Werner Heilbronner (who changed his name to “Warren” in the U.S.) was born in Stuttgart, Germany, on November 7, 1932. His father, Helmut, was a textile engineer; his mother, Dora Loeb Heilbronner, was the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist who owned Gebrüder Loeb (The Brothers Loeb), a large knitting mill that manufactured men’s underwear. The company was founded by Dora’s grandfather. Dora’s father, Hermann Loeb, thereafter operated it with his brothers. When Dora married Helmut, he joined the firm as the factory superintendent.

The Heilbronners were well-off and lived in a large, mansion-style home which they rented in a well-to-do area of the city. “My mother played tennis and bridge and enjoyed the social scene,” recalls Warren. “Until we came to America, she never cooked a meal, never washed any dishes, never cleaned any clothes. She had a Christian maid, Marie Schied, who eventually risked her life for my grandparents.”

While there appeared to be little antisemitism in Stuttgart in the early 1930’s, the Heilbronners—like many Jews in Germany—associated primarily with other Jews. They thought of themselves as separate, but not unequal. They did not feel insecure or in danger. Even after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and the tightening restrictions against Jews, the family did not think it would be dangerous to remain in Germany. “I was only a small child and I didn’t feel the restrictions,” recalls Warren.

“I had no sense of the world coming apart, since my parents sheltered me and my brother, Ludwig. In my little world, the restrictions only meant that I didn’t go to kindergarten, and that my friends and I played in each other’s houses. What happened in the world of politics was kept far away from us.”

“Like many Jews, we had a comfortable life,” he continues. “We were Germans first. This was our country, our homeland. ‘We’ve gone through tough times,’ everybody thought, ‘but this will pass.’ We didn’t feel the kind of pressure that Jews felt in other cities where there was more outward antisemitism. However, in the fall of 1936, as a precaution, on the advice of a friend, my father went to the U.S. Consulate in Stuttgart and applied for a number for entry into the United States.”

On July 19, 1938, the family received a document from the consulate in Stuttgart stating that they were number 5,442 on the waiting list. They were told to get the necessary papers together. By the beginning of November 1938 all requirements for entry into the United States had been met, with the exception of the affidavit of support that Helmut’s uncle Max, a successful realtor from Memphis, Tennessee, had agreed to provide. Such an affidavit could come only from a sponsor—an American citizen who promised to be financially responsible for the proposed immigrants.

Then on November 9, 1938, Nazi Brownshirts swept through all German cities, smashing Jewish businesses, burning synagogues, and arresting as many Jewish men as they could find. It was Kristallnacht.

During the night, they arrested Dora’s father and took him into custody. When Helmut found out, he realized the Gestapo might come looking for him as well; he decided to hide with Dora’s mother, believing that the Gestapo would not return there.

“About 5:30 the next morning, the knock came on our door,” recalls Warren. “They were looking for my father. My mother said, ‘He is not here.’ So they searched our house. As soon as they left, my mother sent my brother to warn my father that the Gestapo was looking for him.”

Not wanting to leave the factory unprotected, Helmut had gone there to make sure it was safe. The Gestapo found him there and arrested him. Both Helmut and Dora’s father Hermann were soon transferred from Stuttgart to Dachau, an internment camp for political prisoners, that subsequently became a brutal Nazi concentration camp.

"The Key Word: “Max” "

Shortly after arriving in Dachau, Helmut sent his wife a brief postcard: “Dear Dora,” he began. “I am here since Friday and I am all right. Don’t worry about me. Every week you can send me 15 marks. But mention the exact address on the other side. Greetings to you. Lutz, Werner, Parents, Mother, and Max. Yours, Helmut.” 

“Max” was the key word. Dora knew that mentioning Max’s name in the postcard was a signal for her to write to him immediately to obtain the affidavit of support, the missing piece that would enable the Heilbronners to leave.

