Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946 Madhouse film

Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt
W.W. Norton, 2009

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In 1938, just weeks after the Anschluss that united Germany and Austria, successful and respected Dr. Lothar Furth, who operated one of the most prestigious obstetric clinics in Vienna, wrote to an acquaintance of his in England, asking of if his acquaintance could offer work –- even menial work –- to him and his wife, since he was certain he would soon be losing his job under the rapidly-expanding Nazi regime. The friend in England wasted no time in contacting the German Jewish Aid Committee in an attempt to expedite the Furths’ emigration, only to learn that a mob had dragged the doctor and his wife out of their clinic and forced them to clean the sidewalk with toothbrushes. The following day, the two killed themselves.

The despair of the Furths was shared by thousands of German Jews who realized their initial optimism in the face of Hitler’s rise to power was gravely wrong. The Furths never got a chance to flee that new power, but the doctor’s desperate letter, the heartbreaking certainty that they City Rats movie download hoped to flee, brings them squarely into the focus of Flight From the Reich, the masterful and horrifically riveting new book by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt. As Dwork and Van Pelt point out, that initial optimism wasn’t purely fantasy. “On average,” they write, “governments after 1918 had lasted less than nine months and no one had any reason to think this one would be any different.” Even when the darker reality began to assert itself, those with the means to flee did so in the explicit expectation of return. Berlin Alxeanderplatz

author Alfred Doblin speaks for many such:

One Night with the King ipod It would just be a brief trip abroad. You’ll let the storm pass over you, just three or four months, someone will have dealt with the Nazis by then … I left the house with one small suitcase, alone.

The fate of the six million Jews who fell victim to the Nazis is exhaustively documented; the fate of those who fled or were displaced is less so, mainly because it comprised many many thousands of different fates. Drawing a coherent picture on such a vast canvas is a task Dwork and Van Pelt prosecute with enormous energy and commendable spirit. Flight from the Reich may be dark in its subject matter, but it’s a bright shining accomplishment in Holocaust studies. Its authors begin with the clearest possible assertion that Holocaust studies is exactly what they’re doing:

All European Jews who came under the control of Germany and its allies were targeted for death. Some six million were killed. The remaining three million survived camps, endured life in hiding, “passed” as a gentile, fled to safety, or experienced some combination of these. All were victims of the Holocaust. Had Jews not hidden or passed, they too would have been deported. Had they not sought asylum elsewhere, they too would have been caught in the machinery of death.

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Fleeing does not write refugees out of the story; it simply takes the story elsewhere. Indeed: it takes it everywhere. The history of refugee Jews during and after the Nazi era is literally, from the Latin centrifugal, to flee the center.

That flight from the center landed refugees in thousands of far-flung and improbable destinations, and Dwork and Van Pelt follow them everywhere. The shame of the niggardly welcome extended by England and the United States is well known; the tales of other destinations will be less familiar to readers. As their civil rights were systematically curtailed and then erased, German Jews grew more and more frantic to find a way out of the trap closing on them … even if that way out led to places none of them had ever thought about before, except perhaps as a name on a map, such as Shanghai:

Panic-stricken German and Austrian Jews continued to buy tickets issued by Nord Deutsche Lloyd, Lloyd Trieste, and Nippon Yusen Kaisya, knowing that upon arrival they would have to fend for themselves in an utterly strange metropolis that promised nothing but the most destitute and temporary refuge from persecution -– a squalid waiting room for better times. Abandoning the idea that learning a trade would help them earn a living and giving up on acquiring the local language, Jews clutched at hope and set sail. By the outbreak of the war, seventeen thousand Jews had arrived in the city, without a future, but safe from the Germans.

Flight from the Reich, almost by definition, has a sister-subject living alongside its main one, because as Dwork and Van Pelt follow the exodus of their subjects, they must also chart the slowly growing and changing awareness of the Holocaust in other countries. This picture is usually not pretty, but our authors don’t flinch from reporting the worst, even though Americans who’ve learned their history from Hollywood movies just might (as when General Patton repeatedly refers to Jews as a “sub-human species”). But no matter: this is a great and powerful book, a fitting bookend for Richard Evans’ recently completed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and a masterpiece in its own right.

–Steve Donoghue