What he did was give a bunch of permits and said [to the German officer], ‘Sign these.’ [The Nazis] didn’t even know what they were signing. So, he told us, ‘This is all ready for you, and you are going to use this to leave, you are going to use it to get out of this country.’”
The sisters used the permit that was written only in Slovak and stamped with the signature of a Nazi officer and possibly a swastika to get on a train from Prague and travel to France to escape. German border guards at stations could not read the permit written in Slovak, so they didn’t know that the sisters were supposed to be traveling back to Slovakia, not France. The border guards probably felt confident that the sisters were on a valid travel permit when they saw the permit signed with a German officer’s signature. In the audio interview, Mom expresses the fear of getting caught every time the train stopped and border guards inspected their papers:
“We were very scared. We went on the train, and every time we stopped at a station we felt; ‘we passed it, we passed it!’”
Upon arriving in France, my mother and aunt had to stay in Paris for a few days because they were notified that the ship on which they had tickets for passage from Le Havre to New York had a fire, so the ship company paid for them to stay in Paris until alternate arrangements could be made. Iby and Alice spent a glorious time in Paris celebrating their success of escaping the Nazis. Mom told us many years ago she remembered going to see Maurice Chevalier at a Paris nightclub.
That is the extent of all we knew until we discovered Mom’s passport that was locked up for decades in that bank safety deposit box.
THE PASSPORT AND THE U.S. VISAS
Mom’s Czechoslovakian passport (above) was issued in 1938 and contains fields labeled in Czech that were filled in by the local Slovakian office in Slovak, which was to be expected in multi-lingual Czechoslovakia at the time. (My mother was a native Hungarian speaker.)
Mom had said she received a “non-quota immigration visa” from the U.S. embassy in Prague, since she was still under the adult age of 21 in March of 1939, and that is displayed in the passport.
The visa was issued on March 28, 1939. Interestingly, six days after the Nazis marched into Prague, the U.S. ambassador Wilbur J. Carr closed the U.S. Embassy on March 21 and ordered all embassy staff to leave the country (even though Carr did remain in Prague until April 4). The U.S. staff that remained and continued working were most likely doing so out of a concern for the many refugees that were lining up at the supposedly closed embassy doors during this chaotic first month of Nazi occupation. The name of the Vice Consul of the embassy is probably not significant, as various embassy staff regularly used the same stamp and signed Andrew Gilchrist’s name to issue visas.
I contacted Alice’s daughter, my cousin Judy, who lives in California and asked to see if she could scan the visa in my aunt’s passport.
Alice’s visa is stamped on April 4th, so this is the date my mom successfully got Alice’s visa by pointing at a random location within Czechoslovakia where she claimed Alice was born, exactly one week after Mom received her own non-quota visa.
BORDER CONTROL STAMPS AND THE RAIL JOURNEY
The passport contains the border control stamps marking the harrowing rail journey that my mom and Alice took to escape Nazi-occupied Prague.
The first stamp on April 17 is for the station of Krimice which is well within the borders of the Czech state (near Pilsen). So why did the sisters have their passports stamped there? After I researched a bit, the answer became clear: Pilsen or Krimice rail station was on the border of the Sudetenland territory, which UK Prime Minister Chamberlain infamously handed over to Hitler in the disastrous 1938 Munich agreement. On this date, there was no need for anyone to continue reviewing passports because the Krimice station no longer served as a border station. A month after the Nazi takeover, my guess is that the border guards still wanted to continue getting paid and figured they should still be stamping passports. The stamp is in Czech. Could it be that these Czech border guards doing this meaningless work could not read Slovak? Or did they know that the sisters were escaping and allowed them out without saying anything?
The next stamp is for the town of Kosolup, which indeed is on the Czech-German border. Here, German border guards (“Deutsche Grenzpolizei,” displayed in the photo above, translates to “German Border Police”) were fooled by the Slovakian travel permits with the signature of a Gestapo officer. After German guards approved their papers, the sisters were likely relieved. However, their relief was probably tempered by the fact they then had to spend many hours traveling through Nazi Germany. At least there were no more border guards to look at their passports until they reached the French-German border. Their passports are stamped again at the last station (Bahnof Kehl or Kehl rail station) in Germany before crossing over the Rhine to France on April 18th. After crossing the Rhine by train, the sisters were finally past any German border control points and entered France at the Strasbourg station. It would be probably another 4-to-5-hour train ride to Paris, and then another 2 hours from Paris to board their ship at Le Havre.
