In a letter from 1946, Fred Stein describes in detail the story of his family’s escape to his friends and relatives via Paris and Marseille to New York. Conditions in exile in Paris worsened with the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of France: in the summer of 1940, Stein was interned as an “enemy alien” and could not see his daughter Marion for a year.
The crisis in France after 1938 also had a very negative influence upon our work: the great activities of the Popular Front had petered out, the Communists had changed their “line”, emergency decrees reduced building activities totally. At that time we had just done alot of work for progressive architects in Paris suburbs – and we really had the desire to get to the USA as soon as possible.
In 1939 we treated ourselves to a real vacation – (before the child we had seen much of France by hiking) which was ruined, however, by the beginning mobilization and finally the news of the invasion of Poland by the Nazis. During the night of the general mobilization we left the beautiful Isle d’Oleron on the ocean – earlier than planned – in order to be in Paris with our friends during the coming events. In Paris there was great excitement; people in the street (whom we didn’t know) asked us: how can you let such a small child stay in the city? So we tried with success (about which we were very proud) that Lilo and Marion should be officially evacuated. Our city hall in the 16th arrondissment paid for their trip to the official place of evacuation – Evreux. But there she was considered an enemy alien and sent further. She would have been imprisoned immediately if she did not leave Evreux within a few hours. She was sent to Bretagne – to St. Brieuc, the general hospital, which was run by nuns in connection with their convent. Lilo was supposed to work there because she was a trained nursery school teacher while Marion was put with other orphan children.
Soon Lilo was not allowed to work anymore – but she was only allowed to leave the hospital twice monthly to go to the police to have her papers validated. Otherwise she could not go out. The child regressed totally – mentally and intellectually; she became severly ill, superficially treated like the other children were too – many of whom died. The hygienic situation was desparate, the pressure for proselytism strong, the primitivity unbelievable. Eventually, Lilo could see the child only one hour daily; she was not allowed to tell the sisters she was German. Marion learned, for this reason – in opposition to our plans – French as mother tongue. Lilo’s treatment finally became better when she attended the midnight mass of the new year.
[Note: this part chronologically comes before the previous part]
The refugee men in France received a request to go to a stadium (in Colombes) with food for 2 days, and several other items. When we arrived (as quickly as possible as duty-bound Germans) there was so much congestion that we were sent away again. So I had said goodbye in vain. We had all thought we would be taken as “prestataires” – work soldiers – receivers of asylum were required to do this as France had participated in the Conference of Evian – and had first started by giving identity cards. The evening we had the very first extended air alarm, we carried Marion the eight floors down to the basement (the elevator does not functioning during the alarm) where she – to the admiration of mothers of screaming children – immediately went to sleep again. She had just become one year old. The first alarm confirmed our intention to try evacuation – which was not possible for Germans – but Marion was French. (- and I used those few “donated” geschenkten days for it. ????) On Sept. 7, 1939, I accompanied both to the train and went to Colombes reassured.
Lilo was close to a nervous breakdown in St. Brieuc – as I saw from her letters. I was never alone in the camp – that makes everything easier. Yet she – as an enemy alien – was not allowed – in spite of all applications and interventions, to go back to Paris since she had left it. Our friends who had stayed in Paris – i.e. other German women – remained relatively undisturbed, received monetary support from a committee and could even earn a little. Of course they lived in their apartments – and we whose studio was uninhabited were threatened that our possessions would be auctioned off if the rent was not paid in full. French soldiers and non-German prestataires only had to pay 1/4 of the rent, and their families received military assistance. So I tried to get a furlough to Paris. That was only possible if one had applied as a “Volunteer”. (for the French Foreign Legion – Peter Stein) (This was how the moral corruption functioned: others could by such a furlough with a large donation to the garrison). When our whole group had volunteered, with reservations by many of them, – I spoke openly against it. But they pushed me in – in order not to spoil the “group record” saying that I could do it differently and refuse to sign at the time the papers needed to be signed. So I volunteered; at a superficial examination I was rejected, but when a follow up examination was ordered for everybody in front of a military health commission – I refused to go. I retracted my application, in spite of the possibility that I might be sent to a penal camp. On my furlough application I gave the reason of my emmigration case (although I knew I could not do anything about it) and explained my retraction of the Legion application stating that emmigration into the USA was forfeited if one had served in the Legion.
