(upbeat music) - [Jim] It's a tough story, but this 89-year-old Holocaust survivor continues to tell it so that the world will remember.

Two diplomats with ties to St. Louis played key roles during the Holocaust.

One was in Europe risking his life to save Jews from the death camps.

- But perhaps they underestimated what he was actually doing.

- [Jim] While in Washington, the St. Louis-born-and-raised assistant secretary of state was working to keep them out of the United States.

And historians still debate just what motivated Breckinridge Long.

- I think if you read Breckinridge Long's personal diaries, he comes off as a very unlikeable person.

- [Jim] It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - I'm Brooke Butler.

History stories often make us wonder why people did what they did and perhaps make us wonder what we would've done.

Our stories tonight are tied to this month's Days of Remembrance, an annual week-long commemoration of the Holocaust, established by Congress.

And we'll have stories about two men who made very different decisions about the events in Europe.

But we begin with Ruth Ezell's story about some living history.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - This is my father, this is my mother.

This is my brother Adolphe.

This is my brother Henry.

This is my sister Sabine.

This is me.

- [Ruth] 89-year old Holocaust survivor Rachel Goldman Miller is one of the few who fled to freedom carrying priceless possessions, photos of loved ones, most of whom she would never see again.

- They're always in your heart, but the facial disappear.

So this way I can still look at them and see them.

- [Ruth] And you can share them with the world.

- And I can share them with the world.

This is the Jewish Quarter prior to the war.

- [Ruth] Miller shares her story with visitors to the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.

- Because I'm history.

And I want the world to know what happened during World War II and about the inhumanity that can happen between people.

- [Ruth] Rachel Goldman was born in France in 1933.

That was the year after her family moved there from Poland and six years before the start of World War II in Europe.

- This was the beginning of doom.

- [Ruth] She's referring to June 23rd, 1940, the day Adolph Hitler toured notable sites in Paris.

The French capital city was under German occupation at the time.

(gentle music) The following year, Miller's father, Nathan Goldman, was taken to a labor camp by the Nazis.

He later died in captivity hours after being injected with an unknown substance.

Miller believes her father and one of her uncles were among the first victims of so-called medical experiments by the Third Reich.

- I don't have to tell you our house was very, very quiet, very sad.

School was coming to an end, and I was so happy.

My mother said to me, "(speaking in foreign language), I'm gonna send you to the country, and Sabine is going with you," my idol.

- [Ruth] Her idol and her older sister.

What Miller didn't realize was that she and Sabine were being sent away to keep them safe.

Rachel left first, and Sabine was to follow in a few weeks.

But the latter never happened.

Rachel's beloved sister, her brothers, Henry and Adolphe, and her mother, Helen, all met their deaths at Auschwitz.

- The Germans killed 17 million people.

6 million were Jews.

- [Ruth] Miller survived the German occupation by changing her name, more than once, and changing places of refuge.

When an aunt felt it was safe enough, she brought her niece back to Paris.

Miller returned to find her family's apartment being looted.

She was just a child, but had the presence of mind to go inside and retrieve the family photos.

(gentle music) In the years since starting a new life in the US, Miller has shared her precious images with her descendants.

She's also shared them with the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.

- You know, Rachel's is a really powerful story.

It's a story of hiding.

It's a story of loss.

- [Ruth] Helen Turner is the Holocaust Museum's director of education.

The institution was established to promote understanding and to stand up to bigotry.

- Certainly, I mean, we've seen an unbelievable rise in anti-Semitism in the past couple of months.

And I think for me, it's just such a reminder that the museum is needed now more than ever.

A necessary time to open a Holocaust museum, and also a little bit of a frightening time to see so much happening.

Anytime I get nervous or hear from members of the community who are nervous, I say, "That's exactly why we're here."

We're here to spread this message.

We're here to empower people to stand up and speak out.

And we simply will not be silent.

- [Ruth] And neither will Rachel Miller.

- So remember, you met a Holocaust survivor.

