The Costa Rican Passport
HOW MY PARENTS SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST
By no stretch of the imagination were my parents Costa Rican. In the years leading up to World War II, they had never left Europe. I doubt they had ever met a Costa Rican, and they didn’t speak a word of Spanish. But their papers in the 1940s said they were citizens of Costa Rica. And those papers saved their lives.
A passenger manifest for the ship the MS Sobieski recorded the arrival on December 3, 1948, of two new immigrants to the United States: Maksymilian Brandel, age 38, nationality Polish, and his wife, Lotte, age 30, also Polish. Prior to the start of World War II, Maksymilian had never lived anywhere but his city of birth, Lwow, Poland. Lotte spent her early life in Vienna, Austria before she, along with her parents Heinrich and Adele Suchestow, and an older sister, Ella, returned to Lopatyn, Poland, the small town approximately 55 miles from Lwow where she had been born.
At no point had either one set foot in Costa Rica. Nor would they ever do so.
How was it then that my parents, Max and Lottie, both Polish Jews, came to hold Costa Rican documents?
LWOW UNDER OCCUPATION
My parents’ relationship began before the war, in the late 1930s, when my father, an artist, drew my mother’s caricature as she sat in a Lwow café with another man. I imagine that the moment was enchanting — at least for two of the three — but the era was an inauspicious time for romance. By the time they married, on January 1, 1941, World War II was underway and Lwow was under Soviet occupation, a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that had paved the way for the division of Poland between the two powers.
The Suchestow family’s standing under Soviet occupiers was fraught, not because they were Jewish, but for reasons of class. In time, my affluent, land-owning maternal grandfather was dispossessed and, during the winter of 1940–1941, jailed. My mother’s oldest sister, Doris, who had managed to flee to New York with her husband, pulled some strings to secure a Costa Rican passport for her family members in Europe. They all hoped that the presentation of a foreign passport, though fraudulent, might induce the Soviet authorities to free my grandfather and allow the family to emigrate. They handed over the passport, and it was never seen again. My aunt in the United States could not arrange another one, but she came through with something else that proved to be no less valuable: a certificate stating that the Suchestows — and my father, by marriage — were Costa Rican citizens.
I don’t know exactly when my grandfather was released from Soviet prison, or whether the Costa Rican certificate had anything to do with it, but he was not free for long. In June 1941, Nazi Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and unleashed a bombing campaign against the Soviet Union. Soviet forces retreated from Lwow, and German forces seized the city. The Suchestows decided to register with the new occupiers as citizens of Costa Rica, using their certificate as evidence. The move paid off. As Costa Rican Jews, they were not required to wear Star of David armbands or live in the hellish conditions of Lwow’s Jewish Ghetto, a ghetto which few survived. But my grandfather was again detained, and this time, so was my father. There were no facilities specifically for foreign nationals at the time, so the two men spent several months in a prison on Lwow’s Jachowicz Street. The rest of the family was permitted, temporarily, to stay on in a Lwow apartment.
My grandfather did not live to see the further travails about to unfold. He died in October 1942, two days after being released from prison with a diagnosis of advanced cancer. Shortly afterwards, German authorities herded my parents, my grandmother, my aunt, and others from Lwow who were (or purported to be) foreign citizens — thirty or forty people in all, according to my mother — into a truck bound for Warsaw’s notorious Pawiak Prison. Located in that city’s Jewish Ghetto, Pawiak was run by the Gestapo, Germany’s secret police force, and held political prisoners. Inmates slept on straw mattresses in crowded, lice-infested cells and suffered constant fear and hunger. “You heard a lot of screaming and beating…we lost completely hope that we would ever get out,” my mother told me as she recalled her three months there.
But they did get out, and it was the Costa Rican papers that determined where they would go next. As a foreign national, my father was sent from Pawiak to a German civilian internment camp for men in late October 1942. My mother, grandmother, and aunt stayed in Pawiak until they, too, were sent to a German civilian internment camp in January 1943.
THE CIVILIAN INTERNMENT CAMPS
It is important to note that civilian internment camps were not concentration camps. They were run not by the ruthless paramilitary organization that controlled those camps, the Schutzstaffel (the SS), but by the German Army. The civilian internees were prisoners, but the prisons operated within a framework of agreed upon norms that made life relatively bearable. In the civilian internment camps, the fact that someone was Jewish was of less importance than the fact that he or she was, on paper, a foreign citizen. Foreigners were of potential use to Germany: in a prisoner of war exchange, citizens of the Allied countries might be exchangeable for citizens of Germany imprisoned in those countries. Holding exchangeable civilians was in Germany’s interest, and holding them in decent conditions was leverage, a way to pressure the Allied countries to treat German prisoners of war similarly.
