War and Efforts to Escape
ELI RECEIVED HIS diploma as a doctor of medicine on June 15, 1940. On that same day, the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania, and by early August it had become a Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the USSR (“Annexation of the Baltic States”). Eli began working in the krankenkasse and held an internship at the university. As he recalled, “We didn’t have any difficulty under Russian regime, because antisemitism was strictly forbidden, punishable by prison, and everybody was sweet and nice to us. But we knew that there is an underground favorable to Hitler. . . .”
In fact, from the late 1930s, the family had been trying to find ways to leave Europe, but the United States was largely unavailable as a refuge in the years leading up to the Holocaust. The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, passed at a time of intense nativism and xenophobia, reduced the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the country, and set quotas for each country of origin based on its representation in the United States in 1890. This severely limited further immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which had increased greatly in the years between 1900 and 1920. American secular ideology prevented designating Jews as a distinct population, but it was known that immigrants from certain countries after 1890 were predominantly Jewish. In 1924, the highest quotas were for Germany (51,227, which enabled Jewish German refugees to immigrate, at first), Great Britain and Northern Ireland (34,007), and the Irish Free State (28,567). All other quotas were in four figures or less (“Who Was Shut Out?”).
The quota for immigrants from Russia was set at 2,248; for Lithuania it was 344. Whether or not the numbers were the same in the 1930s, this disparity between the two quotas was to have heartbreaking consequences for Eli, his wife, and their child. Serafima had been born in St. Petersburg in 1908 (Leningrad, by the 1930s), so she and Borya might have come to the United States in the Russian quota. As Eli described it in his interview, the US consulate “said she could go any time.” Instead, however, the family decided to stay in Lithuania together. I don’t when that was, or exactly how they envisioned the consequences of their decision. I don’t know who persuaded whom, or if there was any persuasion involved. When my father mentioned this situation to me once, I was too afraid to ask him any questions; I suppose I thought probing might evoke unbearable pain. My brother, only about twenty years old when he interviewed our father, may have felt similarly. Thinking about it now, however, I realize I might have been more afraid for myself than for my father. Perhaps I was afraid to hear my father tell this story with its horrible ending. But he had already lived with the outcome of that decision for many years, and perhaps he would have been able to talk about it. He might have welcomed the chance.
We know, however, that as early as 1938 Eli’s brother Avraham took steps to go to America. On January 2 of that year, he and Rose sent Dave and Ida an excited and optimistic letter:
My Dear and Beloved Brother and Sister-in-law!
I am glad that you are well and that you feel good and healthy.
I thank you for your efforts, that you are concerned about us. I was at “HIAS,”1 and they told me that it is easy to make up the papers if you have the means, or if we have friends with means. They say that they can make up the papers in the course of four months’ time, and they would be able to count us as part of the July quota for this year.
I want to ask you—if I am able to establish myself in America; according to my profession, I am a bookkeeper and a business manager. You will likely receive an inquiry from the New York “HIAS.” The inquiry will be sent by the Kovno “HIAS” to the New York “HIAS,” so that they may inquire of you about us.
Avraham encloses a letter from “Sorale” (little Sarah, around six years old; figure 36 depicts her at age nine), printed in Yiddish in neat schoolgirl handwriting. The note, in ink on graph-lined paper, begins, “Dear Uncle, I want to see you,” and then Sarah goes on to tell her uncle and her musical aunt that she does well in school and plays the fidl mit klavier, violin and piano. She carefully signs the letter “Sorale Rochelson.” At the end of Avraham’s letter, Rose adds a brief wish “that we may soon be able to speak with you in person,” noting, “You would certainly like my Sorale. Bobe Henale [Grandma Henye, with a sweet diminutive ending] will already tell you that.”2
Figure 36. Sarah Rochelson, January 21, 1940. Family collection.