And as you get older, they will show you all kinds of videos, but it won't be the same.

'Cause a video is not the same as hearing someone, right?

(gentle music) - Next, we have stories about two people connected to St. Louis, whose names you'll find in books on the history of the Holocaust.

One is considered a hero, the other not so much.

Jim Kirchherr has the story of a man best known, not for what he did, but for what he would not do.

(upbeat music) - [Jim] If you read the 1958 obituaries in national and local papers of Breckinridge Long, they merely recount his career in the US State Department under the Wilson and Roosevelt Administrations serving as ambassador to Italy and assistant secretary of state.

It wasn't until later when historians started digging into declassified documents and Long's own diaries that he would be seen as having been on the wrong side of America's Holocaust response, a key figure in keeping Jewish refugees out of the United States.

- You think about November 1943 when he testifies to Congress and basically talks about all of the reasons that the United States does not need to do anymore to rescue Jews, that- - [Jim] Rebecca Erbelding is a historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and the author of "Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews."

- I think if you read Breckinridge Long's personal diaries, he comes off as a very unlikable person.

- [Jim] Samuel Breckinridge Long was born in 1881 in St. Louis and was about as upper crust as you could get.

He went to Princeton, got a law degree at Washington University, and started a legal practice in St. Louis.

In 1912, he married into even more money.

Christine Graham's mother donated Graham Chapel to Washington University.

Her grandfather was Senator Frank Blair, who has a statue in Forest Park.

And the newlyweds moved into the Graham mansion on Lindell Boulevard.

And it was big cash contributions to the Democratic Party that got Breck Long into the inner circle of Democratic politics.

He supported Woodrow Wilson, nominated for a second term at the convention in St. Louis in 1916.

Wilson had been one of Long's teachers at Princeton.

And in 1917, Breckinridge Long was appointed third assistant secretary of state.

He was tall, distinguished, looked good in a top hat and tails, and might be described by the less-than-flattering term for a diplomat, a cookie pusher, because he spent much of his time greeting, escorting, and entertaining important visitors.

When a British delegation arrived in the US during World War I, they stayed at the Long's impressive residence in Washington, DC.

That same year, a French delegation came to St. Louis, and they stayed with the Longs on Lindell Boulevard.

As a political appointee, Breckinridge Long left the State Department when the Republicans came to power, and was back in with Roosevelt's election in '32, with a new job, ambassador to Italy.

And in 1940, he was appointed assistant secretary of state.

When it came to dealing with people trying to get into the country, he was the gatekeeper.

He didn't make the rules, but he made sure they would be tightly enforced.

This is the classic scene of immigration from the early part of the 20th century, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

But after World War I, that golden door was nearly slammed shut with tighter and tighter restrictions on immigration.

And they were still enforced in the 1930s as the world was facing a new crisis.

The world was changing, but American laws were not when Breckinridge long moved into his new office in charge of visas.

- And so his sensibilities and his department in Washington's interpretation of these immigration laws, that has a real effect on the ability of Jewish refugees and really anybody trying to immigrate to the United States on their ability to get out.

- As more and more Jews sought to escape Nazi-occupied Europe and reports of extermination camps increased pressure from some in the US to let more in, Long instructed embassies and consulates to maintain the tight restrictions.

He and others argued that this was about national security, that there might be spies among those trying to get in.

You can find in his diaries evidence of anti-Semitism, but he wasn't alone.

Such attitudes of varying degrees, including so-called country club anti-Semitism, accepting or embracing quotas or exclusions of Jews from clubs, neighborhoods, and in hiring.

This wasn't uncommon among the wealthy WASP upper class.

Is that perhaps part of the Washington establishment, as well as perhaps Breckinridge Long's own personal life?

- I think this kind of cultural anti-Semitism or societal anti-Semitism really is playing a big role in Washington at the time, but that is a thing that is starting to change.

Part of that is the New Deal.

The New Deal expands the federal government.

It brings more people into the federal government.

And so the State Department is basically the old guard.