In striking contrast to the concentration camps, civilian internment camps provided basic food, hygiene, and shelter according to the provisions of the international Geneva Conventions. Per the Conventions, the internees could not be forced to work. Camps were to provide medical care, and those in need of advanced care were to be transported to nearby hospitals or other facilities. Internees were allowed to send and receive mail, albeit in limited quantities and only after review by camp censors. This meant that separated couples like my parents had the cold comfort of occasional communication.
But for the protection of the Costa Rican papers, it was likely that neither of my parents would have been able to leave Lwow. Their lives could easily have ended in one of the organized “Aktionen” (a series of brutal anti-Jewish street actions), or in a Nazi killing center. Instead, my parents had a reprieve from the catastrophe unfolding for Europe’s Jews.
From October 1942 to May 1945, my father was one of hundreds of British, North American, and South American civilians in Internierungslager VII (Ilag VII), whose main camp was in the Bavarian town of Laufen. The subcamp was twelve miles away, in the town of Tittmoning. My father spent time in both camp and subcamp.
My mother, along with her mother and her sister, was interned in Frontstalag 194 in Vittel, a town in German-occupied France, from January 1943 until September 1944. The camp held British, North American, and South American civilians, as well as a small number of Soviet civilians.
The Jewish populations of Ilag VII and Vittel were relatively small compared to the overall camp populations. Internees known to be Jewish lived separately from other internees but could move about freely by day, and by most accounts they faced little overt discrimination or cruelty. The headline of a March 19, 1944 article by an Associated Press correspondent, himself newly repatriated from a German civilian internment camp, read: “Nazis decent to US Jews. Segregate, but treat them well in internment.”
My father never spoke to me about his wartime experiences, although he alluded to having been “in prison.” My mother spoke of Vittel from time to time, and on one occasion allowed me to record some of her recollections. Although Germany destroyed the records of the civilian internment camps, fragments of lists and a variety of other primary sources, including first person accounts, have survived. Only after years of poring over these sources did I begin to understand my family history.
ILAG VII: “ONE OF THE BEST CAMPS IN ALL GERMANY”
The prisoners of the all-male Ilag VII, where my father was, were housed in one of two locations. The main camp, in Laufen, was a square-shaped castle built for the Archbishop of Salzburg in the fifteenth century.
The subcamp in Tittmoning was also a castle; this one dated to the thirteenth century, and access to the main entrance was by way of a bridge over a moat.
Laufen held two groups of internees: British and American. The British internees came primarily from the Channel Islands, the only British territory under Nazi rule during the war. In September 1942, Hitler responded to Britain’s arrest and internment of German citizens in Iran by ordering the deportation and internment of Channel Islands residents born in England. Later deportees from the Channel Islands to German internment camps included those who served as British officers during World War I. The camp at Laufen was one of several to receive Channel Islanders, and it also held a handful of British citizens apprehended on mainland Europe or on European waters. The American internees (with American defined as North Americans and Latin Americans) had been picked up in Germany or German-occupied European countries. There were hundreds of men in each group, with the actual number fluctuating. Some internees stayed for weeks or months. For others, including my father, the passage of time was measured in years.
The Geneva Conventions permitted humanitarian groups like the International YMCA and the International Red Cross to access prisoner-of-war camps and to address the prisoners’ needs. Swedish YMCA representative Erik Berg, who visited many of them, stated that Ilag VII was “one of the best camps in all Germany.” Possibly this was true. But it is also true that the prisoners knew privation and adversity. The camps were crowded, with men sleeping on two- and three-tiered bunk beds, and as many as sixty occupants in the larger rooms. Winters were so cold that at times internees resorted to burning bed slats for warmth. Camp food was meager, although there was sufficient food once Red Cross packages started arriving.
There were probably fewer than ten Jews among Ilag VII’s British prisoners. The number in the American part of the camp was larger, around fifty at its peak. By my count, twenty-six of them held fraudulent Latin American papers. The illegitimacy of these Costa Rican, Paraguayan, Honduran, Bolivian, Salvadoran, Haitian, and Guatemalan documents was an open secret, and was certainly known by German authorities. The men could provide no proof of birth, schooling, or any other history in a Latin American country, nor had they presented themselves as Latin Americans before doing so appeared to offer a safety net. It is unlikely that many — or, perhaps, any — of them were able to speak Spanish. “It was generally accepted by both fellow internees as well as the German authorities at the camp that many of the internees at Laufen claiming American citizenship were not entitled thereto,” stated American-born internee Karl Berthold after the war.
