The Wall Street Journal-20080215-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Taste -- Houses of Worship -- Strange Migration- An Unlikely Haven For Refugees
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Taste -- Houses of Worship -- Strange Migration: An Unlikely Haven For Refugees
Full Text (980 words)On July 6, 1938, at Evian-les-Bains, a lovely French tourist resort on Lake Geneva, representatives of 32 countries met for a conference to discuss the growing Jewish refugee problem in Europe triggered by the rise of Nazi Germany. One by one, the representatives from each country (including the U.S.) explained why they would not be able to take in the displaced Jews. The German newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter encapsulated what Evian meant for the Jews: "Nobody wants them." The conference was later deemed by various historians to have given Hitler the implicit go-ahead for his Final Solution.
Out of all the conference attendees, only one unlikely nation volunteered to take in refugees. The Dominican Republic, led by dictator Rafael Trujillo, made an offer to receive as many as 100,000 people. Because of problems with exit and transit visas, only about 700 Jews actually made it to that country's shores, to the town of Sosua on the country's northern coast.
The story of this strange migration is being told at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage. "Sosua: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic" (which opens Sunday and runs through July 25) presents the fascinating and little-known tale of the Jews saved from the Holocaust by a genocidal Caribbean dictator.
As historian Marion A. Kaplan explains in her book "Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945" (published by the museum), a confluence of factors played into Trujillo's exceptional invitation. The Jews had proved themselves to be a "good minority" in Dominican society in the past -- that is, they were well integrated into the country's elite -- and, importantly, and ironically, Trujillo believed that the Jews would be a good buffer of "whiteness" against his country's darker-pigmented inhabitants. Clearly Trujillo was far from a racial egalitarian: In fact, he hoped that his magnanimous offer would deflect attention from the murderous aggression he perpetrated the year before on Haitians living in his country. Ms. Kaplan quotes one observer as saying that Trujillo's offer was "one of the boldest masterstrokes of modern press agentry."
As one might suspect, however, Austrian and German Jewish refugees did not spend much time analyzing the motivations of their benefactor. "The person who wanted to help us was not a humanist," one refugee, Luis Hess, a nonagenarian who continues to live in the Dominican Republic, said in an interview with Ms. Kaplan. "But did we have a choice? Hitler, the German racist, persecuted us and wanted to murder us. Trujillo, the Dominican racist, saved our lives."
The refugees simply wanted -- and needed -- to get out of Europe. When one refugee, Felix Bauer, was asked in a Swiss refugee camp if he wanted to become an agricultural pioneer in a place called Sosua in the Dominican Republic, he said yes immediately . . . then looked for a map to find out where the Dominican Republic was. Since Sosua was to be an agricultural settlement, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was told to seek out young, physically strong people with farm experience. "What they found in the refugee circles and internment camps of unoccupied Europe," Ms. Kaplan notes, "were young men and a few women desperate to escape their predicament and ready to say whatever necessary to do so."
In one group photograph in the exhibit, young people on a ship that is taking them away from their families but also away from Hitler smile with delight. An equally telling photograph shows some settlers on the day after their arrival in Sosua: Young men and women stand looking around with dumbfounded expressions on their faces; the women are wearing high heels and carrying handbags -- hardly farm- appropriate gear. Their new predicament is aptly summed up in a quotation from refugee Walter Allison that appears between the pictures: "I could repair shoes, but I didn't know how tomatoes grow." Another refugee, Edith Gersten, humorously recounts a priceless Alice- in-Wonderland moment: "We stared at the cow. What happened next? Does one get hold of the tail and pump until somehow the milk comes out?"
But over time, the refugees adjusted to their new lives, building barracks and then homes. They celebrated Jewish and Dominican holidays with their neighbors, planted crops, made cheeses and (non-kosher) sausages, and learned Spanish. The Jews were delighted to find the Dominican community welcoming and completely free of anti-Semitism. The exhibit provides a glimpse, through video interviews, pictures and artifacts, into the refugees' daily lives, from their attempts to re- create European cafe society to their struggles with tropical diseases. When the war ended, the majority of Sosuan settlers left for the U.S. or Israel, but others -- many of the men having married Dominican women -- stayed. The show concludes with a photograph of the current Sosuan Jewish community celebrating Hanukkah in 2007, using the same candelabra pictured in the barracks synagogue of the 1940s.
The exhibit holds important lessons in its comparatively small space. New York State Sen. Eric Schneiderman, along with the American Jewish Congress, originally approached the museum in 2004 with the idea to do an exhibit on Sosua. Mr. Schneiderman represents a large Dominican population in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and he thought that this presentation would exemplify a positive experience shared by the Dominican and Jewish communities. Reflecting the inclusive nature of Sosua itself, the exhibit is completely bilingual -- for the first time in the Museum of Jewish Heritage's history. Standing in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the museum raises implicit questions about the history of our own immigration policy simply by telling the story of one small nation that, for whatever reasons, stood up at a time when no one else did and opened its doors, saving lives that otherwise surely would have been lost.
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Ms. Horn is a lawyer and writer at work on her first novel.