More gentile, potentially more kind of country club anti-Semitism.

And anti-Semitism and nativism is openly tolerated.

Prejudice is openly tolerated in the State Department.

You can say things out loud there that you may not be able to get away with saying in the Treasury Department.

I struggle with whether he is motivated by anti-Semitism or motivated by nativism, the dislike of all immigrants.

So Roosevelt's gut instinct is to defend Long, but I also think that the president is not super involved in what the visa division is necessarily doing.

- Eventually, under pressure from others in the government, President Roosevelt agreed that more needed to be done and created the War Refugee Board in early 1944, taking the responsibility for refugees away from Breckinridge Long.

After the War Refugee Board was created, he says in his diary, "What they can do that I have not done I cannot imagine."

How wrong was he?

- He's very wrong.

The United States, especially in 1943 and 1944, as it's clear that Nazi Germany is losing the war, there is a lot that the United States can do.

The War Refugee Board tries to do it in 1944, but there are things that the United States could have been doing in 1943, to protest more, to get more material in the hands of the resistance, to publicize what the Nazis are doing.

Those are things that Long absolutely could have done and did not do.

And to me, I think Long's overwhelming motivation, beyond nativism, beyond anti-Semitism, is that he wants to be left alone.

He wants his job to be easy, and this refugee crisis is making his job more difficult.

And so over and over again, for me, what you see is Long trying to get rid of problems.

Not trying to deal with them, either positively or negatively, just trying to make them go away.

And the War Refugee Board was the exact opposite.

The War Refugee Board were in running towards solutions.

- He also said after the War Refugee Board was created that it seemed like a good move politically because it would make Jewish voters happy.

This is how he viewed the Jewish refugee crisis.

- It was all politics.

It was all politics.

He felt that way about letting Jewish refugees in too.

You have to let some of them in so that you can get that vote in 1940.

It's so much bigger than that.

It's so much more important than that.

And he was not someone who wanted to sacrifice votes or political power for doing the right thing, often.

- [Jim] Yeah, he strikes me as the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time.

- [Rebecca] I think that's a really good assessment.

- [Jim] Breckinridge Long's career had taken him away from his hometown of St. Louis years before.

He retired to his estate in New Hampshire and raised horses, never feeling that he had deserved the criticism he had received and not living long enough to see just how bad it was going to get.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - Finally, the story of Carl Lutz.

He and Breckinridge Long had St. Louis in common, but that's about it.

Lutz was on the other side of the ocean during World War II and the other side of the refugee crisis.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - Now, one of the things that would happen in Budapest at this time, in late 1944, what they would do is they would take groups of people down to the Danube River.

And essentially would line them up and stage a firing squad.

They would shoot them and push them in the river.

Sometimes they would tie people together, shoot one of them, push them in the river.

So there was this one day, there's a story about Carl Lutz and his driver.

They're driving through the city, and they pass the Danube River.

This had just happened.

One of these incidents had just happened, and a number of people had been killed and pushed into the river.

But Carl Lutz is looking, and he sees this woman bobbing up and down in the cold waters of the Danube.

And it turns out that she had been shot, but the water was so cold that it had slowed the blood flow.

And so Carl Lutz, in all of his nice suit and hat, jumps into the waist-high water, into the Danube, pulls this woman out, turns around to the Arrow Cross and tells them, "What are you doing?

You know, I am the Swiss vice-consul.

You have no right to do this."

And they're so taken aback, he is allowed to take this woman and seek help for her and actually saves her life.

But as you can probably guess, Carl Lutz didn't know this woman.

He didn't know who she was.

But he was driving by, and he saw an opportunity to help someone, and he took it.

(gentle music) - [Brooke] We've heard stories of heroic rescue efforts from the Holocaust, but having taken place nearly 80 years ago, we're bound to feel a disconnect, a decline in momentum for sharing these powerful accounts.

One story, however, that seems to have only gained attention in recent years is of a man who may be the only name you would find within the Righteous Among The Nations and in an old St. Louis phone book.

