Flight From the Reich

Flight From the Reich

Review by Dennis Showalter

All European Jews who came under Nazi control were marked for death. Six million perished. Most of the three million who survived did so by some form of flight, and relative to their numbers the German Jews were by far the most successful. The authors structure their work around four themes: the people involved in the Jews’ flight, the places refugees reached, the papers that legitimated their status, and the problems they confronted. They present each theme in four time periods: 1933, when the first refugees left Germany; 1938-39, as the Nazis’ grip tightened; 1942, when the Final Solution moved into high gear; and 1945, the initial period of realizing what had happened.

Those Jews who fled during the first period were disproportionally from business and professional families, or young persons unestablished in life. A good number of them found places in a Palestine where British restrictions on immigration were still limited. Those who needed papers sought above all passports—in an environment where sovereign state were increasingly protective of that document. That, in turn, raised the problems of minority rights under international law, and whether Jews were a true minority. The moribund League of Nations was no help on either point.

In the second crisis period the key people were officials, German and others, who addressed questions of resettlement and destination. The places were anywhere any Jew could find refuge. Shanghai was a particular destination: a one-way ticket to no future in particular, but at least far away from the Germans. The papers were now visas: the means of fine-tuning entry to countries concerned with avoiding a “Jewish problem.” That was just about every country with a consulate in Germany. Related to the new paper was the new problem: the “rupture of departure” as families increasingly were separated by arcane emigration and immigration processes.

By 1942, the people central to the refugee experience were the passeurs: the amateurs and professionals who brought Jews out of a Reich-dominated Europe. The places were the internment camps set up to shelter Jews who could not be returned. In Russia these proved a means of survival for some. In France they became an unintended trap. And as more and more Jews lost contact with loved ones, the dominant form of paper became letters—mailed, smuggled, delivered almost at random, they maintained contact and hope. But how much dared a refugee hope for anything?

The fourth stage of the refugee experience answered that question. Its people were the “surviving remnant.” Their place was the focus of a universal question: what now? The answer took some to Israel, some across the Atlantic—and a very few back to what once had been home. The next step was paperwork: compiling lists of the living which ended so many hopes that somehow one’s own people had survived. And at the end, the dominant problem was adjustment: different for each person, but necessary for all. The survivors lost much and nevertheless made lives for themselves. This was not a triumphant conclusion. Yet it was a triumph of humanity: body, spirit, and will.

Hardcover: 512 pages

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. ( April 01, 2009 )

Item #: 73-6693

ISBN: 9780393062298

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 1.21 inches

Product Weight: 27.0 ounces