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Melvin (Mel) Theobald
I don't know why this has been such a quiet day on Raiders64, but it seems a good time to add to Lischa's (Elizabeth Stein's family nickname) story as requested by Marv. In an earlier post I mentioned that I've been writing "Time Without Dates", a memoir dedicated to the mentors in my life. This is an excerpt from the chapter on Elizabeth Stein.
"When Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party formed an alliance with Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in 1936, it was evident that Europe was on the brink of another lethal war. Siding with the dictator Francisco Franco in 1937, Italy and Germany intervened in the Spanish Civil War and began bombing innocent citizens, including those in Guernica, which inspired Lischa's favorite artist, Pablo Picasso, to declare his political position in favor of the Communist Party and disavow any allegiance to Spain until Franco was out of power. Those events were harbingers of things to come, and although there was growing anti-Semitic sentiment in Germany, there was little hint of the future arrests of Jews and concentration camps that would define the Holocaust. Sensing the political dangers to come, Lischa made a sudden and uncharacteristically dramatic decision to intervene.
By then, she was a mature thirty-year-old and acutely aware of the growing tensions in Europe due to the formation of the Rome to Berlin Axis that included Japan in its Anti-Comintern Pact against Russian Communists. When the Germans condemned France and Britain as Plutocracies, Lischa sprang into action. Being fluent in German and French, she made it her personal goal to get her relatives out of Germany. As an experienced international traveler and a US citizen, she knew the process for securing travel documents and courageously managed to obtain official immigration papers and visas for all members of her immediate family and orchestrate their escape to America before the Nazi purges began. There is no way to know how many she saved. The only remaining evidence of those efforts came in the form of thank you letters written years later by her surviving cousins.
Like the veterans of the Second World War who are revered as silent heroes, she never talked about her selfless sacrifices because, like so many of her generation, she humbly considered those deeds to be ordinary. Her extended family certainly didn't think that, because everything she did was accomplished in relative secrecy and at great personal risk."
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