The Wall Street Journal
Strange Migration: An Unlikely Haven For Refugees
By JORDANA HORN
February 15, 2008; Page W11
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 Völkischer 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 Sosúa on the country's northern coast. The story of this strange migration is being told at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage. "Sosúa: 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.
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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 Sosúa in the Dominican Republic, he said yes immediately . . . then looked for a map to find out where the Dominican Republic was. Since Sosúa 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 Sosúa: 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 café society to their struggles with tropical diseases. When the war ended, the majority of Sosúan 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 Sosúan Jewish community celebrating Hanukkah in 2007, using the same candelabra pictured in the barracks synagogue of the 1940s.
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Ms. Horn is a lawyer and writer at work on her first novel.
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