The Unanswered Letter

One Holocaust Family's Desperate Plea for Help

Faris Cassell

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684510245
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

In 1939, as the Nazis closed in, Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to an American stranger who happened to share his last name. He and his wife, Viennese Jews, had found escape routes for their daughters. But now their money, connections, and emotional energy were nearly exhausted. Alfred begged the American recipient of the letter, "You are surely informed about the situation of all Jews in Central Europe.... By pure chance I got your address.... My daughter and her husband will go... to America.... Help us to follow our children.... It is our last and only hope...."After languishing in a California attic for decades, Alfred's letter ended up in the hands of Faris Cassell, a journalist who couldn't rest until she discovered the ending of the story. Traveling across the United States as well as to Austria, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and Israel, she uncovered an extraordinary story of heart-wrenching loss and unforgettable love that endures to this day.Did the Bergers' desperate letter find a response? Did they—and their daughters—survive? Did they leave living descendants?You will find the answers here.A story that will move any reader, The Unanswered Letter is a poignant reminder that love and hope never die.

Part I

CHAPTER 1 Ordinary People

February 2000

The letter begging for lifesaving help lay untouched for weeks. Yet it stayed in our thoughts and disturbed us. We walked past it daily, unsure what to do with it. We felt its grim horror. It seemed that Margaret’s family had felt that also; the letter had lived in shadowy corners of their lives for decades.

The letter’s unanswered questions tugged at us. What should we do with it? Who were these Viennese Jews? Did the family escape? In 1939, the Nazi noose was tightening around Jews under the control of the Reich, but my natural skepticism poked at me: Could this letter have been some kind of hoax? Did Mrs. Clarence Berger answer the letter?

Our busy lives pulled us in other directions. After several weeks, Sidney seemed ready to put the letter behind us, maybe find a museum that would want it.

Inexplicably, the letter struck me harder than it hit him, jolting my sense of stability. Our family histories are vastly different. My husband’s family had lived for centuries in western Russia, now Belarus, but his grandparents immigrated to America around 1900, leaving Russian repression for a better life. All of his family who remained there—aunts, uncles, cousins, great-grandparents—disappeared in the Holocaust. When Sidney was growing up, his parents experienced and occasionally talked about antisemitism in their own lives, but they rarely mentioned their murdered family. When he asked about those missing family members, all that anyone would say was, “They were lost in the war.”

Ancestors of mine, in contrast, had come to America with the Pilgrims. Others fought in the Revolution. One distant relative, Hugh Hall, had explored the West with Lewis and Clark. Later generations, including my parents, spoke angrily about the influx of immigrants into “our country.” No one mentioned the Holocaust. When Sidney and I first discussed marrying, his family welcomed me, but my parents objected, and the discord, laden with long-held antisemitism, was painful. I hadn’t been raised with antisemitic talk, but the animus was there, only gradually to be replaced by a warm, loving bond between Sidney and my parents.

Over the years, Sidney and I built a bridge between our two worlds, Jewish and Christian, but it was shaky. We had experienced both the beautiful and the frigid, clannish, excluding aspects of each religion. Insiders and outsiders, we flinched at hurtful remarks that flew in both directions: “Kike.” “Goy.” “Chosen people.” “You have to choose.”

Did we have to choose? We didn’t think so, and we couldn’t. We loved the common core of both religions, as we loved each other. In recent years, I had thought we’d resolved our distress around this conflicted part of our lives. We participated in both religions and taught both to our children. But Alfred Berger’s letter churned up those dormant emotions. In 1930s Vienna there had been no safe, accepting, middle ground like we found in America. The letter stirred my old worries that division and hatred among different groups could flare anywhere, anytime.

I wanted to interview Margaret, and Sidney agreed to tell her about my interest. I hoped to find and write an inspiring, reassuring “Greatest Generation” story of a family that had risked helping a desperate stranger. But I understood that the Los Angeles Bergers might have questioned the letter’s authenticity, worried about financial entanglements, and ignored the plea—as my own family probably would have.

I met twice with Margaret and her daughter Lynn, a nurse. White-haired and in her mid-eighties, Margaret repeated to me the brief account she had given Sidney. She knew almost nothing about the letter. She explained several times that her uncle had shown it to her only once, in the mid-1950s, at the time when Clarence had sponsored Margaret herself for immigration to the U.S. He had said very little about the letter, then put it away. When I asked whether her aunt and uncle had sent a reply, Margaret equivocated. She said that they did not; later she said that they did but had not received a reply. Margaret was certain there had been no family connection. Her uncle’s family had emigrated from Germany in the mid-1800s and Anglicized their name from Bereger. Her Aunt Bea had emigrated from Canada. Her family was not Jewish, she said several times, as if that explained everything.

