Flight to America
The story of one of the thousands of people aided by the courage of Aristides de Sousa Mendes
IN JULY 2016, an elderly American named Stephen Rozenfeld ascended the bimah, or prayer platform, of an ornate synagogue in Lisbon. Before him in the pews sat some 40 women and men from all over the world who had one thing in common: They or their forebears had been saved by Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Now they had returned, along with Olivia Mattis, president of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, and two of Sousa Mendes’ grandsons, to retrace the passage from Bordeaux to Lisbon and to pay homage to the man who had rescued them.
When Germany invaded Poland, in September 1939, Rozenfeld’s father was away on business, in Belgium. Four months later, Rozenfeld and his mother fled their home in Lodz to try to meet him. They traveled to Germany and then to Belgium, where the family reunited. Next, they arrived in France, where Sousa Mendes issued them the visas that would save their lives, and went to Spain before reaching Portugal in July. Along the way, Stefan, 5 years old, contracted appendicitis, rode in a hay cart and pretended to be mute. When at last the family arrived in Lisbon, he now told the audience, their money had run out. And that’s when a “miracle” occurred.
“My parents met a woman from Montclair, New Jersey, who was vacationing with her granddaughter,” Rozenfeld recalled.
The woman said she would cover the family’s passage to America. “My mother had smuggled
nd out a few pieces of jewelry from Lodz, and she offered them to her until my father paid her,” Rozenfeld said, reading from notes jotted on white cards. “She would not take them. She said, ‘You will pay me when you have the funds.’ ”
The Rozenfelds crossed the Atlantic on a Greek passenger ship, docking in Hoboken,
New Jersey, on July 12, 1940. They settled in Queens, New York, and moved into a house with a family of Jewish refugees from Austria. Six weeks later, Rozenfeld said, his mother walked him to school, where he was introduced as “the new refugee boy, Stefan Rozenfeld.” His classmates stood and sang “My Country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.”
“I didn’t know the song,” Rozenfeld said, “and the tears were running down my face—and I said, I’m going to be a real American.” He stopped speaking Polish, and he changed his name, from Stefan to Stephen.
Stephen went on to a good life. He married, had four children and 11 grandchildren. He lived in the waterfront New York suburb of New Rochelle. He owned a business that dubbed and subtitled films. But, during his trip to Lisbon, he announced that he wished to be known once again as Stefan.
“When he said that, shivers went up and down my spine,” said Monique Rubens Krohn, who was in the audience and whose family was also saved by Sousa Mendes.
Last year, in July, as this story was being reported, Rozenfeld died of Covid-19. He was 86.
In that moment in Lisbon, though, standing on the bimah before the holy ark, “he made some peace with himself,” his daughter, Leah Sills, told me. “He realized that he was proud of his background. That it was okay to be Stefan. Nobody was going to come and get him, or make fun of him, or call him the refugee boy,” she said. “My father went back to being the Polish boy who escaped—who lived.”