In Paris – in 2 days – I succeeded in dissolving the rent contract. Also – the helpful former Health Minister Sellier – who was a real friend to us (he had been the mayor of Suresnes, a modern suburb of Paris where Fred took many photos of architecture that was influenced by Le Corbusier. – Lilo) – wrote letters to really influential people that Lilo should absolutely return – and had terrible “caffard” (Katzenjammer -????) I couldn’t stand it any more in our atelier and slept at friends – I knew that now I really would not see all this anymore. Lilo was allowed to return to Paris, our many friends helped her to become a human being again. Marion went to a wonderful nursery where she also slept (Kinderheim) and where Lilo helped from time to time. (The owners – friends of ours – later walked by foot to the Pyrenees, with Marion’s baby carriage or stroller for the grandmother who had a broken leg.) Lilo now also received money from the committee, worked from time to time as a photographer (childrens pictures) and lived at a friend’s apartment. Finally when the women without children were also interned – she took Marion back (from the nursery) and lived there with her. During this time she also managed an illegal visit to my camp in Villerbon (Feb. 1940) where she was smuggled in during the night – and out after a few days – at the crack of dawn. (she has never seen the village.) However, I did not see Marion for a whole year. On the contrary, when Lilo made some photos back in Paris in the nursery with other children, I sometimes did not know for sure which is my own child. I cried very much at that time.
Der ursprünglich auf Deutsch geschriebene Brief Fred Steins von 1946 ist nur in der hier gezeigten englischen Übersetzung seiner Frau Lilo und seines Sohns Peter erhalten. Die deutsche Fassung ist daher eine rekonstuierte Rückübersetzung des We Refugees Archivs.
1The notes in brackets were written by Lilo and Peter Stein.
2Stein is probably referring to the Munich Agreement from September 30, 1938, in which Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Édouard Daladier signed the transfer of the Sudetenland, which had until then been part of Czechoslovakia, over to the German Reich. No Czechochoslavkian representative was not present but legally forced to cede the territory.
3the “policy of appeasement” toward the German Reich to avoid war, coined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, which in retrospect is now judged to have been too restrained in view of the ensuing World War II.
4At the end of October 1938, in a paradigm for subsequent anti-Jewish measures by the Nazi state, some 18,000 of the Polish Jews living in Germany were deported as part of the so-called “Polenaktion.” Many of them were left stateless and trapped for months in a no-man’s land on the border between the German Reich and Poland.
Fred Stein (1909-1967) was born in Dresden as the son of a rabbi and initially started a lawyer’s career. After the National Socialists seized power and issued a decree revoking the license to practice law for Jews as early as June 1933, however, the career as a legal clerk was discontinued. Fred Stein’s political, antifascist and socialist commitment – and his awareness that the Gestapo was making inquiries about him – forced Stein to flee as early as October 1933. Together with his wife Lieselotte (née Salzburg, named Lilo), whom he had married the same year, he went on a fake honeymoon trip to France, from which they did not return.
Like many other refugees, the young couple tried to build up an interim life in Paris. Fred Stein turned his previous hobby, photography, into a profession. He meandered through Paris with the Leica, which he and Lilo had given each other as a wedding present. He developed two main subjects: the “sociology of the street” and “the psychology of the portrait.” Fred Stein photographed, among other things, the Jewish quarter of Marais, the glamour and poverty on the streets of Paris, the workers, beggars, sales clerks and children he met there, the café life of the emigrants. He also took photographs of children who had fled to France from the Spanish Civil War. In 1935 he portrayed participants in the International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris. He also portrayed Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), with whom he had a long friendship, for over 30 years.
The productive network of exiled intellectuals based on solidarity also took place face to face in Fred and Lilo Stein’s apartment in Montmartre which became a meeting place for many refugees and the “Studio Stein” with the bathroom as a darkroom. Lilo contributed through retouching and laboratory work and her own photographs. Stein’s photographs were shown, among other places, in the bookstore and Galerie de la Pléiade, which was central to Parisian exile life. He also published them in illustrated magazines, especially left-wing ones such as the “Regards,” in which social reportage had become an essential element.
Stein remained politically active in Paris not only through his social-documentary photographic work: he became involved in the Anti-Fascist Journalists’ Association and wrote articles for the Socialist Workers’ Party under the pseudonym Fritz Berg. From September 1939 onwards, Fred Stein was sent to various internment camps because of his German origins. In the Villerbon camp, he administered a small camp library and organized mutual instruction courses with other inmates, which they jokingly called “la Sorbonne.” Amid the unrest following the German invasion of France, Fred Stein escaped the internment camp, and managed to find Lilo and their daughter Marion, born in 1938, in Toulouse. In 1941, with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee headed by Varian Fry, the Stein family managed to escape to New York, where they settled permanently. Fred Stein continued his photographic work.
Letter by Fred Stein to his relatives and friends, 1946
Fred Stein’s letter of 1946, originally written in German, is only preserved in the English translation of his wife Lilo and son Peter shown here. The notes in brackets were either added by Fred Stein himself, Lilo Stein or Peter Stein.