We chatted for several hours about her aunt and uncle. They’d had no children. He and Bea had endured lean years during the Depression but managed to build a secure working-class life. Bea had been a homemaker. Clarence owned a car repair shop in the Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles, then worked for a company that repossessed cars, mostly from the black ghetto emerging around his home. He had developed strong racial prejudices, Margaret admitted.

The fact that both Bea and her niece Margaret were immigrants to the United States added an intriguing angle to the story. But I had come to a dead end in our conversation. I backed up and asked Margaret and Lynn why they thought their family had kept this letter for so long.

Lynn answered that when her mother cut off the envelope’s stamps and gave them to a church fundraising project, Lynn had urged Margaret to save the letter.

Margaret’s tone was soft as she answered, slowly and thoughtfully. She couldn’t speak for her aunt and uncle, she said, but for herself, she would take the letter from its various storage places to read from time to time. “I’ve always wanted to know what happened to them. Each time I read the letter, I felt the plea. We have no idea what those people went through, how desperate they were. The letter should be some place where it will bring to mind what happened back then.”

Lynn listened quietly during most of the conversation, but when her mother spoke so openly, she burst out, “I knew my aunt and uncle well. I do not believe they would have tried to help those people. I hope they made it. I’m ashamed that our family did not help them.”

Here, from both of them, was the solid ground I’d sought, the connection that bound Margaret, Lynn, possibly their aunt and uncle, and me to the letter. More powerful than curiosity or a sense of responsibility for preserving history was the pull of the human heart: we cared what had happened to these terrified strangers in Wien, Germany.

As I gathered my recorder and notes preparing to leave, Margaret suggested that others might know more. She handed me contact information, decades old, for Clarence’s and Bea’s families. Surprisingly, she then went to a back room and emerged, her arms full of rolled-up papers. If I could find Clarence’s relatives, she wanted me to give them these family documents—marriage certificates from the 1800s, newspaper clippings of births and deaths, military records of Clarence’s army service in Europe during World War I.

Leaving their home, I accepted that I would not find a straightforward, inspirational tale. This family’s emotions were tangled. More than half a century after Clarence and Bea Berger had folded this letter and put it aside, I had set off a defensive reaction from Margaret and an apology from Lynn. I felt that I stood at the edge of a dark world that I wasn’t sure I wanted to enter.

Over the next week as I rethought that interview, unresolved questions loomed in my mind and drove me back to the story. I began investigating the slim possibility that the California Bergers had responded to Alfred and Hedwig. Within a few weeks I had contacted four of Clarence and Bea Berger’s relatives in California and Canada, but they had never heard of the letter. Disappointed, I accepted the likelihood that the Los Angeles Bergers had not responded, and I filed the letter away with other intriguing dangling story ideas.

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Life’s currents drew Sidney and me into in our busy routines—his rheumatology practice, my journalism, our family. But even as years passed, I remained deeply unsettled by the plea to strangers in America. Sidney and I sometimes talked about the uncomfortable feelings it provoked. He began telling me stories I’d never heard—about growing up in a small Mississippi town where his was the only Jewish family, owners of a small store and motel. Antisemitism was as pervasive there as the cotton fields that stretched to the horizon. Other children made him pay a nickel to play with them. In school, in that conservative community, religion came up often. When a student or teacher talked about the Jews killing Jesus, he would wait for the inevitable “Sidney is Jewish!” as everyone turned to stare at him. Later, dating had been a problem; some parents refused to let him see their daughter. I had known something about his struggles, but even now, these stories came out reluctantly.

My own suburban Seattle childhood had been so different: upper middle class and Protestant; my father an attorney, my mother a homemaker. I was aware of only two or three Jewish students in my high school of sixteen hundred students. Sidney’s ability to manage the obstacles of his youth impressed me. Over the years, he had made close, lifelong friends in that town, but the imprint that he was different had cut deeply. Later he had been accepted at Washington University’s highly regarded medical school, but he had been careful also to apply to Thomas Jefferson University’s medical school, known to accept Jews. We speculated about whether antisemitism had played a role in the Los Angeles Bergers’ apparent decision not to answer the letter.

A level of unease that Sidney did not seem to experience about the letter jarred my carefully balanced world. The letter’s recipients could have been my family as I grew up—and its senders could have been my current family. I understood the gaping chasm between them. My parents had belonged to clubs that admitted only WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. When I talked about the letter with my parents, my father—who had by now grown close to Sidney, his Jewish son-in-law—made a startling admission. He revealed that before my grandparents married, my grandfather had researched my grandmother’s family, the Mangolds, to confirm that she had no Jewish heritage. I learned, too, that my mother’s father, a bank president, had decided not to nominate a respected businessman to a corporate board that he chaired simply because that person’s family were Italian immigrants. My mother had grown up near New York City, where, she informed me, Jews were “very clannish.” It was extremely unlikely that, in 1939, my family would have welcomed any immigrant.

