Fritz Alexander Rothschild: A Portrait Part Two—London, Rhodesia, and America

Abstract

Fritz Alexander Rothschild:A Portrait Part Two—London, Rhodesia, and America1 Elliot B. Gertel (bio) Professor Fritz Alexander Rothschild (b. October 4, 1919; d. March 7, 2009) was the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Professor of Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the leading interpreter of Abraham Joshua Heschel as theologian and philosopher.2 He also edited a standard work on Jewish-Christian dialogue,3 which was inspired by interfaith lecturing that he did in his native Germany during the last decades of his life. Rothschild and his father had been arrested following Kristallnacht. Believing that the Jewish men were in more immediate danger than the Jewish women, Fritz’s mother Bella learned that Northern Rhodesia was issuing a number of visas, and obtained these documents for her husband and son through the British Consulate.4 [End Page 90] Fritz’s first stop was London. He had studied English for a few years in high school, so he was able to find his way around in London. He was aided there by a center for Jewish refugees, where a woman procured a visa for Fritz’s younger sister, Ellen, by finagling for her an apprenticeship as a seamstress. Fritz thus saved Ellen’s life. He also saved the life of another relative, a young woman whose mother was Christian and whose father was Jewish. The Jewish committee would not handle her case since they did not regard her as Jewish. Fritz went to the Quakers and asked if they could find some position for her. They did. The eldest sister, Edith, had a visa for America. On her journey, she first stopped in London. Edith found a job as a governess in London, and later went on to San Francisco where she married Walter Hoffman, a poet. Ellen eventually settled in Rhodesia, where she married an East European Jew, David Chudy, an inventor whose piping systems were used in mining communities. Fritz’s first priority was to beg continuously for funds to rescue his mother and her sister, who were still in Germany. The Jewish council gave him a few dollars for his own subsistence. Though he understood the dangers of deportation, or at least loss of work, if identified as a lingering “alien,” Fritz did risk going to the museum to see the Rembrandt paintings, even at the risk of being stopped and searched. After six weeks in England, Fritz boarded, in Southampton, a ship for Africa. His father embarked at Hamburg and they were reunited on the way. His mother, Bella, had waited in Germany with her sister until both Fritz and his father had arrived in Rhodesia, because they did not have the hundred pounds for three to guarantee that they would not become a public burden. This sister of his mother’s was the wife of Fritz’s uncle, who had died in his arms at Buchenwald. It took over six weeks for the ship to arrive in Rhodesia because it sailed along the coast of Africa. On the ship Fritz met a young man, another German Jew, whom he introduced to a young female British missionary with whom Fritz had enjoyed conversations about religion. The young man was denied entry to Kenya. The German captain did not want him to be sent back to death, so he transferred him to another ship, which was going back to Germany by way of West Africa. On the way back this young man contacted this [End Page 91] woman who was then working in in Nyasaland, and she was able to procure a visa for him by giving him a nonexistent job with the missionaries. Fritz thus believed that he had indirectly saved the man’s life. Fourteen Jews sailed on the boat from England to the port of Beira in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), from where they had to take a train to the interior of Rhodesia. Fritz described this as the hottest place in which he had ever been, and recalled that many could not afford the train ride to Rhodesia. One family had visas to Southern Rhodesia, which had a better climate than Rhodesia proper, but they were told that...