THE GUSTAV STERN FAMILY:
A TREK ACROSS FRANCE

1 -- Paris, France, where Gustav Stern lived with his family until early in 1941. 2 -- Marseilles, France, where they lived until they had visas permitting them to come to the United States. 3 -- Casablanca, where the Sterns stayed briefly before sailing to the United States. 4 -- The Sterns sailed on the Portuguese steamer Serpa Pinta, arriving in New York in January, 1942.

Gustav Stern was the oldest son of Adolf and Dora Stern. Trained in music, he was a symphony conductor in Duisburg and was teaching music as well. But when the Nazis came to power, he lost his position at Duisburg. "Overnight, I lost everything," he told an interviewer in 1979. The family left for Holland at the end of March 1933, then they moved to Paris, where Gustav took a position with one of his father-in-law's many businesses, a factory that made sausage casings.

As his son Michael, who was born in Paris in 1936, later recalled. "He was the worst businessman. My grandfather had hired him to run the factory, and he ran it right into the ground!" This probably overstated the case, as the salary from this job continued to be the family's source of income. But business was not Gustav's real interest, and to have some link to his love of music, Gustav occasionally taught piano to children in Paris.

In 1938, while visiting Gustav in Paris, Adolf Stern had an accident and broke his leg. This prevented him and Dora from returning to Germany for several more weeks. When they learned of Kristallnacht, Adolf and Dora decided they could not return to their native land until Hitler was no longer in power. They remained in Paris with Gustav's family.

By 1939, France and Germany were at war. This at first had little impact of the Stern family. But then Germany attacked in May 1940 and its armored divisions crashed through the French lines and swept across northern France in less than two weeks. Gustav was called up by the French army but had barely begun his duties before the French government asked the Germans for an armistice. By the end of June, German troops had occupied Paris and all of the Atlantic coast of France. Gustav soon began to worry that it would just be a matter of time before the Nazis would seek out Jews who had left Germany in the 1930s. In order not to draw attention to themselves he instructed 4-year old Michael "never to speak German in front of any German." Gustav also began making plans to take his family south.

In the Spring of 1941, after one failed attempt to cross the demarcation line into Vichy France, Gustav managed to find guides to smuggle his entire family, including Adolf and Dora, out of the Nazi-occupied part of France (listen to Michael Stern's description of this event below). They then made their way to Marseilles, where they lived until they could obtain visas for living in America.

These documents finally came through late in 1941. The family obtained passage on a ship to Oran, went from there to Casablanca and lived in a small apartment until they could get ship tickets for America. (a) In January 1942, the sailed to the United States aboard the Serpa Pinta, a Portuguese ship that had been used several times in the 1930s to transport refugees to the New World. The family lived in Chicago for a time, then moved to Seattle, where Gustav was able to renew his music career as a conductor with the Seattle Civic Opera and the city's symphony orchestra.

a. Michael Stern remembers some of the details of these travels from Marseilles to America -- being seasick on the voyage from Marseilles, being a little frightened at seeing two German soldiers in Casablanca, and more vivid details of sailing to America by way of Jamaica. It would appear from his recollections that the family sailed openly from Marseilles: as Donna Ryan reveals in her study The Holocaust & the Jews of Marsellie, the Vichy government, which had been denying people exit visas for months, suddenly permitted a number of Jews to leave France at the end of 1941.