A friend asked me if I felt guilty about this family background. She compared my discomfort to “white guilt.” I’d had to think about her question, but then I laughed and said I knew that guilt was significant for some religions and some people, but I didn’t find it useful. I believed guilt turns a person inward. It seems a detached, often debilitating response. For me, concepts of personal responsibility and justice are more powerful. This might seem a fuzzy distinction, but I thought not, and, yes, I felt a responsibility.

Others’ reactions to the letter also surprised me. Most people who read it expressed pity for Alfred and Hedwig and scorned “those Nazis.” Not one considered Americans’ unrealized potential for rescuing trapped Jews—perhaps by identifying a church or synagogue that might help even one family. The message I heard was this: ordinary Americans had no connection to the Holocaust.

Sidney and I continued to talk about the letter. We admitted that an affidavit of support was a significant responsibility. We doubted whether we would have made such a commitment for a stranger. I had thought of myself as a compassionate person, but never delved into why I assumed so. Fissures developed in my self-image.

On the other end of the letter were the Jewish Bergers and their “situation.” Extreme antisemitism had never affected me, but the message of this letter rang out loud and clear: If Sidney and I had lived in Vienna in 1939, we too would have been running for our lives. We too would have been writing letters: “I beg you… help us.”

CHAPTER 2 The Search Begins

March 2004

Adding to my warring emotions about Alfred Berger’s letter, I was a journalist, and I was curious. A writer writes in large part as self-discovery, and there was much in this letter that disturbed and compelled me. After wrestling with my priorities for several years, I left my work for the Register-Guard to begin sleuthing seriously. I didn’t know, then, where I was heading, but I was moving. Alfred and Hedwig might have sent multiple letters pleading for help. Did anyone answer? Did they escape?

The first steps in my quest for answers began with Clarence Berger. Could he have met members of Alfred Berger’s family during his World War I military service? Looking over his army record, I saw that Private Clarence Berger had served in northeast France, across the Belgian border from the battlefield where young Corporal Adolf Hitler had fought and been injured. In that war Jews were not banned from military service. In fact they had a significant presence in the German army. I was disappointed to learn that Berger had been assigned to an American base hospital for his very brief military stint during the war’s final days. I could see no obvious connection to any Jews in Europe.

I found no common thread between Clarence and the Viennese Bergers during that time, but as I read about the period, I realized that for both of those two young soldiers—Clarence Berger and Adolf Hitler—that time had been formative. As Private Berger sailed home to victorious, prospering America, Corporal Hitler restarted civilian life in a decimated, humiliated nation. Hitler dismissed the harsh reality that Germany’s economic collapse, long string of defeats, and disintegrating morale had forced its surrender. Despite the service of thousands of Jews in the German and Austrian militaries, he blamed Jews for accepting, and thereby causing, Germany’s defeat. He adopted the German generals’ face-saving, stab-in-the-back rhetoric, blaming their surrender on a lack of popular support. For Hitler, Jews became the scapegoat vindicating the Volk, the German people. He made it his mission, his Kampf, to take revenge on Jews. For Hitler, defeat had thwarted Germany’s imperial dreams but not destroyed them.

I was appalled to realize that Hitler’s vision of a self-proclaimed superior race had been, in different forms, commonly accepted worldwide. Hitler and Clarence Berger both lived in cultures of hardening racial and ethnic stereotypes and prejudice, cloaked in the widely accepted pseudo-science of eugenics. Scientists and leaders from Churchill and Roosevelt in the West to Emperor Hirohito in Japan espoused eugenic policies that promoted ranking and “purifying” races. Religious leaders preached eugenics from their pulpits and on national radio. Thousands of Americans deemed deficient or of inferior racial mix were sterilized. The Ku Klux Klan, targeting Jews, blacks, and Catholics as enemies of the “white race,” swelled to record size. Lynching, sometimes as a public spectacle, increased across the country. Hitler admired the racial violence in the United States and used it to defend his own warped and brutal vision.

That racially charged understanding of the world undoubtedly filtered into the homes of the Los Angeles Bergers—and also of my family. Most citizens supported the restrictive immigration laws passed in the 1920s. Those new laws put numbers to the vision of a racial hierarchy, slashing total immigration and setting quotas restricting immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The world kept its “huddled masses”—words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty’s base—as Lady Liberty turned her cold copper back on lines of hopeful immigrants.

I learned, too, how Holocaust study had evolved. Immediately after World War II no one knew the mag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• The Letter
• Berger Family Trees
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Letter
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright