Letters reveal a Jewish businessman’s struggle with family requests from Nazi Germany

Although it was more than a decade ago, I still remember the phone call. The excited voice at the other end that went on and on regardless of whether I uttered a response. Attorney Roger Blane had a donation for the American Jewish Committee Archives, where I work as the director. While in the studio apartment of the late Luzie Hatch, a Jewish immigrant from Berlin, he had stumbled upon an extensive collection of World War II-era letters.

On a brutally oppressive August day, I took the subway to Luzie’s New York City studio, where I was presented with a battered old binder bursting with correspondence. Turning the pages, I noticed something unusual. Not only were there letters Luzie had received, but often there were also carbon copies of her outgoing letters. I accepted the donation, unaware it would yield further surprises. Eventually, using select correspondence, I wrote “Exit Berlin: How One Woman Saved Her Family From Nazi Germany,” published in 2014 by Yale University Press.

A book blogger quickly took me to task for the subtitle. “One woman?” she queried. Why had Arnold Hatch, Luzie’s American-born cousin and rescuer, been shortchanged? The criticism is not without merit.

In 1933, at the age of 45, Arnold Hatch inherited the family business, Fuld & Hatch Knitting, in Cohoes, N.Y. The work was never-ending: shipping deadlines, purchases of raw materials, advertising plans and labor disputes. But days at the office also included letters to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, U.S. court and immigration officials, bank officials and travel agents. For when his German father passed away, it was Arnold who assumed responsibility for relatives trapped in Nazi Germany.

It was in November 1938 that Arnold brought his cousin Luzie, then 24, to America. He had acted not out of love, for there is no indication there had been any prior contact, but out of family responsibility — she was a “blood relative.”

But why had it taken so long? More than two years had passed since he had answered Luzie’s request, promising, “If there is a chance in the world that I can take you out of Germany … I will do it.” In the lean years of the Depression, with millions unemployed, Arnold had no desire to be “reckless and foolish.” He wanted to plan, and to be sure there would be work for relatives arriving from Germany. 

Once in the U.S., Luzie acted as both translator and advocate for family back in Germany. She was their link to Arnold, a possible lifeline. And there was a steady stream of requests. Could he send money and/or food parcels? Would he act as a sponsor, filing an affidavit of support? Could he cover the cost of ship passage to Latin America or the U.S.?

The most daring proposal came from Aunt Martha Harf in Cologne. As the summer of 1940 drew to a close, she realized that chances of escape were dwindling. So she decided to travel with her young daughter Ruth to Moscow where they would take the Trans-Siberian Railroad across thousands of miles of frozen earth to Vladivostok, Russia. At the port, they would book passage to Shanghai, an open city — all hinging on Arnold’s financial backing. 

Arnold exploded. “It is utterly impractical at this time to send two women from Cologne via Berlin, Moscow, Siberia, and Japan … The journey is hazardous … and the American Express Company in accepting the utterly impossible sum of $700.00 per person does not guarantee a thing … the cost of this thing outside of the uncertainty of it is perfectly ridiculous.” To provide some context, the modern-day equivalent of $1,400 is approximately $23,700.   

Arnold Hatch  Photo courtesy of Pat Roth

Aunt Martha and her daughter were transported to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, where, according to the archives at Yad Vashem, they died.

Since the publication of “Exit Berlin,” I have spoken at synagogues, churches, book clubs, libraries and community centers. It is always Luzie who dominates the conversation. How could it be otherwise? It was Luzie, who, unbeknownst to her parents, reached out to her American cousin in 1936, thus setting the stage for future actions. And Luzie was the one who created and preserved a rare collection of two-sided correspondence. 

And yet, in every discussion, Arnold is never far behind. Seeing him as symbolic of American Jews, readers always ask, “Did he do enough? Could he have done more?” It is easy to focus on times when Arnold said “no,” for he tended to so with a flourish. But there is more to his story.

In 1938, when he was finally ready to bring Luzie to America, he also sponsored her cousin Herta Stein. Funds were sent to his cousin Dora in Baden-Baden, Germany, as well as to relatives who had made it to Palestine. When Luzie’s family arrived in Shanghai, he wired them $312. It was nearly $1,000 to bring Luzie’s father, stepmother and brother from Shanghai to America and set them up in New York City.

To other relatives, he offered the promise of American passage after the “air cleared.” But Arnold never saw the war’s end; he died in 1943.

Much has been written, and debated, about how the American government and Jewish-American leaders and institutions responded to the Holocaust. Yet Arnold’s letters go down a new path, offering an intimate picture of how one Jewish-American family faced not only the question of its moral obligations but the everyday realities of rescue. 

Charlotte Bonelli is the director of the American Jewish Committee Archives and author of “Exit Berlin: How One Woman Saved Her Family From Nazi Germany,” Yale University Press, 2014.