But unbeknownst to Helmut, the affidavit had arrived at the post office soon after he had been arrested, sent there by registered mail. Dora went to the post office to pick it up. “Sorry, it is addressed to Helmut,” the clerk responded. “You can’t have it. Registered mail can only be picked up by the addressee.”

Dora persisted for three days. “Every hour or half-hour she would go to the window to ask for it,” Warren recalls. “And they would say no. So my mother wired Sigmund, another uncle, and asked him to have Uncle Max send another affidavit—this time addressed to her.” When Sigmund received the wire, he wrote directly to the Assistant Postmaster General in Washington, D.C., requesting that the U.S. post office intercede with the German authorities to release the letter to Dora, because, as he said, ‘the papers contained in this registered letter might enable her to get a release of her husband, Helmut Heilbronner, from concentration camp.’ This letter was to no avail. Eventually a second affidavit was sent directly to my mother.”

In early December Dora received the affidavit and she took it directly to the police, who agreed to release Helmut. By this time he had been in Dachau for almost five weeks. There he witnessed how brutally the Nazis treated all the prisoners. Inmates were harassed, underfed, and mistreated; many elderly men died there. One night Helmut managed to sneak through the guards into the barracks where his father-in-law was held to make sure he was all right, even though Helmut risked being shot for going outside of his section.

On another occasion a prisoner was taken sick. Helmut and a fellow prisoner volunteered to take him to the infirmary. When they arrived there, the man in charge of the infirmary asked, “What do you want?” They said, “The man needs treatment.” Then Helmut and his friend were ordered to leave. As they turned to go, they looked around and saw a whole stack of bodies piled up like cordwood in the back of the infirmary.

"A New Nightmare"

Once Helmut was released, the family prepared to emigrate. “Then in January my grandmother [Helmut’s mother] died from illness,” recalls Warren. “We had applied for our visas to enter the U.S., but still had to wait for our number to come up. Right up to the very end we didn’t know whether we were going to make it or not. For my father, it was a nightmare.

“Finally, in late January 1939, we were advised that we would be admitted into the U.S. But when my father went to the German embassy to pick up papers that would allow our family to leave Germany, more difficulties followed.

The officer blackmailed him. ‘It will cost you 10,000 marks,’ he said. My father had already been forced to give over all his money to the Reich and he didn’t have more,” recalls Warren. “The officer persisted. My father remembered that he still owned a life insurance policy which had a cash surrender value of 10,000 marks. But when he went to the insurance company to try to cash it in, he was told: ‘You’re a Jew. We can’t cash this. We can’t give you any money.’”

When Helmut relayed the news to the officer who was blackmailing him, the officer told him that he would call the insurance company and authorize it to issue my father a check. “Then bring it back,” the officer demanded. “If you’re not back in a half an hour, you can forget about your visa.”

After meeting the officer’s demand, Helmut received the German exit visa. The family could finally emigrate [to the United States]. This was the moment he had planned for ever since he had applied for the exit number. Realizing that he might not be able to take money out of the country, he had made several visits to his Aunt Frieda, who lived in Lausanne, Switzerland. Each time he went he smuggled jewelry with him that he hid in the hubcap of his car, so Frieda could keep it for him. He would thereby have some available resources if and when he got out.

Helmut and his brothers also devised another plan to send assets out of Germany. Helmut’s mother, who had died in 1939, had left her three sons a small inheritance. The brothers knew the government would take the money when they emigrated, since Jews were not allowed to leave Germany with any cash. They also knew that Germans always followed the law.

“So my father and his two brothers decided to renounce their inheritance,” Warren explains. “In doing so, my grandmother’s brother, Sigmund, who lived in the U.S., became the beneficiary, since he was the next living relative.” The boys agreed that if they got the money out they would divide the money four ways; Helmut’s uncle, Sigmund, would get a quarter for being the shill; Helmut and his two brothers would each get a quarter. “Our plan worked,” he recalls. “The German government honored the renunciation and released the inheritance to my uncle.”

