Marienbad

Every Christmas growing up my family received a greeting card from the Stingl family. 

I knew that my grandmother, mother, and aunt had known Fritz Stingl in the 1930s. He was Czech and he had arrived at Croydon airport as a refugee and been turned back even though they were at the barrier waiting to sponsor him. And then there was something about a hotel in Marienbad, valuable stamps, the Sudetenland, and escape from the Nazis.

I never knew the details of the story – children can be so lacking in curiosity when it comes to their own parents’ lives – but I had the basic outline.

I came across one of those cards last week and it set me wondering what more I could find out.

A quick google search for any genealogical record for the Stingls gave me the basics and then – miraculum miraculorum – Fritz’s own account of his extraordinary life. I have used extracts here but you can read the whole story: My Life by Fred Stingl

Fritz’s grandfather Gottlieb moved to Marienbad 1872 soon after his arranged marriage, A successful businessman, he became the owner of several hotels and shops and he was a prominent member of Marienbad society.

With his brother-in-law, Gottlieb Stingl was a founder of the synagogue built three buildings south of the Konigsberg.

Fritz’s father inherited the Konigsberg when he married Josefina Hahn. 

For me, the story starts with the only grandparent I knew – my grandmother, born Frances Clayton, the oldest of seven, on a dairy farm in Derbyshire in 1883. At seventeen she was a pupil teacher at the local school and then a student at Stockwell Teachers Training College in London on a Queen Victoria scholarship. 

I remember her as built like a fire plug – short, determined, and strong-willed. She had old-fashioned notions of respectability when it came to table linens and how to dress on Sunday and a fascination with all the modern marvels of her era from the motor car to space exploration. She mostly lived far away from us and often in exotic places.

That respectability, however, did not stop her from altering her birth date when she entered into a romantic relationship in her sixties with a man a few years younger. Growing up, there was a family joke that she had changed the 3 in her 1883 birth year to 1888. I don’t know whether she altered her passport, but when she crossed the Atlantic in the 1950s, the ship manifests have her born on the later date. 

Adversity had made her resilient and she was adventurous, entrepreneurial, and a force to be reckoned with.  She had an amazing gift for friendship. Her habit of making and maintaining connections with all kinds of people that spanned continents and decades was a gift of a lifetime.

How they Met

In 1937 she met Fritz Stingl in the spa town of Marienbad, Bohemia. (See sidebar above right).

She was war widowed, divorced, a teacher, and she had two daughters – Edith and Kathleen – both of whom were also teachers in London. In the 1930s they took several holiday trips to Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. 

The older – my mother Edith – was about her own business that summer of 1937. Kathleen – who suffered badly from asthma traveled with her mother through Germany and Austria to Marienbad (Mariánské Lázněthe), the spa town in Bohemia renowned for its healing waters.

This is how Fritz describes how they met:

One nice day in the fall of 1937 one of the salesgirls in our stationery shop came to the office and asked me to come to the store as there were two ladies there asking questions and the girls could not understand them.  The two ladies spoke English and had just bought some picture postcards. They inquired where there would be some nice walks in the woods.  I told them and they left. 

The following day they came back, asked for me, thanked me, told me how wonderful their walk was the previous day and asked where they should go that day.  We started to talk more and that way our friendship started. 

It turned out that the mother as well as the daughter were teachers in London, as was another daughter, who had not come to the continent with them.  Amongst others I told them about arrangements I had made with the Dutch family and they mentioned that they would be very anxious to do the same the following year.  However due to the political situation and the German invasion of Austria it never realized.

In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. In May, German troops massed on the border with Czechoslovakia. Hitler had long claimed Sudeten Germans as ethnic Germans and that they should be included in the “Great German Reich”. He was ready to take over the Sudetenland.

The “Aryanisation” of Marienbad began. Fritz’s father – who had lived there all his life – was heartbroken as he lost his businesses and was removed from his social positions. He had a valuable stamp collection and the family began to send the stamps abroad in an attempt to preserve the wealth.

In August the political situation got worse and my parents decided I should travel to France, Belgium, Holland and collect whatever we had sent out of Czechoslovakia and take it to friends in England.  On August 11, 1938 I went by air to Paris to pick up the packages from my cousin, then to Holland to the Dutch family and other friends, to Belgium (to a stamps dealer, a good friend of my father’s who had moved from Vienna to Bruxelles) and to England to deposit all with the 3 teachers, whom I considered very reliable.  On August 26, 1938 I returned home. (I should have stayed in England then and there!)

As tensions heightened, most of the Jews in Marienbad fled. Fritz learns later that his father suffered a nervous breakdown on the train to Prague. The Munich agreement of September 1938 ceded the Sudeten lands to Germany.

My parents rented a room in a “pension” (rooming house) and went to restaurants to eat.  My father did not speak a word of Czech. The Czechs always disliked the Germans but after the Munich Agreement hated any German speaking person.  My father could not open his mouth in public and was very depressed.

Attempts to emigrate

Prague was crowded with “refugees” not only from the Sudeten, but also from Germany.  Everybody was looking where to emigrate from Czechoslovakia.  People went to embassies and consulates to find out what living conditions and requirements were in the various countries. People got together in groups at coffee houses to discuss the possibilities;  but if and when somebody found out anything positive, they did not talk about it – and one day they were gone.  They were very much afraid that, if they told somebody else, it might ruin their own chances.

Aborted attempts to enter England.

