America may be the land of milk and honey, but for one 15-year-old German-Jewish boy who escaped the Holocaust, it was the land of cornflakes and Coca Cola. Nathan Siegfried Teichler, a retired pathologist who changed his name to Taylor, arrived in the United States in 1946 aboard the SS "Battle Creek Victory". The ship was named after the Michigan city that invented cornflakes, and the sailors on board introduced the young boy to Coca Cola. The five-week voyage was the last leg of an eight-year journey that Nathan and his parents made to escape the Nazis, a journey that took them to Trieste, Italy; Istanbul, Turkey; Baghdad, Iraq; and,  finally, to Calcutta, India.

When Nathan Siegfried Teichler was a second-grader in his hometown, Erfurt, Germany, all his classmates became members of the Hitler Youth. They got red armbands with black swastikas, brown short pants, and brown short-sleeve shirts. All the children except Nathan. It was 1937, four years after Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany.

“The teachers knew that I was Jewish, and so I did not get a uniform,” recalls Nathan. “Later, they had a big festival and all the kids put on their uniforms and marched outside, carrying flags and singing songs. And I couldn’t take part. It was frightening to watch the kids march, because I knew they were up to no good. People don’t usually march with flags and use the goose step.”

But when Nathan asked his teacher why he couldn’t participate, the teacher sent him home, saying , “Don’t pay any attention to it. Just go home. You don’t have to do any work today.” When Nathan asked his parents, they were equally vague.

Nathan, an only child, lived with his mother, Bertha, and his father, Jakob, a wine salesman, on the outskirts of Erfurt, a small town in central Germany. The family lived in a large, concrete apartment building surrounded by fields. Jakob and Bertha Teichler had lived in Germany since they were teenagers. However, since they had been born in Galicia, Poland, the German government considered them Polish citizens. Even Nathan was considered Polish since children took on their father’s citizenship.

Yet the Teichlers thought of themselves as German. They rarely went to synagogue and had little contact with other Jewish families. Even Nathan’s name, Siegfried, reflected a German identity. His parents, who had named him Nathan Solomon after his great-grandfather, thought one Jewish name was enough, so they had “Solomon” changed to “Siegfried.”

Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, Jakob moved the family to Holland to avoid the Nazi restrictions. But Jakob couldn’t learn the Dutch language and couldn’t find a job. When his money ran out, he contacted his old employers in Germany, who invited him to return. They assured him that the Nazis posed no threat and that he would be safe working for non-Jews. But when the Teichlers returned, they found themselves increasingly excluded from German life. Nathan felt shunned by his classmates and the neighborhood children.

By March 1938 Jakob, by law no longer able to work for the wine company, was fired, since German companies were no longer allowed to hire Jews. Jakob and Bertha decided to join Bertha’s parents in Berlin, where they thought there would be less antisemitism. 

"Berlin—the “Safer City”"

Fortunately, Bertha’s parents, Josef and Regina Spindel, lived in a ten-room apartment. Several of Bertha’s siblings were also living there when Nathan and his parents arrived. At first it seemed like a holiday for the small child. But as the days rolled into weeks, Nathan began to feel that this was his new home.

Bertha enrolled Nathan, now 7 years old, in a Jewish school, Adass Yisroel. But he made few friends there. “They considered me an outsider,” he recalls, “because I was neither a Berliner nor identified with the Jewish community.”

Although Nathan learned to accept his Jewish identity, he didn’t really know what it meant. And he came to resent it, because being Jewish was also becoming dangerous. “My teacher said to me, ‘If you don’t wear your yarmulke [a Jewish skullcap] outside in the open sky, God will be angry with you.’ But I knew that if I wore it, the Nazi hoodlums would come after me. I figured they were more dangerous than God; I figured God would understand.”

As antisemitic restrictions increased, Nathan’s world grew smaller and lonelier. The isolation didn’t come only from strangers; his parents refused to answer his questions about why the men in the streets were wearing brown shirts or black uniforms. Instead of telling him what was happening, they told him not to wander far from home. They tried to protect Nathan.

Early in November 1938, a week before Kristallnacht, Nathan was awakened by a loud banging on the family’s apartment door. Armed German soldiers had come to pick up Jakob.

“You’re going to Poland,” they charged. “You’re not a German citizen. Pack your belongings and come with us.”

