By Elizabeth Perry
Tom Lewinsohn and his family did not try to leave their home in Berlin until January 1941, after Tom’s father received a tip from a policeman that their family would soon be deported. Very few places were open to Jewish refugees by 1941, so Tom and his family fled to one of the few places still open to them – Shanghai. For many German Jews, especially those emigrating after Kristallnacht in 1938, Shanghai was one of the very few places that did not limit Jewish immigration. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, there were 17,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai by 1939.
Most of the testimony I have transcribed thus far featured the experiences of those that survived the war in Europe in concentration camps, but some of the testimonies feature survivors that escaped Germany before they were deported. Many of them followed a long, tangled route to safety. Klaus Frank and his father were arrested after Kristallnacht and sent to Sachsenhausen, but his family managed to pay for their release, and afterwards they made it to the Dominican Republic. Reggie Goldberg’s family managed to board a French ship to Cuba, but like the famous St. Louis, they were turned back. The family later obtained fake papers and escaped on a flight to the United States from Portugal.
Having studied the Holocaust, and taught it to high school students, one of the questions I often hear is why more of the Jews in Europe, particularly Germany, did not leave. In retrospect it seems like an easy choice, but in reality this was a very difficult decision. These families had often lived in their hometowns for generations, they had homes, businesses, friends, and extended family nearby. Most did not have the money to emigrate. How many could actually imagine what the Nazis planned? Reggie remembers that her father was convinced it would blow over, up until the day that Reggie was picked up at school by the police and sent to a ghetto in Poland with her parents. Klaus’ father dismissed Hitler in 1933, figuring that he “wouldn’t last the next week.” Tom’s father fought in World War I and received the Iron Cross – all his friends told him that no one would touch him because of his service. There were many logical reasons why they didn’t want to leave, and not least of those was the fact that they would be leaving their lives behind. Tom remembers that they left their apartment in the middle of the night, taking only what they could pack and carry with them.
Compounding these problems was the fact that, particularly after 1938, it was difficult to find a place to go. After the war, Tom found out that his father, who worked as a doctor, tried to obtain papers for his family to go to England. He received a reply stating that England did not need any more doctors. Only a few places, like Shanghai, were still available for Jewish refugees, and these were difficult to reach. For most, by the time they realized what was happening, it was already too late.