(gentle music) His name was Carl Lutz.

During the Second World War, he served as a Swiss diplomat in Budapest, Hungary.

You might not recognize his name, but if you're familiar with the more famous chronicles of Raoul Wallenberg or Oskar Schindler, Lutz's efforts were similar.

They utilized loopholes in their positions of authority in order to protect the lives of Jewish people during World War II.

The major difference, however, is that Lutz led what is now considered the largest civilian rescue mission of the Holocaust.

And although it might be a stretch to call him a famous St. Louisan, his time spent here shaped the trajectory for his heroic actions.

- Carl Lutz spent about 10 years, about a decade, in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

- [Brooke] Amy Lutz is a local historian and also works with the Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.

And as far as her family can tell through ancestry records, there doesn't seem to be any relation to Carl Lutz.

However, researching Lutz's story is what motivated her to pursue a career in history.

- Like I said, he was born in Switzerland, but he came here at the age of 18, not knowing a word of English.

Was looking for more opportunities that he didn't have in his small town.

So he ended up in another small town, actually, Granite City, Illinois, right across the river for a few years.

Worked there to save up some money.

And then around 1918, 1919, he enrolled in Central Wesleyan College.

(perky music) - [Brooke] Central Wesleyan College in Warrenton closed in 1941, but this was where Lutz first embraced an important aspect of his personality.

Having grown up in a devout Christian family, he explored the possibility of becoming a pastor.

(perky music) - But unfortunately, he realized pretty quickly that that was not gonna be the path for him.

He was kind of a little soft spoken.

He wasn't really a great public speaker.

He was also a perfectionist, you know, held very high standards for himself, and realized that was not gonna be what he did.

And so around that time, he had an opportunity for a summer job with the Swiss Legation in Washington, DC.

And that is where he got interest in diplomacy.

- Lutz graduated from George Washington University in 1924, and then spent the next decade in appointments around the United States.

His last appointment in the country landed him back where he first started, in St. Louis.

From about 1933 to 1935, the hotel behind me was where Carl Lutz lived.

Then it was the Statler Hotel.

And right down the street was where he worked in the offices above the now-demolished Ambassador Theater.

It was there where Lutz met his wife, Gertrud, who was also a Swiss native living in the city.

But the people of St. Louis embraced them as locals.

So much so that when Lutz accepted a new position in Palestine, the St. Louis Star-Times dedicated an entire-page article detailing their recent moves.

(pencil scratching) (clock ticking) - So during the later part of the 1930s, Carl Lutz, with his new wife, Trudy, ends up in Palestine, which is a British mandate at the time.

The state of Israel is not yet founded.

But the first couple years, they have a great time.

You know, he is a devout Christian.

He's close to Bethlehem.

He's close to Jerusalem.

But while he is there, a few years later, 1939, the war breaks out.

- [Brooke] This led to a couple of key elements that would later influence Lutz's rescue efforts.

First, because Palestine was under British control, any German citizen in the country now found themselves essentially in enemy territory.

In this wartime scenario, a neutral nation will be brought in.

In this case, with their infamous neutrality, Switzerland represented the interest of those German citizens.

- Carl Lutz essentially was given that position.

Does a really great job according to his superiors.

He's able to negotiate the release of a number of German diplomats and their families back to Germany.

- [Brooke] Another major discovery was something called Schutz-Passes or protective papers.

These papers protected anyone who possessed them from having their property seized or from being displaced.

They were a commonly sought after item, particularly for Jewish people during the war.

(mischievous music) When Lutz arrives to Budapest in 1942, instead of representing German interest, he's now vice-consul and responsible for the Allied nations, including the United States and Great Britain.

Under British authority, he's still distributing Schutz-Passes.

And between 1942 and 1944, Lutz is able to secure the immigration for about 10,000 Jewish people, mostly children, from Budapest to Palestine.

- Then things change on March 19th, 1944.

Within a course of a few weeks, Germany takes over Hungary.

