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Authors: Leslie Maitland
Tags: Non-Fiction, WWII
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crowded airplane, for instance, she once flatly refused to take her seat in row 27 and insisted my father travel the aisle to find fellow passengers willing to trade seats before take-off. And this time, at least, her vehemence left him no choice.
“You see those people seated in the twenty-seventh row?” my father pointed out drily once they had switched seats and were airborne. “I should warn you—if they go down, we go down also.”
The concept of collective doom was one she was used to, but the goal of escape, the personal struggle toward life and renewal, was like hope through a storm, the thing that prevailed.
FOUR
THE SIDEWALK OF CUCKOLDS
B Y THE TIME Hanna returned from Arosa in late 1937, the growing number of legal, economic, and social restrictions on German Jews had forced Sigmar to accept the urgent need to get out of the country. Their immediate world was shrinking around them, and escape had become his critical goal, never mind the loss of their home or his business. But he had waited so long that it was no longer easy to gain entry anywhere else. For months, he struggled to secure visas to immigrate to the United States, but with Jews by the many thousands seeking admission, his written pleas went unanswered, and his subsequent trips to the visa office in Stuttgart proved equally fruitless.
The following March, declaring a need for Lebensraum or living space in the east, Germany annexed Austria, where jubilant crowds welcomed Hitler’s troops into Vienna. Almost immediately, Jews were violently attacked on the streets, the women forced to their knees to scrub sidewalks and gutters. Mass arrests of Jews in Germany began in June, and soon synagogues in Munich and Nuremberg were burned to the ground.
At an international conference on the refugee question held that summer in France, at Evian on Lake Geneva, the scope of the problem loomed large. Many of the thirty-two participating countries offered sympathy. Very few offered asylum. Although a quarter of Germany’s six hundred thousand Jews had fled its borders since 1933, France had accepted only 10 percent of them. With Austrian Jews now swelling the tides of refugees, the British not only tightened restrictions for England but also refused to accept Jews into Palestine. American quotas were kept tightly in place, as polls showed that the majority of Americans viewed Jews negatively and believed them to be a threat to the nation. Those who sought to curb immigration argued to President Franklin Roosevelt that the Depression still demanded putting domestic needs first. As a result, between 1933 and America’s entry into World War II eight years later, only about one hundred thousand Jews were admitted.
“It will no doubt be appreciated,” an Australian delegate announced at the Evian conference, “that as we have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” And Canada said that in terms of welcoming refugees, “none was too many.” Afterward, it was bitterly noted among Germany’s desperate Jews that Evian spelled backward yielded naïve , which was what they saw their hopes to have been, when they expected the conference to offer them someplace to go.
Sigmar now aimed his efforts at France, believing that what remained of the small building supply business he had launched in Mulhouse before he was married, along with the fact that his sister lived there, might help win admission. Then perhaps they’d have greater success winning American visas as “stateless” refugees stranded in France, he reasoned, than they’d experienced applying from Freiburg. And so, week after week, Sigmar traveled to the French consulate in Karlsruhe in pursuit of French visas, and he hired agents both there and in Mulhouse to lead him through thickets of requirements and charges. While his sister Marie’s son, Edmond Cahen, a lawyer in Mulhouse, helped him with legal papers, in the end Sigmar was obliged to pay what he termed “a
“You see those people seated in the twenty-seventh row?” my father pointed out drily once they had switched seats and were airborne. “I should warn you—if they go down, we go down also.”
The concept of collective doom was one she was used to, but the goal of escape, the personal struggle toward life and renewal, was like hope through a storm, the thing that prevailed.
FOUR
THE SIDEWALK OF CUCKOLDS
B Y THE TIME Hanna returned from Arosa in late 1937, the growing number of legal, economic, and social restrictions on German Jews had forced Sigmar to accept the urgent need to get out of the country. Their immediate world was shrinking around them, and escape had become his critical goal, never mind the loss of their home or his business. But he had waited so long that it was no longer easy to gain entry anywhere else. For months, he struggled to secure visas to immigrate to the United States, but with Jews by the many thousands seeking admission, his written pleas went unanswered, and his subsequent trips to the visa office in Stuttgart proved equally fruitless.
The following March, declaring a need for Lebensraum or living space in the east, Germany annexed Austria, where jubilant crowds welcomed Hitler’s troops into Vienna. Almost immediately, Jews were violently attacked on the streets, the women forced to their knees to scrub sidewalks and gutters. Mass arrests of Jews in Germany began in June, and soon synagogues in Munich and Nuremberg were burned to the ground.
At an international conference on the refugee question held that summer in France, at Evian on Lake Geneva, the scope of the problem loomed large. Many of the thirty-two participating countries offered sympathy. Very few offered asylum. Although a quarter of Germany’s six hundred thousand Jews had fled its borders since 1933, France had accepted only 10 percent of them. With Austrian Jews now swelling the tides of refugees, the British not only tightened restrictions for England but also refused to accept Jews into Palestine. American quotas were kept tightly in place, as polls showed that the majority of Americans viewed Jews negatively and believed them to be a threat to the nation. Those who sought to curb immigration argued to President Franklin Roosevelt that the Depression still demanded putting domestic needs first. As a result, between 1933 and America’s entry into World War II eight years later, only about one hundred thousand Jews were admitted.
“It will no doubt be appreciated,” an Australian delegate announced at the Evian conference, “that as we have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” And Canada said that in terms of welcoming refugees, “none was too many.” Afterward, it was bitterly noted among Germany’s desperate Jews that Evian spelled backward yielded naïve , which was what they saw their hopes to have been, when they expected the conference to offer them someplace to go.
Sigmar now aimed his efforts at France, believing that what remained of the small building supply business he had launched in Mulhouse before he was married, along with the fact that his sister lived there, might help win admission. Then perhaps they’d have greater success winning American visas as “stateless” refugees stranded in France, he reasoned, than they’d experienced applying from Freiburg. And so, week after week, Sigmar traveled to the French consulate in Karlsruhe in pursuit of French visas, and he hired agents both there and in Mulhouse to lead him through thickets of requirements and charges. While his sister Marie’s son, Edmond Cahen, a lawyer in Mulhouse, helped him with legal papers, in the end Sigmar was obliged to pay what he termed “a
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