A rabbi’s daughter
Recha Sternbuch was born Rachela Rottenberg on 13 May 1905 in Wadowice, a small town near Kraków in what was then Austrian Galicia and is now Poland. Her father, Markus (Mordechai) Rottenberg, was a respected rabbi and scholar; her mother was Dvora Friedmann. In 1912, when Recha was seven, the family moved to Antwerp, where her father had been invited to serve as chief rabbi of the city’s growing strictly Orthodox community.
There were no Jewish schools for girls in Belgium at the time, so she attended a public school, where she learned French, while German was spoken at home. Her real education took place at the family table. The Rottenberg home was a meeting place for scholars, and her father’s discussions of Talmud and Midrash were open to his children. As a teenager Recha sometimes joined in, to the surprise of the visitors who travelled long distances to consult her father.
Marriage and a move to Switzerland
In 1928 she married Yitzchak (Isaac) Sternbuch, the son of a Basel family of Orthodox Jews who had lived for a time in the United States after the Kishinev pogrom before settling in Switzerland. The couple made their home in St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland near the Austrian border. For a young woman raised in the intense religious world of Antwerp, the small, largely liberal Swiss Jewish community came as something of a culture shock.
The Sternbuchs were observant, family-minded and, by the standards of their community, unremarkable. But St. Gallen’s location would make them central figures in one of the most dangerous chapters of Swiss history. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, thousands of desperate Jews tried to cross the nearby border, while Swiss policy grew steadily harsher toward refugees.
Nights at the border
From 1938 Recha Sternbuch organised the escape of Jews, many of them Orthodox, from Germany and Austria into St. Gallen, from where most continued to other countries. She took refugees into her own home, found them papers and helped them avoid deportation. According to accounts by her biographers, she spent nights in the wooded hills near the Austrian border, sometimes while pregnant, guiding people past Swiss guards who had orders to turn refugees back.
In this work she found an unlikely ally in Paul Grüninger, the commander of the St. Gallen cantonal police, who quietly allowed large numbers of Jewish refugees to enter Switzerland in defiance of federal orders by backdating their papers. Grüninger was dismissed in 1939, prosecuted and stripped of his pension; he was rehabilitated only decades after his death. Sternbuch, too, paid a price. In the spring of 1939 she was arrested on suspicion of helping refugees enter illegally and supplying illegal visas, and was held in pre-trial detention in St. Gallen. She is said to have admitted her own actions while refusing to name anyone who had helped her; her biographers say she lost the baby she was carrying while in custody. The case dragged on until June 1942, when she was acquitted for lack of evidence.
An Orthodox rescue network
Prison did not stop her. Working with her husband and, later, his relatives, she built an independent rescue operation outside the official Swiss Jewish organisations, whose caution and legalism she found intolerable when lives were at stake. In 1941 the Sternbuchs founded in Montreux a relief organisation to help Jewish refugees, many of them rabbis and yeshiva students, who had escaped to Shanghai; it was later broadened to aid Jewish refugees everywhere. In 1944 it became the official Swiss representative of the Vaad Hatzalah, the rescue committee created by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada.
The couple used every tool they could find. They gained access to the diplomatic pouch of the Polish legation in Bern, through which they sent coded cables, money and messages. On 2 September 1942 they used this channel to alert Orthodox leaders in New York to the mass murder of Polish Jewry, reinforcing the report sent weeks earlier by Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress. Recha Sternbuch cultivated the papal nuncio in Switzerland, who allowed Vatican couriers to carry money and messages into occupied Europe, and she was among the first to distribute Latin American identity papers, documents that could protect their holders from deportation. Some of these came from the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, where the Jewish diplomat George Mantello issued thousands of citizenship papers.