I wondered what route they took through Germany, so I found a 1939 map of all the railroads in Europe and circled the stations (in bright green) that were stamped on their journey.
Notice that the passport control stamp locations (green circles) correspond to a route that probably had them ride through the heart of Germany, including Nuremberg, the site of the infamous Nazi rallies held annually on the parade grounds. Those rallies were held in August or September, but in 1939, no rally was held in preparation for the invasion of Poland.
HARRY ROTH WAITS IN PRAGUE FOR A LETTER FROM THE SISTERS
Shortly after I finished writing the first version of this essay, Judy discovered a Hungarian American newspaper clipping from 1965 in a box of her mother’s memorabilia. I scanned the article and sent it off to a translation service, hoping it would fill in more information on how the Harry fooled the Nazi authorities. The full article translation can be found here.
The article filled in many gaps of the story for Harry, who eventually moved to Connecticut in 1956 after initially escaping to Palestine by forging his own travel permit as he did for the two sisters. Here are some key excerpts from the interview with Harry:
” We lived in Királyhelmec, Slovakia. The Munich Agreement gave back that part of the Highlands to Hungary, and that is when our bank deposits were seized, and it became impossible to make a living. We lost everything and I moved to Czechoslovakia with my younger brother. We chose Prague because that city was then free from the German Nazis. In November 1938 I already realized that we were trapped because it was only a question of time when the Nazis would attack the free part of Czechoslovakia, and I started organizing the under-the-radar immigration to the Holy Land.”
“But on the 15th of March 1939 the German Nazi hordes attacked Prague and I had to stop doing this. I resorted to a trick and started a resettlement movement to Slovakia. With the help of my brother, I asked our brothers and sisters to make an appearance before the Gestapo and tell them that they want to move back to their former domicile, to Slovakia. First there were only a few people but later more and more came to the consulate. There was big chaos and bustling, so I grabbed a paper pad and started giving out numbers like I was a consular employee although I had no authority to do that. And when once a consular officer passed by me, he believed that I was there on behalf of the Gestapo and that’s why I’m handing out numbers. On the other hand the Gestapo thought I was a consular employee. That’s how I ended up at the German consulate as a reliable person. And suddenly I saw that the Gestapo’s stamped permits were on a writing desk with the following text: The holder of this permit is authorized to cross the German border.”
“Our main problem was that we did not know how to get out of Hitler’s Czechoslovakia, and here the opportunity presented itself! Without any hesitation I grabbed a bunch permits, and I knew I found the way to our freedom! I gave the first permit to the Herskovits family and after two dreadfully anxious weeks I got a note from them: they managed to get to Paris without any problem! This was such joyful news that it gave my quest an incredible push, and in a short time I issued permits to about three thousand Hungarian Jews and persecuted anti-Nazi and Jew-friendly Christians, and I also ended up using one to go to Palestine.”
I was ecstatic to find that Harry’s telling of the story agrees with the details my mother recalls on the audiotape. Harry also recounted that the first permits he issued were to Herskovits sisters, my mom and aunt, and that he waited for word of their successful escape when they got to Paris.
THE FIRE AND SINKING OF THE SS PARIS
On the audio interview, my mom said when they arrived in Paris, they were notified that their transatlantic crossing from Le Havre to New York would be delayed because the ship they were supposed to take had a fire and alternate arrangements had to be made. I realized that we never asked my mom further about this event, but with this passport, the details emerged. In the passport, an immigration card fell out that showed that the ship she traveled on was the SS Champlain of the French Line. Alice’s daughter Judy sent me the ship manifest from the April 20, 1939 sailing of the SS Champlain where their names can be found.
Detail from the Ship Manifest of the SS Champlain sailing of April 20, 1939
But if the voyage on the French Line’s SS Champlain was a last-minute change, what was the ship that Alice and Iby were originally booked on? With a quick Google search, I found this YouTube video when searching under the terms “April 1939 Le Havre ship fire”.
The YouTube video shows a British newsreel film shown in movie theaters in April of 1939 which documented a tremendous fire that led to the spectacular end to one of the grandest ships of the French Line. Wikipedia describes the loss as follows:
“On 18 April 1939, Paris caught fire while docked in Le Havre and temporarily blocked the new superliner Normandie from exiting dry dock. She capsized and sank in her berth where she remained until after World War II, almost a decade later.”
The two sisters were supposed to board the SS Paris. On the day of the fire, April 18, valuable artwork was being loaded on the ship. The art was to be shown at the French pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The ship was a total loss when it sank the next day. I am guessing that Alice and my mom were notified by French Line employees at the Paris Gare de l’Est when they got off the train from Strasbourg late in the day of April 18th. They were probably told to stay in Paris and not board the train to Le Havre until the French Line could make alternate arrangements for a different ship voyage.
MAURICE CHEVALIER AND THE CASINO DE PARIS
I now needed to investigate other aspects of my mom’s story. I wondered at which nightclub the sisters went to see Maurice Chevalier. Maurice Chevalier became famous in the U.S. after World War II and appeared in many movies and TV shows that I remember from the 1960’s. After googling “Maurice Chevalier Paris 1939”, I quickly found that from 1938-1940, he was performing shows at a Parisian nightclub, Casino de Paris.
The show for April 1939 was “Amours de Paris” which Chevalier performed with his wife Nita Ray. Below are some selected pages from that program that Alice, and Iby most likely had in their hands the night before the two sisters left for Le Havre to board the SS Champlain for the trip to New York.
THE EXACT LOCATION OF THE PHOTOGRAPH
Over the past two years, I have been intrigued by the photo of the two sisters and Harry Roth on a European street. I was convinced that due to the joy and gratitude written on their faces, that this could only have been taken after the sisters’ harrowing journey by rail through Nazi Germany. In the first version of this essay, I hypothesized that the picture was taken on a street close to Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera House.
After the initial version of this essay was published, I set out to find any surviving relatives of Harry Roth. After many weeks, I found Harry’s niece Arlene Rothstein in Atlanta, Georgia, who introduced me to her daughter, Rachel Rothstein, who has a PhD in history. Rachel’s studies focus on Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, which she initiated when she studied abroad in Prague in 2002. Both Rachel and Arlene were excited to read the first version of this story and find out about their uncle/great uncle Harry’s heroism of which they were not previously aware. But Arlene and Rachel gently let me know that they doubted that the picture of Harry with my mother and aunt was taken on a street in Paris. They did know that Harry had left Prague and sailed on a ship from a Romanian port to Palestine, so Harry probably traveled south and not west to France. Rachel decided to ask her professional history colleagues of the location of the photograph. Rachel posted the following on Facebook and asked for guesses as to the location of the picture:
Over twenty of Dr. Rothstein’s colleagues weighed in, and there was much disagreement over whether the photo was taken in Paris or Prague. One exchange of comments on the Facebook post was particularly amusing:
FB User: Women in Paris only wear high heels. So this must be Prague.
Rachel Rothstein reply: what would Slovak women in Paris wear?
Ultimately, a consensus emerged. One Facebook colleague noted that the letters in the sign visible to the left of my aunt ( ŠTĚ ) appeared to be Czech. Another individual noted that the streetlamp visible at the end of the street in the back was identical to the streetlamps that existed in Prague at this time. Then, a respondent identified the building at the end of the street as the Hybernia Theater (opera and ballet) which is located on the street Na Příkopě in Prague. I found this postcard from 1906 showing the Hybernia Theater at the end of this street, and it appeared that the picture of Harry and the two sisters in 1939 was taken on the sidewalk on the left approximately where the cart is located. Notice that the streetlamp that is at the end of the street near the theater is of the same design in 1906 and may even be the same exact streetlamp 33 years later in the 1939 picture of Harry and the two sisters.
Postcard PHOTOTYPE. D. KOSINER & CO., AROUND 1906
In this aerial view of present-day Prague, I have placed a red star on location where I believe the picture was taken. The two buildings on the left-hand side of the street are new since WWII; however, each of these buildings were probably put on the same footprint as the original buildings that were there when the photograph was taken in April of 1939.