By what process had the Latin American documents been obtained? Passports and other documents of citizenship could sometimes be purchased directly from obliging diplomatic personnel working in secret behind the backs of their governments. In other instances, diplomats prepared and distributed passports for free and with their countries’ support. The Lados Group, named after Aleksander Lados, the wartime Polish ambassador to Switzerland, was in this category: the six members of the Group (Lados and three fellow diplomats, plus two Jewish activists) organized thousands of Latin American passports and citizenship certificates. This clandestine operation was supported by the Polish government-in-exile in London and was the source of the Paraguayan and Honduran passports of at least fourteen Jewish Laufen and Tittmoning internees. The Paraguayan, Honduran, and Haitian passports of dozens of Vittel’s Jewish internees also originated with this group.
Another rescue operation was that of Manuel Muñoz Borrero, an Ecuadoran diplomat stationed in Stockholm, Sweden. Ten Polish Jews were interned in Vittel on the strength of Ecuadoran passports from Muñoz Borrero.
Not every fake passport led to the relative safety of an internment. The chaos of wartime Europe and the mounting numbers of Jewish deaths and deportations under Nazi occupation meant that passports often did not reach the intended recipients. Then too, Nazi officials could choose to ignore a person’s documents.
Those interned in Ilag VII with false documents understood that they were not guaranteed survival. Bernard Osiek, an interned Jewish doctor from Krakow, Poland, acquired a Guatemalan passport with the help of an American friend. His life in Laufen was “physically tolerable,” he said in his Shoah Foundation testimony, but he added “I was all the time under the pressure that I would be sent away from the camp.”
Some Jewish internees with verifiable claims to American citizenship were “sent away” — that is, repatriated in prisoner of war exchanges. One group ended up in a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration camp in Philippeville, Algeria, as part of an exchange for German nationals in Mandatory Palestine; there they awaited resettlement elsewhere.
Other Jewish internees who were “sent away” didn’t fare as well. Due to the fragile state of his health, Ludwig Boas, an elderly American-born Jew, was sent back to his Hamburg, Germany apartment and placed under Gestapo supervision. He died in that apartment in a matter of months, by suicide.
Also “sent away” were the teenaged brothers Herfried and Reimar Mendoza Gutmann, holders of Bolivian papers but born in Germany to a Jewish family. They were transferred from Tittmoning to an unknown location in 1943 after an ill-thought-out escape attempt. Later records show they were murdered in the Ebensee concentration camp, a subcamp of Mauthausen, Herfried in March 1945 and Reimar in April of the same year.
I imagine that my father kept a low profile to escape attention that might have led to extra scrutiny of his paperwork. I’ve searched for him in vain in archived photos and artwork that depict internees performing various activities in the camp.
VITTEL: “IT WAS RELATIVELY NOT SO TERRIBLE, BUT IT WAS TERRIBLE.”
In August 1943 a group of Jewish internees in Tittmoning with wives and children in Vittel was permitted to join them there. My father’s name was on the list initially, and he was devastated when he was not ultimately selected. But unknown to all, most of the transferred internees would eventually find that Vittel was but the first leg of a trip whose final destination was Auschwitz. What was in one moment my father’s painful disappointment was, in the next moment, a saving grace.
Vittel was a larger camp than Ilag VII. A Red Cross report from January 1943, the month of my mother’s arrival, put the population of the camp at 1,779. One year later, it had grown to 2,536. As in Ilag VII, the numbers fluctuated due to repatriations as well as transfers to other camps. There were deaths and, after Vittel became a camp for families rather than strictly a women’s camp, there were births.
Most of the Vittel internees were British, North American, and South American citizens who had been living in France. Also interned in Vittel: over three hundred Jews from Poland, almost all holding fraudulent papers from Latin American countries.
My mother, grandmother, and aunt were part of a group that arrived at Vittel from Warsaw early in 1942. Months later, another group arrived from Warsaw — Jews who had purchased passports in something called the Hotel Polski affair. Latin American passports had piled up unclaimed in the Gestapo offices in Warsaw because their intended recipients were no longer alive. Gestapo operatives saw an opportunity to make money by selling passports to desperate Jews, many of whom abandoned hiding places for a purchase they hoped would lead to transport to Vittel. But only a small number of those who showed up at the Hotel Polski and a second hotel, The Royal, for passports made out to others ended up in an internment camp. Most were sent to other locations to be executed.