A Sabbath journey
Stories about Recha Sternbuch’s single-mindedness circulate widely in Orthodox circles, and one has become emblematic. On the Sabbath of her son’s bar mitzvah, the story goes, word came that Jews were in danger and needed immediate help. Instead of attending the celebration, she set off to rescue them, breaking the Sabbath, which Jewish law not only permits but requires when a life is at stake, the principle of pikuach nefesh. The details differ between tellings: one version has her travelling to Vichy France, another has the Sternbuchs securing the release of refugees arrested by Swiss police. What all versions share is the conviction that defined her life, that saving a life took precedence over everything, including her own family’s joy.
People who knew her recalled that she made no distinction between religious and secular Jews in need of help. Her own piety was never in doubt, but it expressed itself as action.
Negotiating with Himmler
In 1944, as the war turned against Germany, the Sternbuchs pursued their boldest gamble. Through intermediaries they approached Jean-Marie Musy, a former president of the Swiss Confederation with far-right sympathies who was personally acquainted with Heinrich Himmler. At Recha Sternbuch’s urging, Musy and his son Benoît travelled to Germany, across roads under Allied bombardment, to negotiate with Himmler for the release of Jews held in the camps, holding out the prospect of payment and of goodwill with the Western Allies. According to the historian and author Max Wallace, Musy dangled a promise of five million Swiss francs, money that was never actually to change hands, and encouraged Himmler to believe that sparing Jews might open the way to a separate peace with the West. On 20 November 1944 the Sternbuchs cabled Orthodox rabbis in New York that Musy had secured a promise to cease extermination in the concentration camps.
The talks produced one concrete result. On 7 February 1945 a train left the Theresienstadt ghetto carrying 1,210 Jewish prisoners, who reached Switzerland safely. Further transports were promised but never came; Hitler is reported to have forbidden them when he learned of the release, and the Sternbuchs believed their efforts were also undermined by opposition from within the Swiss Jewish establishment. They kept negotiating through Musy until the end of the war, pressing for camps to be handed over intact rather than evacuated on death marches.
How much did she save?
Estimates of Recha Sternbuch’s achievement vary enormously, and historians continue to debate them. Her 1984 biography by Joseph Friedenson and David Kranzler, Heroine of Rescue, credited her with saving thousands of lives. In 2017 the writer Max Wallace went further in In the Name of Humanity, arguing from archival documents that the Sternbuchs’ negotiations through Musy contributed to Himmler’s order in late 1944 to halt the gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Other historians have questioned this, pointing to the advancing Red Army and to several other groups who were negotiating with Himmler at the same time.
What is not in dispute is the documented record: the smuggling across the St. Gallen border, the arrest and acquittal, the relief work for refugees in Shanghai, the Polish and Vatican channels, the Latin American papers, and the 1,200 people who stepped off the train in Switzerland in February 1945.
After the war
When the war ended, the Sternbuchs’ organisation turned from rescue to relief, as the survivors of the camps, many of them alone, destitute and stateless, needed food, papers and somewhere to go. Much of what is known about Recha Sternbuch’s wartime work comes from the archives of the Vaad Hatzalah and the American War Refugee Board, from Swiss records, and from the recollections of her family and of the people she helped, gathered decades later by historians.
She died on 6 February 1971, at the age of sixty-five. Sources disagree on where: the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland gives Paris, while other accounts give Montreux, the Swiss town where the couple’s rescue organisation had been based.
An unsung heroine
For decades Recha Sternbuch was little known outside Orthodox communities, partly because she worked outside the mainstream Jewish organisations and partly because her methods, smuggling, forged papers, bribery and back-channel deals with Nazi leaders, did not fit neatly into official histories. Her story has gradually reached a wider audience through Kranzler’s research, Wallace’s book and the growing attention paid to Swiss rescuers such as Grüninger and Mantello.
She remains a striking figure: a deeply observant mother, raised in a world that expected women to stay out of public life, who became one of the most daring rescue activists of the Second World War. Her conviction that one Jew in danger was reason enough to drop everything, the Sabbath, the family celebration, her own safety, is the thread that runs through every story told about her.
Sources & further reading
Recha Sternbuch, Wikipedia · Sternbuch, Recha, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS) · Orthodox Jewish Housewife behind Secret Deal to End the Holocaust, Aish.com · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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