With the mystery solved of the location of the picture, I still scoured the internet to find a picture of the street that would have been taken around the time that the photo was taken. Knowing the picture was taken on a day between the day Alice received her visa (April 4th, 1939) and before their departure by train from Prague (April 17th , 1939), I checked almost every historical source for the period when the Nazis first marched into Prague (March 15th, 1939), because there was a chance that that Nazis demonstrated their control of the city on the day they invaded by parading on Na Příkopě street. After several days of obsessively searching, I found this photograph:
The photograph shows the German army with a tank on March 15, 1939, the day Nazis and Hitler marched into Prague, competing with streetcars and traffic on Na Příkopě street. This picture was taken just three to four weeks before the photograph of Harry and the two sisters. The banners overhead promote ready-to-wear ladies’ fashion. The photograph of the smartly dressed sisters and Harry was probably taken directly on the sidewalk to the left under the ‘Busch’ ladies clothing shop sign. The sign that we see only the last three letters to the left of Alice now can be seen as reading ‘PLÁŠTĚ’ which translates in English to ‘COATS’. The sisters being fashionably dressed was consistent with the nature of the boulevard as described in this description from a web site (https://www.old-prague.com/history-prague-na-prikope-street.php ) of old Prague postcards:
“Following the clearance of the Jewish ghetto, Na Příkopě Street became the home of a number of Jewish merchants who opened their shops here. It was this first generation of Jewish businessmen which established the reputation of this street as Prague’s No. 1 street of commerce, with some of the most luxurious shops offering mostly goods from abroad.”
Later, I was able to contact another relative of Harry Roth, a granddaughter of Harry’s younger brother Aaron. This great niece of Harry Roth currently lives in Israel, and she recalls seeing the photo of my mom, Alice, and Harry in a box of mementos at her uncle’s house in Israel. The picture of the three is stored with another similar photograph taken on the same day, but this second picture has Harry and his younger brother Aaron walking in the same exact spot on that sidewalk. I was not able to obtain a copy of this second photograph, but could these two photographs be a celebration of the Herskovits sisters receiving the first travel permits to escape Nazi-occupied Prague? Did Aaron Roth take the photo of the sisters and Harry and then hand the camera to either Iby or Alice to take a picture of Harry and Aaron? Were the two pictures taken immediately after Harry gave the stamped travel permits to the sisters, or closer to the date when the sisters started their journey out of Prague?
IN AMERICA
Alice and Iby embarked on the SS Champlain on April 20, 1939 and arrived in New York on April 28th. From there, they traveled to Chicago where their father Bernard (Boril) had lived since 1926. My mom did not recognize my grandfather as he greeted her at the train station in Chicago, as she had not seen him since she was 8 years old. This photo was developed in June of 1939, so the photo was likely taken immediately after their arrival in Chicago.
Alice spent the next two years working to get the rest of her immediate family out of Europe. With the aid of the Hebrew Immigration Assistance Society, she was able to successfully get her mother Rose and her youngest sister Edith out of Hungary in 1941. Rose and Edith had left Slovakia to join Mom and Alice’s oldest sister Sari and her husband and daughter who were living in Budapest. Rose and Edith escaped on the September 19th sailing of the SS Excambion from Lisbon in 1941. Shortly after leaving Lisbon, the ship passengers got a scare as detailed in an article on the SS Excambion from a periodical published in 2020 on sailing ships. The incident is described on page 22 of the magazine:
“In September 1941, a Nazi four-engine Condor bomber dove down on the Excambion six hours out of Lisbon, terrifying the passengers as the plane flew within 100 yards of the liner. Dutch passenger Haitze de Vries stated, ‘It was a Fock-Wulf ... God knows I’ve seen enough of them drop bombs on Holland.’ “
Mom’s oldest sister Sari and Sari’s husband Erno and daughter Judit chose to stay in Budapest because in 1941, the Hungarian government allied with Nazis did not appear to have plans to deport Jews. But in March of 1944, the Nazis took over Hungary, and by May, they initiated deportations of Jews from there. Sari, Erno, and Judit perished in Auschwitz.