Jakob, who secretly carried his money on a belt inside his clothing, packed very little. Then he was put onto a truck while Bertha and Nathan watched in shock. At the Polish border, Jakob was abandoned. But he managed to walk about five miles to a train station, where he bought a ticket for Krakow, a city in Poland where German was spoken.

After Jakob left, Bertha tried to restore an environment of normality—a normality that collapsed on November 9, when Nazi hoodlums swept through Berlin, smashing store windows, burning synagogues, and arresting more than 30,000 Jewish men. The vandalism took place far away from Nathan’s home, but it didn’t matter: The Nazis had already shattered the life of his family.

After the Kristallnacht pogrom, Bertha kept Nathan at home, allowing him to leave the apartment only to attend school. Six months later, she received a letter from Jakob instructing her to take Nathan to an apartment in Breslau, a city in eastern Germany about forty miles from the Polish border. There, smugglers hired by Jakob would take Bertha and Nathan across the border. Even though the Germans considered them Polish citizens, the Polish government wouldn’t take back Polish-born German Jews who had let their citizenship lapse. 

"In the Hands of Smugglers"

On May 2, Bertha and Nathan arrived at a small, shabby apartment in Breslau where three hired smugglers were waiting. Nathan was frightened of the men, and that night he slept in a bed with Bertha. When he awoke the next morning and saw that he was safe, he felt better.

Later that day the smugglers drove them to a large corridor of barren land—about one mile wide—that separated Poland and Germany and belonged to neither country. Guards were positioned at each border. The smugglers deliberately chose May 3 because it was Polish Independence Day and they figured the Polish patrols—whom they needed to pass to get into Poland—would be drunk by evening, when they hoped to cross.

First, however, they had to sneak past the German guards, who were not supposed to let people through unless they had exit papers. Neither Bertha nor Nathan had any. As they approached the border, a woman unexpectedly stepped out of a wooden hut.

“She examined us very carefully,” recalls Nathan. “She opened our suitcases. She searched us to see if we were carrying any weapons. She was very nice, very friendly. ‘Be careful,’ she warned us. ‘The guards are nearby. Go down the hill. When you see a stream, crawl low.’ She told us exactly how to avoid detection from the Poles, because the Poles didn’t want to have the problem of arresting us and sending us back to Germany.”

As Nathan and Bertha came to the brook, it shimmered brightly, lit up by a full moon, making crossing dangerous. “It looked very scary to me,” recalls Nathan, who was only 8 years old. “For the first time, I realized that this was bad business. We had no papers. If they arrested us, we would be sent back to Germany. I was frozen with the cold and with fear. I hoped for the best.”

After crossing the shining stream, the smugglers guided them quietly into the woods. The Polish guards were several hundred yards away, up on a hill. Nathan could hear their drunken shouts and laughter. Soon Bertha and Nathan were met by a second group of smugglers, who took them to a waiting car and drove them over the Polish border to Katowicze, a small city near Auschwitz, where a deadly concentration camp would be established. From Katowicze, Bertha and Nathan boarded a train for Krakow.

“We were totally alone, and sat in the train until dawn,” Nathan recalls. “When the train finally started, the trip took only two hours at the very most. In Krakow my father met us at the railway station.” Seeing his father filled Nathan with relief.

"No Welcome in Poland"

Jakob lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Krakow, only a streetcar ride to town. But no one ventured out very far. Jakob did not remember how to speak Polish, and he couldn’t find a job. He spent his days hanging out  with other German deportees in cafés. When Nathan went outside, kids threw rocks at him, and tormented him. They knew, from his halting Polish and his fine clothes, that he wasn’t one of them. To protect him from more abuse, Bertha did not enroll Nathan in school; instead, he stayed home, reading the same books over and over, playing with a stamp album, and complaining to his parents.

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. Stories spread that the Germans were arresting Poles and Jews. Men in Jakob’s apartment building were planning to hide in the woods. They invited Jakob to join them. Jakob agreed, but when he met with them the following evening, he said, “Wait!” He’d forgotten his toothbrush. “Are you crazy?” the men said. “Do you realize that where we’re going, you’re not going to be able to brush your teeth?” But Jakob stubbornly ran back to get his toothbrush. When he returned, the men had left. He found out later that they were captured outside of Krakow; half were killed, the others were tortured. “If my father had gone with them, he would have never returned,” sums up Nathan. “And that is how a toothbrush saved our lives.”

