June 8, 2018 Hello ,
Ottilie Gobel Moore first became famous in the society pages as the daughter of the "Sausage
King" of Brooklyn.
The New York Post called her a pleasant, attractive and capable widow. Others called her eccentric, impulsive, and a forceful woman. Like that's a bad
thing.
She must have been all that, plus resourceful and courageous to single-handedly
spirit eight children well over a thousand miles to escape the
Nazis.
A One-Woman Refugee Association In 1941, Ottilie drove the kids in a station wagon from the south of France, through Spain, across Portugal to the port city of Lisbon, where they caught a boat to America. Here they are on the arriving safely in New York.
Below: Ottilie Moore (seated on steps, left of photo,) Shown are 13 and 12 year-old Robert and Henry Durand; 13 and 11-year old Dora and Betty Steuer; Max Beeckmann, 15, Roger Kaufer, 1; Hermann Spitz, 2; Valerie Page, 9; Moore's daughter, also Ottilie 13; nephew Wallace Moore, 12 and poodle, Martini. In 1936, Dora and Betty Steuer were six and eight when Nazi soldiers marched into the Rhineland, launching German aggression in Western Europe and spreading hatred of Jews.
The girls' father was sent to Dachau, their mother, who was expecting another child was sent to an institution and they were sent away for safety, cared for first in Holland, then Belgium and finally driven to France by the war.
In 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, Roger Kaufer's father was sent to a concentration camp, then his mother committed suicide. Friends helped Roger escape
to France. Below: Jewish men rounded up for deportation to Dachau, Baden Baden, Germany, 1938.
The stream of Jewish refugees soon became apparent to Ottilie Gobel Moore who’d moved to L’Ermitage, a villa on the French Riviera in 1929.
L’Ermitage was a lovely estate with several houses, terraced gardens, fruit trees, and small waterfalls overlooking the bay of Villefranche-sur-mer near Nice.
Seven-year-old Valerie
Page was the first child to take refuge there. Ottilie offered to care for Valerie while her mother returned to England to join the British women's naval corps.
“I began taking in refugees when the war started," Ottilie said, "the kind of people that the relief organizations were not prepared to are for. Dora and Betty Steuer, for example, were to have been sent to Canada, but a
hitch developed and they were sent to my villa. At one time I had as many as 27 refugees living there and I was feeding as many as 40.”
When Germany invaded France in 1940, food became scarce, and Ottilie grew more and more worried about the safety of the children in her care. Thousands of Jews had requested visas from authorities in Nice, and were turned away with the stamp “Case
Killed.”
Below: Ottilie Moore (center) with Valerie Page (sitting, third from right) and the other children she rescued. But Ottilie displayed her forcefulness, plus perseverance, procuring visas for six children. She hurdled the next problem, scarce gasoline, by trading a pig and five chickens to a neighbor for fuel, then loaded the six kids along with her
own daughter and nephew into her luxury station wagon on September 22, 1941, and made a run for it.
The trip across Spain and Portugal took ten days.The older children crowded together in the front and back seats, with two babies lying in cradles hung from the car ceiling, and they towed a huge load of suitcases on a trailer
behind. And there is one report that a goat came along on the trip to be traded for gasoline along the way.
One of the first nights they stopped in Bezlers, France, but were turned away by the hotel keeper until word carried to
town leaders who shamed him into taking them in. The continued into Spain until their car broke down and they became stranded for three days in a cork grove until a Spanish policeman arrived and helped fix the car.
Arriving in Lisbon, the boarded the ship Excalibur and set sail for New York, but their troubles weren't over.
The first day out to sea, a Nazi bomber circled overhead. Turns out it was a spotter, and shortly thereafter the Nazis torpedoed and sank two other ships close by.
The group arrived safely in New York city October 10, 1941, where they were met by news photographers.
Ottilie had grown up the eldest daughter of a German immigrant named Adolf Gobel, who began selling sausages door to door in a straw basket in 1904, and twenty years later ran the largest independent sausage and meat manufacturer in the country.
His sausages had a
reputation for full flavor and fine quality. And demand grew for meat products as the sandwich, the fast food of the day, grew in popularity as an easy and affordable lunch for a city on the go.
Adolf Gobels had died in 1924, leaving his $3 million dollar company to his wife and children, the sale of which allowed Ottilie to travel and live
abroad.
Ironically, the most well-known recipient of Ottilie's wartime hospitality did not escape the Nazis. A German-Jewish art student Charlotte Salomon took refuge with her grandparents at Villefranche-sur-mer not long after Kristallnacht in 1938. She remained at the villa after Ottilie Moore left with the children in
1941. Charlotte's mother and grandmother had both committed suicide and she
was deeply troubled about the mental illness in her family, as well the danger of being Jewish as the Nazis took hold in France. She started to paint. "I will create a story so as not to lose my mind,” she wrote.
In 1942, Charlotte worked like one possessed, producing 1,700 colorful paintings overlaid by text and entitled Leben Oder Theater?, Life? Or Theater?
It was the story of her life, the joys and the tragedies, her relationships with family, friends and lovers all set against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism.
"The war raged on and I sat by the sea and saw deep in the heart of humankind,” Charlotte Salomon wrote in her masterwork. “How beautiful life is. I believe in life. I shall live for them all.”
And she did. For a short time. Then a Gestapo truck
rolled up to the villa by the sea and took newly-wed Charlotte and her husband away. Just 26 years of age and four months pregnant with her first child, Charlotte was gassed the day she arrived at Auschwitz, October 10, 1943.
Leben
Oder Theater? survived the war. Charlotte dedicated the work to Ottilie Moore who returned to Villa L’Ermitage after the war. She got the paintings to Charlotte's father who had survived the war in hiding in Amsterdam. You can view some of them
here...
Ottilie returned to America and the daughter of the Sausage King eventually retired to the Adirondacks and raised poodles.
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