Holocaust refugees in a global context
In the 1930s and 40s, many Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe fled their homes to search for safety in countries away from persecution. Some of these destinations, notably Britain and the United States, are widely known about because research still focuses heavily on journeys within and to the West, with movements such as the Kindertransport having received particular attention. But Jewish refugee journeys to Western Europe and North America are only one part of a far bigger story.
Demonstrating the global nature of Jewish refugee experiences in the mid-twentieth century, here I focus on East Asia. Alongside other scholars, I encourage a move away from the widely understood sites of Europe and the West, towards a truly global understanding of wartime Jewish refugee movement, complicating how Holocaust refuge and survival are defined. This shift will help to develop both our understanding of the worldwide repercussions of the Holocaust and of the scope of wartime Jewish movement.
There has been a recent global turn within Holocaust Studies: a growing body of scholarship focuses on Jewish refugees and the Holocaust in contexts that had been previously ignored. The importance of the Soviet Union has first been considered, as a space refugees both existed within and also moved through. More recently, scholars have examined refugee experiences in the French and British Empire, for instance in the French Caribbean, as well as the responses of the colonized and sovereign peoples of West and East Africa. Research on wartime experiences in Asia has also been developed, especially on Shanghai. This can be seen in Refugee History blogs, including Ria Sunga’s post on Jews in The Philippines and Helena F. S. Lopes’ on student refugees in wartime Macau.
This work has been important for a number of reasons, for example in highlighting how those experiencing the war in Europe did so in different ways to those living through the conflict in other parts of the world. This is particularly true for the end of the war. In Shanghai, Jews and Chinese people continued to worry about American air bombings – a fear actualised when a bomb hit the Shanghai ghetto in July 1945. Many Jewish refugees in Asia, and the aid networks attempting to assist their onward mobility, also had to contend with conflicts such as the Chinese Civil War (1945-49) and later the Korean War (1950-53). As Andrew Buchanan notes, ‘across much of Asia there was simply and literally no peace for months or even years after Tokyo’s surrender’. Therefore, taking a global perspective to Holocaust refugees complicates the established Western-centric timeline of the Holocaust and the war and connects to histories that offer alternative readings of this period, such as the ‘forty-year crisis’ from 1919 to 1959 discussed by Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch. Doing so highlights the varied trajectories taken and individual experiences of forced displacement, which took many forms.
Following this global turn, in my current doctoral research I focus on Jewish refugees who travelled to Japan, and who in the process often made journeys covering multiple countries across land and sea. For example, many Jews who arrived in Kobe, a city in Japan, in the early 1940s arrived via Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, having used the Trans-Siberian railway and sea travel to cross multiple borders.
Access to visas was central to shaping their routes. Many Jews who ended up in Kobe held visas issued by diplomats Chiune Sugihara and Jan Zwartendijk. Jan Zwartendijk, the acting Dutch consul for Lithuania, was willing to give Jews end visas to Curaçao, an island in the Dutch West Indies, which indicated that they would finish their journey in Curaçao. Zwartendijk had been authorised to sign these visas by the Dutch Ambassador L.P.J de Decker. The visas stated that an entry visa was not required for refugees to come to the island. However, while a visa may not have been needed, entry to Curaçao required the permission of local governors, which refugees did not have. Therefore, Curaçao visas were understood by both diplomats and refugees as a further step in escaping persecution, rather than a guarantee of settling in the Dutch West Indies. Indeed, no Jewish refugees actually went to Curaçao. Obtaining the Curaçao visas meant refugees could claim they needed to travel through Japan to reach the Dutch West Indies, and so could petition the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, for Japanese transit visas. These transit visas would take them to Kobe, from where many refugees hoped to travel to the US or Palestine.
This one example highlights the transnational and bureaucratic complexities of these Jewish refugee journeys; visa acquisitions, reliance on diplomatic agreement and, in the case of the Curaçao visas, an awareness that what was considered on paper their official destination was not necessarily what would transpire in reality. Such experiences can prove challenging for historians to study, as fully understanding the motivation behind them requires access to refugee voices alongside official documents, and an awareness that journeys planned on paper and the actual refugee journey, at times, looked very different.
Tracking global Jewish refugee journeys also helps to show connections maintained between those who moved and those who stayed behind. But what did these networks look like in practice for individual families?
The Wang family, composed of father Szymon, mother Emilia and daughter Edwarda, are one example of these criss-crossing geographies that highlights a global flow of movement and correspondence. Szymon Wang obtained a US tourist visa in 1939, but his wife refused to go to America, instead staying in Lvov, at that time part of Poland. Szymon and his daughter Edwarda travelled from Lvov to Istanbul and then went to Bombay before Kobe. From Kobe, they travelled to Yokohama, where they took a ship to the US in 1941. While in Istanbul, Szymon managed to obtain Nicaraguan passports for the family, which he sent to Emilia. Their last correspondence was in 1943: that same year Emilia was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Here, she was put in the international section of the camp due to her Nicaraguan passport, but in October 1943 was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered.
This story shows the wide-ranging geographies and experiences encountered by members of the same family, and how Jewish refugees’ ’world of possibilities’ was impacted by their mobility and place. We see too how global journeys were entwined with better understood Holocaust trajectories, so that Szymon Wang obtaining a visa for his family in Istanbul changed the placement of Emilia Wang in Bergen-Belsen. Understanding how events in these seemingly disconnected spaces could have life-changing effects suggests that refugees’ networks and choices at different points in their journeys can only be fully comprehended when viewing Holocaust refugees through a global perspective.
The header image is a photograph of the port of Kobe in 1927, looking out from high up over the buildings of the city towards the port, with many ships visible, large and small. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