Jakob now knew they had to leave Poland. Jews were being segregated and had to wear a yellow star on their clothing to identify them as Jews. In order to leave Poland, the Teichlers tried to get an exit permit from the German government. In February 1940, Bertha traveled to Berlin, where she had the name from smugglers of a German officer she could bribe to obtain a handwritten exit permit. It cost her most of her husband’s severance pay. Next she paid a forger to prepare false passports.

In March 1940 the Teichler family left Poland, hoping to get to America. Their odyssey began with a train trip from Krakow to Trieste, Italy, where Jakob thought it might be easier to get a ship to America, since  not many refugees took this route.

But they missed their connections to Trieste and spent the night in Vienna. The next day they boarded a train to Italy. Knowing that Austrian officials would inspect their baggage, the Teichlers were prepared with a bribe. Since German Jews could take only 10 marks (the equivalent of a couple of dollars) across the German border, many Jews used their valuables—their furs and jewelry—as bribes. Nathan’s parents had none of these. But they had something else.

"A Rare Stamp Collection"

Nathan had started collecting stamps in Germany. By the time the Teichlers left Poland, he had accumulated many German stamps, as well as some special editions in honor of a heroic Polish general named Pilsudski. When Bertha packed their suitcases for the trip, she put Nathan’s stamp album on the top of their belongings in the first suitcase. The inspector came by, opened the suitcase, and saw the album. “His eyes widened,” recalls Nathan. “He said, ‘I’m not sure if you can bring this across the border. I have to ask my superior.’ Then he took the stamp album and disappeared. He never showed up again.

“I became angrier and angrier about losing the album, and then I felt the train moving,” recalls Nathan. “I was too young to understand that it was a good thing he had taken the stamps, because if the inspector had searched through the cases, he would have taken other things that we needed.”

Underneath his coat, Nathan was wearing six watches on his arms. In Trieste, Jakob sold the watches for cash. They lived on the money for the next three months, while they tried to get papers to leave. In the meantime, Nathan went to school, and, for the first time in many years, he had friends. “We’d go to the piazza and hang around the orange carts, where vendors would give us fruit, because they knew we children had no money,” he recalls. “We would also go every day to the harbor and watch the big ocean liners, hoping to leave on one of them.” But the U.S. consul would not give his family entry papers.

When Mussolini, the Fascist ruler of Italy, allied himself officially with Hitler on June 10, 1940, the Teichlers realized that it was dangerous to stay in Italy. Despairing of getting visas to the U.S., they decided to travel east and took a train to Istanbul, where they thought they would be safe. In Istanbul, Jakob met some well-to-do French Jews who arranged for him to work as a lingerie salesman while he tried to find passage on a ship to America. The Teichlers decided to travel to Shanghai, since it was the closest major port that was not occupied by Germans. But since the Mediterranean was filled with German submarines, they decided to travel to Shanghai by train. 

"Saved by a Sheik"

In the spring of 1941, Bertha and Jakob joined twenty other Jewish refugees, all of whom intended to take a train to Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey. From there, they planned to bribe their way through Syria and into Baghdad, where they could take a train to Shanghai. But French officials refused to let the group board the train. Since the roads were impassable due to a spring runoff, they hired Kurdish natives to take them down the Tigris on a raft made of wooden planks lashed to buoyant sheepskins.

“The first night, we were in a big hurry to get to Iraq,” recalls Nathan. “But the Kurds told us to stop. It was only 4 p.m. We said no. So we continued and, as the sun set, we hit some rocks. The raft started to list. The women started to scream. Fortunately, nobody fell overboard into the freezing-cold water.”

When they reached shore, the group had to walk about three miles to the nearest village in the pitch dark. Their journey to Iraq wound up taking almost two weeks. Each night, they stayed in a different village, where they slept on thick carpets on the ground. “When we got to Iraq there was a gorge and there were hot springs,” recalls Nathan.

“We stopped at the hot springs and bathed. But we slept in the caves overnight with the donkeys. I was allowed to ride the donkeys. That was the greatest thrill of my life. I’d never ridden an animal in my life, and I was on a donkey. My parents were appalled because fleas bit us. This didn’t bother me.”