In 1948, Alice traveled back to Europe to find out what happened to the rest of their family. There she found my great uncle Jeno who had returned to his hometown after being liberated from Auschwitz, and Jeno told her the story of her and my mom’s brother William who, along with Jeno, was sent to a labor camp that operated outside of the death camp. Alice’s daughter Judy told me in an email the story that Alice told her on what happened to brother Willie:
“During the liberation of Auschwitz, Willie went to the infirmary to rescue his uncle Jeno who was sick with Typhus. He left the infirmary carrying Jeno on his back while the Russians were recklessly firing their guns, likely intending to kill all the stray Nazi guards they might find in the area. At some point, Jeno told Willie to leave him behind and run alone, so Willie could save himself. The irony being that while running, Willie was mistaken for a Nazi attempting to flee, so Willie got shot and killed by the Russian liberators by accident, and his deathly ill Uncle Jeno miraculously survived to tell this story to my mother who had returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948 to learn if any of their family had survived.”
Through Wikipedia, I looked up a historical list of train transports to Auschwitz from Slovakia carrying Jews during WWII. Since there were only a handful of transports organized to Auschwitz from Slovakia, I determined that Jeno and William were probably on the very last transport train that left Slovakia on November 2, 1944 with over 900 other Slovakian Jews. The last Auschwitz gas chamber stopped operating the day before the train arrived, as the Nazis began the process of destroying evidence of their crimes. So Willie and Jeno were assigned to work camps and remained in Auschwitz for almost three full months until Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945.
After the war, Jeno returned to the family’s hometown of Királyhelmec and started a new family. Jeno died in 1957, and his family immigrated to Canada in 1960. We recently re-established contact with Jeno’s children and grandchildren in Toronto.
After World War II, Alice got married and divorced and had Judy, who now lives in Los Angeles. My mom met my father in Chicago. My dad Martin was a German Jew who immigrated to the U.S. in 1938. My parents married while my father served in the U.S. Army in World War II. In this picture taken in 1947 in Chicago, the early stages of the sisters’ families are shown. On the lower row on the right, my mom is holding my oldest sister born in 1945. Alice is in the middle, and Edith is on the left with her oldest son, born in 1946. My father is on the left in the top row with my grandparents, and finally, my uncle Morrie (Edith’s husband) is on the right.
I am one of five siblings, and my mom has ten grandchildren and seven great grandchildren. My father passed away in 1991, and my mom passed away recently just short of her 104th birthday in October of 2022. The picture below was taken in 2015 with Mom in the center, posing with just a subset of her large family:
HARRY ROTH’S ESCAPE TO PALESTINE
When Harry heard from the sisters of their safe passage to Paris, he continued the scheme of issuing forged travel permits with his brother Aaron. Harry claimed he issued 3000 forged permits over the next two weeks. Harry and Aaron’s exploits appear to be confirmed by Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy. In a 2013 opinion piece in the Haaretz newspaper, Levy describes how his father was able to escape Nazi-occupied Germany with the help of ‘two shrewd Slovakian Jews.’ The two brothers organized travel on rail leaving from Prague to Vienna on April 30, 1939. From Vienna, the refugees boarded a Danube river passenger boat to the Romanian port of Sulina. In Sulina, approximately 700 Jews boarded the Greek-owned cargo ship Frossula for the voyage across the Mediterranean for Palestine. Levy describes the long journey to Palestine:
“The cargo ship whose flag was Panamanian and whose crew was Greek had been turned into a passenger ship; hundreds of bunks had been built in its belly. In the coming months the passengers would be tossed about at sea, people who had left everything behind. My father left behind his parents and fiancée, never to see them again. He left behind his career.
The shores of Turkey were closed to them, as were those of Palestine. In Tripoli, Lebanon, they were allowed to drop anchor but not to disembark. At the port, the passengers exchanged their fine European clothing for food with merchants. In Beirut they were taken to a detention camp; after six weeks they were again at sea.
His Majesty’s planes flew threateningly overhead. At one point the British shot and killed two passengers. At sea they were transferred to another ship, the Tiger Hill, also full of illegal immigrants. It was one vessel alongside another; hundreds of hungry, sick and exhausted passengers climbing rope ladders while carrying their possessions
Finally the Tiger Hill ran aground off Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach. The stronger passengers jumped into the sea; most were arrested and taken to Sarafand, today known as Tzrifin. The people of Tel Aviv stood and cheered the convoy of refugees, which lifted their broken spirits.”