And between mid-May and early July 1944, in about six weeks, 440 Hungarian Jews are sent to Auschwitz, and somewhere between 70 and 80% are killed upon arrival.

So where's Carl Lutz in all of this?

(tense music) - [Brooke] In an effort to cast a wider safety net, Lutz, in partnership with several other nations, put a series of about 76 buildings under diplomatic protection called the International Ghetto.

This was a place where Jewish people could take refuge.

- Now, Carl Lutz is able to do this in part because the German authorities remember the work he had done in British Palestine and respected his work as a diplomat.

Perhaps they underestimated what he was actually doing.

- [Brooke] Lutz and his wife made frequent visits to the International Ghetto, where they would issue as many protective papers as possible.

Because even though by this point the Swiss foreign minister put an end to the Schutz-Passes, Lutz still had about 7,800 documents left.

That 7,800, however, turned out to shield the lives of many thousands more.

- We find out pretty quickly that there's 10 number 10s, there's 15 number 15s.

What would happen is that the people creating these papers, once they got to 7,800, they would start again and just keep writing them, because they knew if there was a 9,000 out there, it would be an obvious forgery.

- [Brooke] Lutz and his staff headquartered this work in an old glass factory called The Glasshouse, where crowds of people would line up in hopes to receive papers.

And it was through this work that Lutz was able to save tens of thousands of lives.

But of those thousands, two people in particular stood out.

(gentle music) - I remember very well the first meeting with the man who later became my stepfather.

- [Brooke] Agnes Hirschi was six years old by the time Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944.

Being born in Britain to Hungarian Jewish parents, her mother wanted to protect Agnes any way she could.

And by then, Carl Lutz had developed a reputation for providing such protection.

- And my mother explained to him our situation.

She was 33 and a beautiful woman.

And Carl Lutz immediately became attracted to her.

- [Brooke] Lutz invited Agnes and her mother to stay at his personal residence in Buda, where her mother worked as a housekeeper, and Agnes got to continue a somewhat normal childhood, at least for a little while longer.

- But I have very vivid memories of those terrible times, especially the two months we spent in the bomb shelter.

I celebrated my seventh birthday in the bomb shelter.

And Carl Lutz was very nice.

He even had kept some chocolate for me because he knew I would've birthday.

And I was very happy with that.

And after New Year, the situation became even more dramatic because the house, the residents of the Lutz family, was hit by 20 fire bombs.

The house caught fire and burned for 48 hours, while we were down in the bomb shelter.

But we managed to survive.

He really ruined his health there in Budapest, because he was day and night, he cared day and night for the people under his protection.

And often he had to go out at night.

And he had no quiet moments.

- [Brooke] His quiet moments did come after the war when Lutz made his way back to Switzerland, where instead of acknowledgement for his heroic actions, he was scolded for acting outside of his authority.

- He was very disappointed that the Swiss government didn't even take notice of what he did, you know?

They didn't even listen to what happened in Budapest, and they had no idea how war was, how terrible all this was.

- [Brooke] That's why Agnes has dedicated so much of her life to sharing her stepfather's story.

And while it was for her mother that Lutz left his first wife, Agnes explains that he wouldn't have been able to do the work without Gertrud.

- His stay was very short in St. Louis, but it had a positive outcome.

It's there where he met the attractive, young, Swiss lady, and that was Gertrud Fankhauser.

- So Carl Lutz's time in St. Louis in Missouri ends up being very important for what he does later on.

At least for us listening to his story, it revealed some personality traits, it revealed some habits that end up becoming helpful later on.

Carl Lutz's story is a question.

For me, it's a question of what would I have done?

You know, would I have done the right thing?

And so I hope people who learn this story have that same, to be honest, that strange struggle, that same debate.

Heroes like Carl Lutz deserve to be recognized because they show us the best versions of ourselves and tell us what we really are able to do.

And we're able to do great things.

(upbeat music) - And that's "Living St.

Louis."

Feel free to get in touch with us at NinePBS.org/LSL.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Brooke Butler.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.