Walter Meyerhof may well have died in a Nazi death camp if it weren’t for a wad of unused toilet paper.
He had been attempting to flee Vichy-controlled France into Spain via the Pyrenees, but a pair of gendarmes had other ideas. The policemen led the Jewish teenager to jail, where he spent the night and was certain he’d soon be in the hands of the Gestapo. But, the very next day, he noticed a familiar customs officer when he and two fellow prisoners were led to a local cafe for a meal.
“Public toilets in France lacked toilet paper (and still do), so before leaving Banyuls, I had stuffed some into my back pocket,” wrote the longtime Stanford physics professor in his recently released autobiography, “In the Shadow of Love.”
“Turning away from my guard, I wrote on a piece of toilet paper: ‘Please contact my parents and tell them we have been jailed in Cerbere. On Saturday, we will be taken before the judge in Perpignan’…I crumpled up the paper and threw it on the ground, looking at the customs officer and gesturing toward the paper.”
Thanks to his parents — Meyerhof’s father, Otto, had won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1922 — and others including humanitarian Varian Fry, Meyerhof was freed and eventually escaped to Spain, Portugal and, finally, the United States.
A physics professor at Stanford from 1949 to 1992, he hadn’t thought much about his teenaged escapades and early life until enrolling in an autobiographical writing class at Foothill Community College taught by Sheila Dunec.
During the class, Meyerhof unearthed memories from the sands of time, and the Menlo Park resident combined a handful of vignettes about his childhood, the flight from his German homeland and his early life in the United States into a short book.
While Meyerhof grew up as a Lutheran, his parents’ background was Jewish. His obviously Jewish name and calls for his father’s dismissal from his university position in “low-brow Nazi newspapers” were enough to make school life very unpleasant for the young Meyerhof during the early years of the Third Reich.
He was taunted by Hitler Youth, threatened, and even assaulted by teachers. Eventually, his father lost his job at Kiel University, and, unlike so many Jewish families, left the country.
With the outbreak of hostilities, however, a relocation to France was not sufficient. Otto Meyerhof obtained a position near the French-Spanish border in hopes of sneaking across. With the aid of Fry — an American diplomat who saved thousands of Jews — the family escaped to America.
But not before young Walter, on his own, was rebuffed twice and crisscrossed France, several times leaving work camps. On at least one occasion, he left a residence only days ahead of the Gestapo.
“You must remember at the time I was 18 years old. And when you’re 18 you’re perhaps more resilient than when you’re 80,” said Meyerhof with a laugh, his German accent still present after more than 60 years in the United States.
“In general I’m a rather persistent person and don’t easily give up, but also, luck intervened in both [failed attempts to escape France]. It is quite clear my father’s Nobel Prize opened doors for me not opened to other people. I felt, on the whole, more secure than perhaps other people would feel.”
In 1996, the semi-retired Meyerhof “ran out of good ideas” relating to physics. He turned his attention and efforts to teaching of a different kind, however.
He’s spent the past six years as director of the Varian Fry Foundation, publicizing the feats of the man who saved him, his family and thousands of fellow Jews.
Meyerhof has helped distribute teaching materials about Fry to 35,000 schools across the country. He estimates that the kits may have helped to inform 750,000 schoolchildren about Fry’s life and work.
“I owe him a debt of gratitude. I feel he is a role model for American schoolchildren,” said Meyerhof.
“He helped people in situations that were also dangerous for him. And this idea of helping people in need, even if you are alone and can only do a limited amount of good, that’s a good example for American children.”