During my visit to Canada in August, some thoughtful person handed me a copy of an article, which had appeared in the Toronto Star in April, headlined "Warm Memories of Trinidad" with the subheading "Island haven in wartime became home to small community of Calypso Jews".
It was a special to the Star by Alisa Siegel about a group fifty "Calypso Jews" who met at a kosher Chinese restaurant in Miami Beach recently for a celebration of survival. They had come from Toronto, Montreal, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Venezuela and Brazil for their first ever reunion to toast the country they once called home: Trinidad and Tobago. Some had not seen each other in more than fifty years. Siegel lives in Toronto and is working on a book and film about Trinidad's Jewish community with her father Arthur Siegel, who had lived in Trinidad. The reunion was scheduled in large part to toast the recent publication of a book of personal memoirs titled Our Calypso Shtetl (Shtetl means a Jewish village), a project organised by Dr Zeno Strasberg and Lorna Yufe, two former Trinidadian Jews, now living in Toronto.
"The book" writes Siegel " is a testament to the wonderful memories the Jews have of the island that sheltered them during a gruesome period in history. It documents the testimonials of a significant portion of the Jews who grew up in Trinidad, now adults in their 50s, 60s and 70s. The Jewish presence in Trinidad is one of the happier stories of World War II."
I never did find the time to read Siegel's article until last week and was amazed to find that the lone remaining Jewish refugee from World War II, is Hans Stecher, of Goodwood Park.
Stecher, recently retired from the business world, was at first reluctant to talk about his experiences, which date back to exactly sixty-one years ago when "my family and I landed in Trinidad on October 13, 1938. The only other Jewish family from Austria or Germany at the time was the Strumwassers."
He arrived with his parents Dr Victor Stecher, a barrister in Austria, and Sophie Stecher; uncle Dr Wilhelm Stecher, also a barrister; and aunt Wilhelmine Baltinester, his mother's sister, a much-published writer in Austrian and German magazines. They were followed by Erich Tauscher, who had married Dr Stecher's sister, Bertha, and their two little girls, Trudy and Alice.
"We all managed to find a safe haven in Trinidad" says Hans, "the world did not open its doors to refugees, there were very few places in the world we could go since Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, although the terror in Austria began when he took over in March 1938."
The United States of America was out of the question as one had to be sponsored by an affidavit from relatives. "Trinidad was one of the very few colonies in the world which had liberal immigration policies" says Hans, "you did not need a visa that is how many of the Syrians, Lebanese, Portuguese, and Chinese came into this country. All you needed was to make a deposit, either before or at the time of entry, of fifty British pounds, a security deposit to ensure that the immigrant would not become a public charge, which was refundable after one year."
This is how the Stechers came to Trinidad. "We had a relative living many years before in Venezuela who made the deposit for us because we could not send money out of the country, so he made the deposit and told us about Trinidad, a small island off the South American coast. I knew where it was from stamp collecting" says Stecher. "It was not a matter of choice, people would have gone to the waterless Sahara to get away from Hitler." And it got much worse as a few years later two of Stecher's aged great aunts disappeared. "My grandmother's sisters, most probably they went to the gas chambers." A lot of people were arrested after November 10, 1938, the infamous crystal night named after the broken glass from the shop windows that still belonged to German and Austrian Jews, which was strewn all over the streets of the German Reich.
" That was the night the Nazis organised breaking, burning and looting of all remaining Jewish shops in the whole German Reich and the burning of all synagogues. They unleashed organised thugs and mobs to do this in reported retaliation for the killing and shooting of a German Embassy official in what was then still free Paris, by a young German jew. The official was called Von Rath, and the killer Herschel Greenspan reportedly did that in retaliation for the Nazis deportation of his parents from Germany to Poland where they later died at the hands of the Nazis" remembers Stecher.
"My family escaped because we got out in September. Uncle Erich Tauscher, however, lived through the take-over, and was arrested when they broke down his apartment door in the night, kicked him out in front of his family and brought him to Gestapo headquarters. He was brutalised and was to be transported to the feared Dachau Concentration Camp which would have meant his end, people did not get out of there alive."
However, his wife Bertha summoned her brother Otto Stecher who was then living in Rumania (Rumania had been part of the Austro/Hungarian Empire before World War I at which time the Austrian Empire was stripped of its colonies). At considerable risk to himself, Otto rushed to Vienna and helped to get his brother-in-law out from Gestapo headquarters before they took him to Dachau. And was only able to accomplish this because the family had already completed most of the many tyrannical formalities for their immigration from occupied Austria and showed steamship reservations from Amsterdam to Trinidad.
According to Hans, "the Tauchers made it by the skin of their teeth as the window of opportunity for Jews to save themselves in Trinidad was shut by the acting Governor John Huggins under new Immigration regulations which prohibited further European immigration from January 15, 1939."
The Jewish refugees not only had to leave all assets and come out with very little, but were made to pay for their own personal possessions. "It was called a Reichsfluchtsteuer (a cynical tax for fleeing the Reich) . If you had some jewellery or a camera or anything of value, we could not take it out unless we declared it first to the Nazis, whose valuators' assessments had to be accepted and you then had to pay the value stipulated to the State for your own things." The Jews who had come from Germany and Austria to Trinidad did not escape oppression, as in September 1939, they were suddenly considered by His Majesty's Government "enemy aliens" because there were stories of Nazi spies, "fifth" columnists, etc. abounding in the western world, and the British Government found it impossible to sort out genuine German and Austrian refugees and victims of the Nazis, from those who they thought may be Nazi spies hiding behind false identities as refugees.
Thus all refugees in this country who held passports issued in Germany or Austria , were interned. Hans Stecher and his family were the first to have been picked up by the police, and told to get packed immediately. The refugees were put in cells at Police Headquarters and the next day the men were sent to Nelson Island and the women and children to the Island of Caledonia, in the five islands. Stecher found the stigma of being branded "enemy alien" almost intolerable, and longed for nothing more than to get to the U.S.A to join the Army and help fight the Nazi monster. 'It was a deep insult to us, the first and the most savaged victims of Nazism."
After a few months on the two islands, an internment camp, code named "Camp Rented Trinidad" was built in the area which is now Federation Park. The camp was surrounded by a tall barbed wire fence with sentry towers and search-lights at the corners.
This was the early 1940's and many of us would have already been born, but like myself, will have no recollection of this camp. The camp authorities gave permission for the children to go to school outside of the camp and Hans Stecher was able to complete his secondary education at Queen's Royal College.
In the meantime somehow in spite of immigration restrictions, more refugees had arrived from occupied Poland and other European countries but were considered nationals of allied countries, and left free from internment.
Finally in 1943, says Hans "we were released in response to our applications, even though under certain restrictions while the war lasted. These included daily reporting to the nearest police station, not driving motorcars or riding bicycles and a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m."
The most outstanding event during the life of the Austrian and German community in the internment camp was the sudden arrival of several hundred refugees in May 1941, off the "Winnipeg", which was full of Jewish refugees coming out of occupied France, (therefore an enemy ship to the allies), on their way to Santo Domingo. The vessel was intercepted in Caribbean waters by a Dutch torpedo ship and brought to Trinidad, the island best able to handle the influx of hundreds of refugees.
Stecher, the only one of the original refugees in Trinidad and Tobago, has accepted responsibility for the upkeep of the special Jewish burial plots in the north eastern corner of the Mucurapo Cemetery. There are other Jewish people here, including wives of Trinidadian husbands who came out later, and others descended from Jews. "This small group of people proudly identify with their roots" says Hans Stecher.