In April 1941 the Teichlers arrived in Baghdad in the midst of an uprising: Natives were attacking the British, who governed there. Jakob wanted to leave as soon as possible and hired two smugglers, a Palestinian and a Lebanese, to drive the family across the desert to Haifa. The family piled into an old Mercedes-Benz with windows so scratched and sun-bleached that Nathan could barely see the sand as they drove from Baghdad to Palestine.

When they arrived, the British—who were in charge of Palestine—would not let the Teichlers enter, since there were stiff quotas on how many Jews could emigrate there. The Teichlers drove back to Iraq, where there was now violent fighting in the streets. The mob had taken over. They were murdering young non-Arabic women and dragging their bodies through the main street. Jakob found refuge in a cheap hotel where a sheik was living. When Arab terrorists broke into their hotel, the sheik protected them.

“If anything happened to us, he thought Allah would hold him responsible,” recalls Nathan with a smile. “So his guards threw out the Arab mob and locked the doors. And we were safe.”

From there Jakob moved the family to the large Iraqi port city of Basra. They sweated out July, trying to find available ship tickets. Then they heard that a secretary to a British consul was hosting a dinner where he would secretly be selling tickets to refugees for passage to India. India would get them closer to Shanghai and out of Iraq.

At the lavish party, Jakob gave all his money to the secretary, in exchange for a plain envelope that was supposed to contain vouchers for tickets. When Jakob arrived at the dock, the clerk said the vouchers were worthless. Jakob refused to believe he had been scammed; he began arguing loudly. Then Bertha joined in, creating such a ruckus that the ship’s captain came over. When Bertha explained that they had been swindled, the captain phoned the official and threatened to have him fired if he did not deliver proper tickets. Apparently, the secretary had performed the ruse often with other naïve refugees.

"Passage to India"

When the Teichlers at last sailed from the harbor, there were only a few passengers on their huge ship. Later, they found out why: It was loaded with munitions. Nonetheless, they arrived in Bombay safely, with almost no money in their pockets. A Jewish relief association that fed and housed refugees, put them up in a huge Quonset hut with hundreds of cots. It was July 1941. They were starting over again, for the fifth time in three years.

Bertha began working as a masseuse, even though she had no training at all. With money wired to them from Bertha’s brother, Max, who had emigrated to America, they found an apartment. Bombay was so bug-ridden that Jakob decided to sell insecticide. He got a formula from his brother-in-law, Ferdinand, who was in Palestine. Then he formed a partnership with a Polish lawyer he had met in Bombay. The insecticide sold well; Jakob moved the family to a larger apartment and hired a servant. Nathan enrolled in a Jesuit academy where a ruddy-faced, chain-smoking priest took him under his wing. Nathan played cricket and ran track. He also formed a close friendship with a Jewish classmate, Ellis Meyer, who filled a void in his life.

When the war ended in 1945, the end of the Teichlers’ long journey seemed in sight. Uncle Max sent affidavits so they could obtain U.S. visas. But once again they faced obstacles. The only ships leaving Bombay were military carriers; they wouldn’t accept passengers. So Jakob took the family to Calcutta, which had a larger port and more ships. On the lengthy train ride, Bertha became very ill; they had to wait a month in Calcutta while she recovered. They finally boarded the SS "Battle Creek Victory", a large naval ship. Three days into their voyage, passengers learned the ship was carrying dismantled warheads.  

The Teichlers had hoped to arrive in New York City, where Uncle Max was waiting. But since the ship was carrying explosives, it was diverted to Charleston, South Carolina. After disembarking, the Teichlers took a taxi to Union Station, where they could board a train to New York City. Driving to the station, they saw little huts that looked as though they were made out of tin cans.

At Union Station, Nathan saw two gates: One was marked White. The other bore a sign, Colored. Nathan asked the conductor what the signs meant. His eight-year journey from oppression to freedom held one last lesson in discrimination.

Nathan and his family remained in New York City. Eventually, Nathan received an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. He did an internship at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester. Then he moved to Boston and later Syracuse to practice medicine.

In 1967 he moved back to Rochester to join the Rochester General Hospital as a pathologist. He married and had four children. He is now married to Alisa Cook.

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