Tiger Hill aground on the Tel Aviv Beach in 1939
Harry met his wife Martha on the Frossula. Harry was among the refugees put in the British Sarafrand military camp. Harry, like many of the Frossula’s healthy male refugees, was then later conscripted into the British army. In Palestine, Harry worked for the British Army as a film projectionist and later for the Israeli Haganah (army) doing the same. After the 1948 War of Independence, he went into private business as a theater operator in Tel Aviv.
HARRY AND MARTHA IN THE US
In 1956, Harry and Martha decided to leave Israel and immigrate to the US. They established Roth’s Delicatessen on Van Zant Street in Norwalk Connecticut. The 1961 Norwalk Hour article had a picture of Harry, his wife, and his son Gil Roth, celebrating Gil’s acceptance into Yeshiva University. Also shown is a typical ad that frequently ran in the Norwalk paper that promoted Harry as the Deli King and his incredible multi-lingual knowledge.
Harry died in 1998. Some time in the 1980’s, my parents and my older sister visited Harry at his Norwalk home. My wife and I lived for a short time near Harry in Westchester County in the 1980s, and I regret that I did not know the story of my mom’s escape from Prague at that time and therefore never made the 30-minute trip to meet him.
I was glad to finally connect with many of Harry Roth’s relatives after completing the first version of this essay. Arlene (Harry’s niece in Atlanta) told me that one of Harry’s siblings, who lives in suburban New York, was still alive. This sister survived both Theriesenstadt and Auschwitz and is now 105 years old. When Arlene asked her if she remembered my aunt and mother, her reply was, “Of course I remember Alzbeta and Iby!”.
One of my goals in writing this essay is to obtain the recognition for Harry Roth that he deserves. Jewish heroes who saved fellow Jews are not considered for enshrinement at Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among Nations, as those honors are reserved strictly for non-Jews. B’nai Brith does honor Jews who rescued fellow Jews during the Holocaust. Through distribution of this story, I hope that others who know of Harry’s exploits will come forward and that his name will forever be known by every descendant of every Jewish refugee he helped to escape Nazi-occupied Prague in April of 1939.
Bruce W. Mainzer
January 26, 2023
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research would never have been possible without my sister Sharon who had the foresight and dedication to record over 3 hours of interviews with my parents on the back porch of our suburban Chicago home during the summer of 1985.
I would like to thank Suzy Snyder, Curator of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Suzy met with me in 2014 and took in the collection of papers and photographs of my mother’s life in pre-War Europe and escape from Nazi-occupied Prague. The three hours of interviews my sister Sharon recorded can now listened to online on the Holocaust Museum web site, and the collection of my mom’s papers and photos will be available soon on the site.
I am appreciative of Alice’s daughter, my cousin Judy. Judy was extremely helpful in tracking down Alice’s documents that she had kept as well as sending documents she discovered through online searches. Judy was always available to provide vital facts that she remembered Alice telling her about the sisters’ escape.
I also want to thank Dr. Laura Brade, assistant professor of history at Albion College. Dr. Brade’s dissertation was on the emigration of Czechoslovakian Jews and is entitled “Coerced Voluntary Migration: Jewish Flight from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1941.” The dissertation was invaluable for me to understand the events of 1939 in Prague. Via a phone conversation, Dr. Brade provided me with a good understanding of how the employees of the U.S. embassy at the time probably stayed behind after being told to leave Prague and assisted my mom and aunt.
For the second version of this essay, I am indebted to Arlene Rothstein and her daughter, Dr. Rachel Rothstein, Harry’s niece and great niece. Arlene was instrumental in introducing me to relatives of Harry that filled in the gaps of Harry’s epic life, and Rachel provided the final clues to the photo that was taken in Prague and not Paris, as I had previously thought.
Ramona Garcia, Reference Librarian in the History Room of the Norwalk, CT Public Library was very helpful and provided me with numerous articles and ads about Harry Roth in the Norwalk Hour newspaper.
Finally, I wish to thank my son Jordan and my wife Beth for their editing and suggestions.