"Bluffing"

Just before they planned to go to the U.S. Consulate to pick up their final papers, they faced another potential obstacle. Helmut learned that his uncle, Max Heilbronner, the family’s sponsor, had died on January 10. It was now February 1939. Would the U.S. officials find out that the Heilbronners’ sponsor was no longer alive? With much trepidation, the family went to the consulate.

“When they asked us where we were going to go, I was supposed to answer, ‘Memphis, Tennessee,’” recalls Warren. “But I said, ‘Tennessee Memphis.’ The officer said, ‘I also come from Memphis, Tennessee.’ My father’s face went sheer white because Max Heilbronner was well-known in the community. He was worried that this official might have seen Max’s obituary in the Memphis newspaper. But we were fortunate. He was not aware of Max’s death.”

"Leaving Stuttgart"

The Heilbronners finally left Stuttgart on March 3, 1939. Warren, only six-and-a-half, was excited at the prospect of traveling to a new country, but soon learned that it could be treacherous. “We went by train and had our own compartment,” he recalls. “There were lots of Jewish families there. When we got to the Swiss border, the Germans checked papers. They passed on ours. But they took the family behind us and we never learned what happened to them.

“We were at risk until we crossed the border,” he continues. “Since my brother Ludwig had been sick the day before we left, my mother put rouge on him so they didn’t think he was too ill to travel.”

In Lausanne, Switzerland, Helmut retrieved his jewelry from his aunt. Then they visited Helmut’s brother in Paris. From there they traveled to Rotterdam and boarded a ship for New York City.

When the Heilbronners arrived in the U.S., they had only a scant sum of money from Helmut’s jewelry and inheritance. They settled in Perry, New York, because there was a major textile factory there, and Helmut got a job in textiles, earning $12 a week.

Once in the U.S., Helmut changed his name to ‘Harry’, Ludwig’s to ‘Leslie’ and Werner’s to ‘Warren.’ “My father didn’t want us to be raised with German names while the war was still going on,” says Warren. “It was bad enough to be one of the few Jewish families living in a small town.”

"The Relatives Left Behind"

In June of 1939, the Nazis took over the family’s factory by sending over one of their lackeys to take charge. “My grandfather had to send a letter to customers thanking them for their patronage and introducing them to the new owner,” recalls Warren.

While the grandparents remained there, also waiting to leave, they were aided by Marie Schied, the maid who had worked for Dora. “She hated the Nazis,” says Warren. “When our family left for America, Marie returned to her family who lived in a small village in the Black Forest. But she would sneak into Stuttgart and bring food to my grandparents, who otherwise would have had very little to eat. She took great risks to do this. If she had been caught, she would have been shot.”

The Heilbronners brought Marie to the U.S. for a visit in 1960 as a way of showing their gratitude to her. “Marie was then in her eighties, and when she arrived at our home, she looked at our kitchen floor and got down on her knees and started scrubbing the floor until my mother stopped her. She still thought of herself as a maid. But now she was our guest,” recalls Warren. “We would have arranged for her to stay, but if she became sick, there was no way to get medical insurance for her.” 

Warren eventually became a lawyer and settled in Rochester with his wife, Joyce. They have three sons. His son Larry, Vice President of Finance for Canandaigua National Bank, and Larry’s wife, Laura, have two children, Madeleine and Sam. Son Jerry, a systems analyst with Raytheon, and his wife, Lisa, have three children, Sarah, Brian, and Heather. Son Kevin works for a public relations firm in Washington, D.C., where he is also the public address announcer for the NBA and NNBA teams.

Reflecting on his experience, Warren remarks, “My family’s trauma was minimal compared with what other German Jews suffered. But it had a powerful impact on me. It shows that a government gone amok can threaten to destroy an entire people, and that we must always be vigilant.”

Excerpt from "Perilous Journeys: Personal Stores of German and Austrian Jews Who Escaped the Nazis" written by Barbara Lovenheim and Barbara Appelbaum