UNESCO 2014 Leaving Home Body Text
I waited until now, but now, time is running out.
For many, the journey through the Holocaust began well before the Wannsee Conference formulated the now-infamous “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” While no one could have imagined the systematic murder of millions of men, women, and children, the persecution of the 1930s presaged a difficult future for Jews throughout Europe. Many sought to flee the increasingly violent anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi party in occupied territories, and some sought refuge in faraway lands before the Nazis even managed to occupy their countries.
The experience of flight took people far from their homes, to places where they usually had no family, didn’t know the language, and the culture was foreign. With immigration policies becoming increasingly strict in the 1930s, many Jewish families headed to destinations they could never have imagined visiting. These were the only places accessible for Jews. Paul Engel describes his family’s flight to Shanghai, China, which did not require a visa. Thousands of Jewish families found safe haven there. They also found hardship, limited resources, and the unknown. Many thousands more sought familial connections in other hemispheres, in North and South America. John Baer, whose testimony is included here, discusses his quest to secure safe passage for his family to Latin America. 249 testimonies in the Visual History Archive include discussion of flight to China, and 428 testimonies discuss flight to Latin America.
Not everyone had the means to flee to far-flung lands, and with restrictions on legal transit they relied on the kindness of strangers, luck, and any other means necessary to get themselves to safety Maurice Blindt, at age 17, describes his illegal flight to Algiers in 1942. Maurice was able to reunite with family. This was often not the case as all of this movement led to the inevitable separation of families. The journey to the Holocaust is saturated with rupture, and for every story like Maurice’s, dozens more stand as moments of permanent and painful familial division.
Flight represented the beginning of large-scale displacement that altered the social landscape of dozens of countries and increased the spread of the Jewish diaspora. The moment of flight represents the end of any sense of agency that Jews and other persecuted groups had in the course of the journey leading to the Holocaust. While their choices were limited and uncertain, they still had choices. The dehumanizing process of deportation would soon remove this illusion of agency.