It is hard to imagine how anyone could resist such an appeal, and maybe they did not. Ida and Dave had seen Avraham and Rose, then pregnant, less than seven years earlier. In 1938, did they feel they could not financially support their brother and his family? In fact, Dave’s business had failed a few years earlier, and Ida earned a city teacher’s salary. Did they think of contacting relatives in Oklahoma—cousins who generously assisted Eli after the war? Maybe they did, and those cousins, building a business, were unable to help, even if they tried. Among family genealogy files I have discovered a United States of America Affidavit of Support, filed with the Cunard White Star Line by David B. Pierce of Chicago, on behalf of ten members of the German branch of the Rochelsohn family in 1938, after Kristallnacht. Germans, as noted above, had the largest immigration quota under the 1924 law. However, out of the ten individuals promised sponsorship, only four were able to immigrate, two teenagers and their parents.3 The rest were murdered in Terezin (Theresienstadt) and other concentration camps.
The family in Kovno did not stop trying. In a letter of April 1941, Henye Rochelson mentioned to Dave and Ida a branch of the family that lived in Brooklyn. She did not ask directly for their help, but about their health: “My child,” she wrote, “I am suffering greatly on account of my nephew—that he died. Indeed, he was still a young person. . . . He left behind a wife and children. In fact, he had a gold business [he dealt in gold], so he was wealthy. How is his brother, Moishe Esner, and how are his sisters—aren’t they unmarried? Write me about them. If you see them some time [?] give them my regards.”4 At the bottom of the letter, in English and in Dave’s handwriting, are the names and addresses of members of an Esner family, people I had not known of before seeing this letter recently. Following genealogical leads online, I found descendants of Moishe Esner, now new and dear cousins.5 I asked Bill and Sandy Esner what they thought of this missed family connection, not only in 1941, but also over the many years Eli lived in the United States and, indeed, in the same city. Bill told me that if Dave had contacted the individuals whose names he had written down, they would not have had the means to rescue anyone in 1941. If that had been the case, we concurred, perhaps neither side felt they wanted to continue the connection. It is also possible that Dave, in the United States since 1912, had never contacted these relatives before, and then, years later, felt uncomfortable doing so when it was clear that he was asking for or even implying that they grant him an enormous favor. Perhaps Dave did everything he could have done when he received all these letters and possibly others. In the end, I just don’t know.
Documentary evidence, however, supports what has become common knowledge: It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Jews to leave Lithuania in early 1938, and even more so after the war started, although Jewish organizations did what they could to repatriate Lithuanian Jews in the United States and elsewhere. The HIAS-HICEM archive at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research offers a sense of both the strenuous efforts of HIAS officials to help Kovno Jews emigrate and the difficult bureaucratic situation they faced that was most likely unknown to refugees applying to leave.6 Kovno had a population of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand Jews in the years prior to the start of the war (USHMM, “Kovno”). A statistical document sent from the Kaunas office of HIAS-ICA to its Paris headquarters, the only such document I found covering a complete calendar year, illustrates how few of them were able to leave in 1939, the year after Avraham, Rose, and Sarah sought HIAS assistance. It was a year, too, in which Jewish refugees from throughout occupied Poland fled to Vilnius, once again part of Lithuania as of late September, and added to the workload of the Kaunas office, which served Riga and Vilnius as well.
In 1939, 5,119 would-be emigrants approached the office, of whom 3,475 men, women, and children officially registered; 1,554 of those intended to emigrate to the United States. Yet a final tabulation indicates that only 204 people, in all of 1939, went to the United States from the Kaunas office, with promised support. The total who arrived at all destinations (the second largest being Palestine, at 182) was 591. Thus only about 10 percent of those who approached the office at all, during a year when mobility might still have seemed possible, were able to leave their soon-to-be-occupied cities. When one realizes that support in the country of destination was only one step in a process that required obtaining a Lithuanian passport as well as a visa to the intended place of refuge, a ship’s ticket that cost more than $300 per person, and transit visas—all of which, even today, involve expense and complicated application procedures—it is not surprising that many would-be refugees could not leave.7 As Israel Bernstein recounted in his March 1940 report to HIAS and HICEM, “we must face reality as it is and confess that there are to-day no emigration possibilities even for a small portion of those interested. Since the catastrophe [of the Nazi invasion of Poland in the fall of 1939] there were at Lithuania issued visas: 91 for the United States, 205 for other countries, 250 for Palestine,” smaller numbers, for the United States, than appear in HICEM’s statistical tables, and of all those who were issued visas to anywhere, Bernstein indicates that only 258 had left at the time of his writing (page 4 of report).8
Bernstein also expresses, as diplomatically as possible, his frustration at the lack of awareness in America of the dire situation for Jews under both the Soviet and Nazi regimes: “Some time ago (and, perhaps, even now) a considerable faction of American Jewish opinion indulged in discussions as to which of both the captivities, the German and the Russian, is the less cruel and more human. From my discussions with many prominent personalities [who had experienced one or both] . . ., I gathered the opinion that there can be no talk on where life is easier and better. [In] both it is ‘worse’” (5). This was in 1940, after the Nazis had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland. How much less could Americans in early 1938 have imagined the extermination to come? Moreover, the sums of money Avraham would have needed were probably beyond the reach of his American relatives. Even the wealthy Nathan Straus Jr. was unable to help his friend Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, bring his family to the United States from Amsterdam (Rothstein C5). Without means or “friends with means,” Avraham, Rose, and Sarah could not get on that ship in July. Many hopeful families like theirs found themselves without hope.
1. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded in 1881 to assist Jews from Europe to immigrate to the United States. It remained active throughout the twentieth century and, as HIAS, continues to aid refugees and support immigration reform (“HIAS”).
2. Letter of January 2, 1938. Translation of adult handwriting by Rivka Schiller; translation of Sorale’s letter by author.
3. In later years, when we were all middle-aged, I came to know the teenagers, Hans Georg Israel and Inge Sarah, at that later time known as George Rockson and Ingrid Scheuer. George was instrumental, in fact, in connecting me with family genealogists, photographs, and information.
4. Translation by Rivka Schiller.
5. A query to the LitvakSIG listserv resulted in extensive, generous, and very helpful research by Bette Stoop Mas; a subsequent query to the Ellis Island database led me to the ship’s manifest of a woman who had to have been my grandmother’s sister, named Chaine (as the manifest has it) or, as in later documents, Sarah, a woman who came to the United States in 1897 and was killed in a trolley accident in Brooklyn in 1909. My grandmother’s nephew “in the gold business” was Abraham Esner, a jeweler who died at age sixty in early 1941, and indeed the brother of Moishe. The relationships verified in conversation with Bill Esner were confirmed by death certificates that Ms. Stoop Mas helped me to obtain from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
6. The HIAS-HICEM Archives, Series II France I, are in microfilm file MKM 16.7 RG 245.5 at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Center for Jewish History, New York. HICEM was formed in 1927 by a merger of HIAS (the United States–based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the ICA (Jewish Colonization Association, based in Paris and London), and Emigdirect (based in Berlin). The acronym combines parts of each organization’s name; Emigdirect withdrew in 1934 (“HICEM”).
7. The statistics I cite are from YIVO file MKM 16.7, RG 245.5, folder 84, Kaunas HICEM statistics, 1939. I am indebted to Marsha Rozenblit, who helped me translate from the German, explained the relations of the various columns of figures to each other, and recounted to me the many steps an emigrant had to take from first approach to the committee to safe arrival in a land of refuge. The cost of a ship’s ticket, $300 per person, is noted in the report by Israel Bernstein to the HIAS and HICEM offices in New York and Paris, March 22, 1940 (YIVO MKM 16.7, RG 245.5, folder 92).
8. Bernstein, on a fact-finding mission for HIAS-HICEM, recounted the sufferings of ten thousand Polish refugees newly arrived in Vilnius, most of them men uncertain of their future and afraid for wives and children they were forced to leave behind. Bernstein indicates that waits of five to seven years were anticipated for most visa applicants, and he is forthright about the horrific experiences of the refugees, whose stories “force the listener to cast down his eyes and remain silent. Painfully silent” (page 2 of report, YIVO MKM 16.7, RG 245.5, folder 92). While he is able to recount successes in providing temporary shelter, food, medical care, and clothing, he expresses frustration at not being able to answer the more pressing question of where the refugees and their families were to go. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that there is no other Jewish organization whose representative has, like the emigration worker, to face this problem in all its ramifications. For in prevalent conditions mere counsel and advice is less than not enough” (page 4). Later Bernstein coordinated HIAS-ICA activities in Vilnius, Kaunas, and Riga.