My mother, coming to Vittel after Pawiak Prison, thought it a paradise. Vittel had once been a destination for wealthy travelers who were drawn to its therapeutic mineral springs. A 1924 British Medical Journal article on the spas of northeast France described it as having “well-designed and well-managed facilities for modern spa treatment…its situation is beautiful…the principal hotels are built in palatial style and the amusements provided, including polo and racing, attract many fashionable visitors.”
Now the hotel rooms that once held “fashionable visitors” lodged internees. “I’ll never forget the first time when I stretched out in a bed…it was unbelievable,” recalled my mother. The camp’s perimeter was surrounded by three rows of barbed wire. Nonetheless, the grounds within the wire were park-like. Germany routinely used photos from the camp for propaganda purposes. But paradise it was not.
“We were like birds in a golden cage, we had everything but freedom,” said American-born Lena Wattenberg in a newspaper interview after her repatriation to the United States. My mother was awed by Vittel’s comforts, but she recalled the pressure of imprisonment with invalid documents. “We were really not foreign citizens, and the Germans knew it, and we knew it.” The Jewish internees were aware of the existence of extermination camps, and aware too that they were not truly safe. “It was relatively not so terrible, but it was terrible, because the fear was there all the time,” said my mother.
The stress was too much for my aunt Ella, who suffered a breakdown in Vittel and subsequently spent several months in a French psychiatric facility in Nancy. There she was chained to a bed and given a treatment for mental illness that had been introduced just a few years earlier: electroconvulsive therapy.
THE DEPORTATIONS
In 1943, Swiss authorities launched an investigation into the passports issued by Latin American diplomats stationed in Switzerland. This resulted in several Latin American countries calling back those diplomats who had made rescue passports available without authorization, and it led to the invalidation of many passports.
Also in 1943, the viciously anti-Semitic Alois Brunner, commandant of France’s Drancy transit camp (a camp from which tens of thousands of Jews were further deported to death camps) wrote a letter to his superior, Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer and key player in Nazi Germany’s plan to exterminate European Jewry. In it, he urged an inquiry into the passports of those he called “jüdische Verbrecher” (Jewish criminals) in Vittel.
In December 1943, German officials arrived from Berlin to confiscate the Latin American papers of Vittel’s Polish Jews. For over three hundred Jewish internees, the protection offered by those papers vanished, and they suddenly faced their greatest fears.
Had Latin American countries taken quick action and stated that they recognized the holders of the fake passports, the story of Vittel’s Jewish internees might have ended differently. But by the time the first such statements reached Germany, it had already been decided that the Polish Jews in Vittel — and only in Vittel — with suspect Latin American documents were stateless, and of no further use. On March 20, 1944, the Vittel administration isolated those internees in a hotel located a short distance from the other hotels.
The relocated internees knew what was coming next. Numerous accounts by Vittel survivors refer with horror to the many suicide attempts. At least fifteen internees tried to kill themselves by leaping from windows, throwing themselves down flights of stairs, or taking arsenic they had smuggled in with their possessions. At least three were successful. “Some people had poison, and this was the greatest fortune… [if I had poison] I am sure I would have taken it,” my mother confided.
The first deportation from Vittel occurred on April 18, 1944. Gestapo agents forced around 170 internees onto passenger trains whose windows were covered by planks of wood. Deportation was delayed for several internees whose suicide attempts left them alive but injured; their subsequent hospitalizations resulted in their being classified medically unfit for transport. The strange logic behind declaring internees unfit to be transported to their deaths was likely a way for the authorities to preserve the fiction that deportation simply meant being sent to another internment camp.
For most, hospitalization only brought a few extra weeks of survival. A second deportation on May 16 affected approximately sixty additional internees and included internees taken from the hospital on stretchers.
Both groups of deported internees first found themselves in the camp at Drancy, except for a very small number who managed to escape the train before its arrival there. After a few days, the internees were further transported, in crammed cattle cars, to the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp in occupied Poland. The trip from Drancy to Auschwitz was days-long, the trains hellishly crowded. There was no food, and almost no water. Several Vittel internees jumped from the moving trains. A few others died enroute.
Of those Vittel internees who arrived at Auschwitz, not one survived. The murdered included over fifty children. The youngest: Akadius Dudelzak, born in the camp and just shy of three months old.