In November I bought a round-trip ticket to fly to England.  No visas were needed at that time to enter England and I left by air on November 23 without even saying good bye to my father.  I had notified my teacher friends and they waited for me at the London airport – BUT the immigration officer refused to let me land.  The friends even requested help from a member of parliament;  he actually came in the middle of the night, but did not succeed.  There was another man, who was also refused entry and when we boarded the plane in November 27 for our return flight, a newspaperman travelled with us, interviewed us while travelling and a long article about our plight appeared in one of the leading British newspapers – but it did not help us!

I’ve tried to track down that newspaper article and the name of the MP who showed up in the middle of the night (such were my grandmother’s powers of persuasion) but while there are many stories of frantic desperate scenes with Czech refugees being refused entry at  Croydon Airport, I was unable to find this one.

Back in Prague

After my unsuccessful attempt to get out of Czechoslovakia and return to Prague I found my father sick. He just did not want to live anymore.  He eventually came down with pneumonia and emphysema and on February 19 he died in a hospital and was cremated 3 days later.  His ashes were deposited in the Jewish cemetery in Prague.

Continued search for Countries to Emigrate and Frantic Telegrams 

Now the attempts especially by the Jewish people to leave Czechoslovkia were considerably increased – never mind to WHERE.  I received frantic telegrams from my teacher friends in London, who in the meantime had succeeded in obtaining permission for me to enter England, advising that I should report to the British embassy or consulate and that my permit was waiting for me there.  Of course I tried, but there were many hundreds of persons in the yards of all the Western consulates and nobody could even reach the guards at the gates. (I found out later that a letter from the British embassy had arrived at my home one day after I had left, notifying me that the permit to enter England had arrived.)

Fritz learns that the Gestapo are looking for him and this adds another level of urgency to his efforts to escape, including waiting all night outside Gestapo headquarters in order to be in line to apply for an exit permit. 

My Escape

Italy was one of the few countries where no visa was necessary. On April 13, 1939 I left on the basis of my SS exit permit and had no further problems even traveling through Germany to Italy.  I was only allowed to take along 1,000.00 Czech crowns, an equivalent of 40 US dollars, and I would not dare to risk an arrest by taking along anything not permitted.

Italy

 I went to Genoa (I don’t remember why I picked Genoa) and looked for a cheap hotel, which I found in Pegli, a suburb of Genoa.  I went to the British consulate in Genoa and told them,that my entry permit was at the Prague consulate, but I was not able to communicate with the officials there.  They promised that they would have the permit transferred to Genoa and notify me.

No more Money

But when I finally got the British Permit on May 3, 1939, I had run out of funds and could neither pay the hotel nor purchase the tickets for transportation to London.  With the last money I sent a telegram to my brother in Casablanca as well as to my cousin in Paris.  My brother phoned me and told me that he requested his bank to transfer the money to Genoa;  but my cousin in Paris sent me some money by telegram and I received it the following day.  I never received the money from my brother.

No Transit Visa

I also had other problems: I could not get a visa to cross France, even for using an airplane which had to stopover in Paris.  Finally on May 10 the Swiss gave me a 12 hour permit to use a plane flying from Switzerland nonstop to England.  (Trains from Italy to England would have to cross France and without a French visa, I could not use trains.  And to travel from Italy to England on a ship would have cost more than by air.) 

Once I paid the hotel bill and the airplane ticket from Switzerland to London, I had just enough money left to buy a ticket for a slow night train from Genoa to Zurich.  On May 11, 1939 I left Genoa.  I arrived in Zurich the next morning and the plane to London left at noon.  I walked in the street and could not even buy a roll in a bakery!  On the airplanes there were no meals included at that time.  The stewardess offered some sandwiches to the passengers, but when I told her that I did not have any money, she brought me one free (left over from what she could not sell!).

1939-1941, ENGLAND: The Teachers

 At my arrival at the Croydon airport my friends were waiting for me and invited me to stay with them.  The family (the father had died) owned a typical small English home in Croydon, a suburb of London.  The mother as well as both daughters were teachers.  I kept house, worked in their garden, hand-washed their laundry, and prepared “high tea” for them.  I even started to paint some of the inside of the house.

After a few weeks Fritz left the house on Northampton Road, Addiscombe not wanting to become a burden to his friends and realizing that living with them was no solution. He looks for work and because of the shortage of labor due to the military call-up finds work on a farm. In January 1940 he started work as a waiter at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand.   

In January 1941, he received his American immigration visa and on February 15, 1941, sailed from Glasgow, headed for Uruguay on the mail steamer “Andalucia Star”, of the Blue Star Line. From there it was on to New York and the next chapters of his life.

My grandmother and Fritz stayed in touch. By the late 1970s, he was living in Los Angeles and my grandmother was in Santa Barbara,

Fritz writes:  November 10th Drive to Santa Barbara to see Mrs. Sims.

When I went to visit my grandmother there in 1979 she arranged for Fritz to meet me at Los Angeles airport and I stayed the night with him and his wife Gerda.

In researching this  I came across a host of fascinating stories. As always one thing leads to another and I’ve left out so much: the Hotel Sroubek in Prague and the connection with Nicolas Winton and the Kindertransport; the wooden toy partnership with a Nazi war criminal; the cloak and dagger smuggling of stamps by train; the experience on the English farms; the sinking of the “Andalucia Star”  off the coast of Liberia; his time in NYC and in the army; his experience as an intelligence specialist in Europe after the war; and the search for what happened to his mother. But I will leave these for a separate post.

Meanwhile, here I am with my grandmother in Santa Barbara in 1979. She died two months short of her 100th birthday, having made fast friends with the woman in the next bed at the nursing home. 

Fritz and Gerda Stingl are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.