The policemen rapped on the door of the large, two-story house in Kippenheim shortly after dawn on the morning of October 20, 1940. They had come to enforce a Nazi government order expelling all Jews from the state of Baden, in the southwest corner of Germany, along the Rhine River. The policemen gave the Maier family two hours to leave their homes.

There was barely enough time to assemble everyone, let alone prepare adequately for their departure. Siegfried and Charlotte Maier sent a taxi to retrieve their two sons, Heinz and ten-year-old Kurt, from a Jewish boarding school in Freiburg, 25 miles away. As they waited for the boys to return, they packed a few belongings. They were joined in the family living room by Charlotte’s mother and father, Sofie and Hermann.

A once-successful merchant impoverished by years of Nazi-led government extortion, Siegfried made sure to wear the pin that identified him as a World War I veteran on the lapel of his suit. He hoped that the evidence of his service to Germany might provide his family with a measure of protection as they headed into the unknown.

A man from a nearby village snapped a photograph of the family leaving their house. Unearthed from a shoebox 30 years later, the photo shows Kurt’s grandmother, “Oma” Sofie, hobbling past a policeman in a heavy winter uniform and shiny black boots. “Opa” Hermann is too dazed to carry anything. Kurt follows wearing a beret that almost swallows his head. Siegfried brings up the rear, with two bulging suitcases. Neighbors watch impassively.

After making the rounds of the village, the truck headed for a nearby railway station, where the family was herded into third-class railway carriages. An SS officer informed Siegfried that he would be held “personally responsible” if any of his fellow passengers attempted to escape. “And you can take that off,” he added, gesturing toward the veterans’ pin. “It won’t do you any good where you’re going.”

Life at Gurs

To their great relief, the Maiers were deported not to the East, but to the West. These “unwanted” Germans were dumped across the border, in an unoccupied portion of France referred to by its temporary capital, Vichy. The French, in turn, directed them to a mud-drenched internment camp at Gurs, on the edge of the Pyrenees Mountains.

The conditions were atrocious. Rats scampered around the flimsy wooden barracks, there was never enough to eat, and disease was rampant. Soon, dozens of inmates were dying every day, including Opa Hermann, who fell victim to a typhoid epidemic just six weeks after his arrival at Gurs. Kurt fell ill with diphtheria, but survived.

Like most of the other prisoners, the Maier family saw only one salvation: immigration to the United States. They understood very clearly that “a piece of paper with a stamp,” in the words of the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, represented “the difference between life and death.” In order to escape Gurs, they would need to navigate a bureaucratic maze that included the French police, the American consulate in Marseille, foreign relief agencies, and the shipping lines that still offered passage across the Atlantic. There were endless forms to complete.

For months, they heard nothing. Toward the end of February 1941, the Maier family received a summons from the Gurs camp commander. Their transfer to Marseille and exit visas from France had been approved. Now everything depended on securing an interview with the US consulate, which was besieged with visa applications from Jews, European intellectuals, and German opposition figures on the run from Hitler.

When they arrived in Marseille, Charlotte and the children were directed to a flea-bitten hotel opposite the port, while Siegfried was interned in a former brick factory turned “emigration camp” an hour away from the city. “The visa rigmarole here is inhuman,” the American rescue worker Varian Fry wrote in a February 1941 memo. “It is almost killing the refugees . . . They have to wait in corridors and lines over and over and over again, until their very souls must be shriveled and shrunken by the experience.”

The Maiers’ long-awaited interview with the US consul came on May 8, 1941. The square outside the consulate was already packed with visa applicants when they arrived early that morning. Oma Sofie, who had come from Gurs more recently, was barely able to stand. Siegfried was suffering from swollen legs from his time in internment camps.

It was at this point that a small miracle occurred. The family had been accompanied to the consulate by a relative who had fought in the French army during World War I. They were summoned to the front of the line on the strength of his wounded veteran’s pass.

Once inside the consulate, their luck continued to hold. They were able to prove that they had been issued US visas back in May 1940 in Germany but hadn’t been able to escape back then. They also possessed a valid affidavit from a long-lost cousin in New Orleans, who had paid for their passage to Martinique in the French West Indies. After inspecting their documentation, the consul agreed to grant new visas, valid for four months.

Traveling to America

“You can imagine the joy felt by these people at finally being able to leave,” wrote a French rabbi as he watched 500 or so other exhausted refugees, including the Maier family, board the Wyoming on May 15. Their trials, however, were far from over. When they reached Casablanca, in French Morocco, two weeks later, they were escorted off the decrepit freighter and interned in an abandoned Foreign Legion Camp. Another French ship had been seized by the British navy in the middle of the Atlantic, causing the Vichy authorities to close down the Martinique escape route for refugees.

For weeks, it was unclear whether the Maier family would make it across the Atlantic. If they failed to reach America by September 8, their visas would officially become worthless pieces of paper once again. Fortunately, an American Jewish relief agency was able to find space for them on another ship, the Nyassa, headed this time for New York.

Kurt and his parents caught their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty on the morning of August 9, only to encounter one final mishap. As the Nyassa sailed up the East River, its mast hit the Brooklyn bridge, scattering metal debris onto the deck below. A front-page story in the New York Herald Tribune the following day mentioned, in passing, the arrival of “two hundred refugees from Casablanca” who had been engaged in “a race against time” to reach America before their visas expired.

Kurt later became a cataloguer of German books at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and acknowledged his extraordinarily good fortune in reaching America. Of the 6,500 German Jews expelled to Gurs in October 1940, fewer than one quarter survived the Holocaust. Of those who didn’t survive, roughly one quarter died in Gurs or other French camps, while nearly half were deported to Auschwitz.

Those murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz included several neighbors of the Maier family from their hometown of Kippenheim, Germany, including Max and Fanny Valfer and Momo and Gerda Auerbacher. The Auerbachers had passage booked on the Wyoming—the same ship as the Maiers—but were unable to complete all their paperwork in time.

Kurt credited his survival to his American visa, the reverse side of which is adorned with a multitude of stamps and signatures. The absence of a single stamp would condemn the refugees to endless bureaucratic purgatory, and often meant that they would be unable to escape. “This was the most precious document I ever possessed,” he said. “Those stamps saved our lives.”

Learn more about Kurt’s journey in The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between, co-published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.