Also murdered: Sylvia Helena Mandelbaum from Room 416 of Vittel’s Central Hotel — the same room that held my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt, according to World Jewish Congress records. The eighteen-year-old from Krakow, interned as a Costa Rican, was no doubt the roommate to whom my mother alluded when she told me, “We kind of adopted her [but] she was taken out of our room, and she perished.” Sylvia’s father, Abraham Mandelbaum, was no more Costa Rican than his daughter, but he was imprisoned in Tittmoning and not Vittel. He survived the war but lost his only child. “If my dad is saved, watch over him so that he does not do something stupid,” Sylvia begged relatives in a farewell letter, written in her native Polish immediately prior to her deportation and now part of the archives of the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem.
Of the more than three hundred Jews with false Latin American documents in Vittel, only approximately three dozen survived. Some had arrived in the camp after the deportations. A small number survived in hiding, helped by non-Jewish internees.
For reasons that will never be known, my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt were not deported from Vittel. My mother had her own theories. One had to with a paperwork technicality: holding a certificate rather than a passport may have placed the three in a different category from actual passport holders. The second theory involved the possibility of a behind-the-scenes intervention from a German man who worked in Vittel as a translator and had demonstrated a sympathetic interest in my mother.
I have another theory. I know, as I suspect my mother did not, about a mysterious cable sent from the Polish government-in-exile in London to the Polish legation in Switzerland on March 10, 1943. The cable urged an in-person discussion between Polish and Costa Rican diplomats on behalf of my mother, grandmother, and aunt, and stated that family in England could offer them financial help. How exactly this cable came into existence is impossible to know, but one of my mother’s three sisters, Anna, a British citizen by marriage, lived in London during the war years and worked for the clandestine British military organization known as the Special Operations Executive — something I only found out several years after her death, when I requested an SOE personnel file that inexplicably bore her name. From this file I learned that Anna had two roles: Polish translator, and another function described as “contacts Poles and Czechs in England.” It is not hard to imagine that she crossed paths with influential Polish officials and had opportunities to press the case for her three “Costa Rican” family members in Vittel. In any event, I like to think that the cable resulted in action that protected my family members and kept them off the deportation lists.
Certificate or no, friendly translator or no, cable or no…had Vittel not been liberated several months after the second deportation to Drancy, my mother, grandmother, and aunt’s luck might have run out.
LIBERATION
My mother’s freedom came eight months before my father’s. Free French forces liberated Vittel on September 12, 1944. American troops arrived next, “tossing…bars of chocolate and cans of food,” according to the memoir of camp survivor Gutta Sternbuch. My mother and grandmother were reunited with my aunt shortly after Vittel’s liberation, when my aunt was discharged from the psychiatric hospital in a somewhat improved condition. The three stayed for some weeks in Vittel and were then moved to a displaced persons camp further from the front.
American forces liberated Ilag VII’s internees on May 5, 1945. Three days later, World War II ended in Europe. Months later, my parents were finally reunited, after a person whose identity I will never know sold my father information about my mother’s whereabouts, information that was taken from a radio show broadcasting names of people searching for relatives.
The couple first lived in Paris, where my father resumed his prewar career as an artist, beginning by drawing caricatures for American GIs. He eventually became a freelance editorial cartoonist and a designer of visual humor features for European newspapers and magazines. Later he continued his career in the United States. Readers of Mad magazine during the 1960s and ’70s may recall the name Max Brandel and his work in those pages — humorous features that were often political. He died in 1975 at the age of 64. My mother died decades later at the age of 92. My grandmother and my aunt Ella also came to the United States, and they lived to 89 and 90, respectively.
“My father decided it’s better to be a Costa Rican Jew than a Polish Jew,” recalled my mother about the decision to present false Costa Rican papers to the Nazis. Initiative on my grandfather’s part led to the family’s internment and ended up playing a significant role in their survival. So did thwarted initiative. My mother would have taken a lethal dose of arsenic in Vittel, had she had any. The best course of action at any particular moment was unknowable.
Many hundreds of Jews with Latin American documents met horrific ends. Although they were no more prescient and no more deserving, my mother, father, grandmother, and aunt survived. At critical moments, they benefitted from decisions made by others and circumstances they did not control. That said, without the protection of Latin American citizenship, their story would certainly have been a different one. Over 200,000 Jews made Lwow their home during the first months of World War II. By war’s end, few were still alive. My family’s unlikely survival would have been very much more unlikely, were it not for the Costa Rican passport.
