Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal by Marion Kaplan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal by Marion Kaplan Norman J. W. Goda Marion Kaplan . Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal . New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 2020 . 356 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000628 Marion Kaplan's study of Jewish refugees in neutral Portugal during the Holocaust is most welcome in terms of both content and method. Studies of refugees generally focus on governmental policy with a sprinkling of lived refugee experience based on poignant moments. Drawing on an array of sources from personal letters to memoirs to Jewish organizational records over the refugees' longue durée in Lisbon and other Portuguese locales, Kaplan provides an everyday history that is darkly colored by the brittle emotions and anxieties of the refugees themselves as they navigated their unsettled status over months and even years in constricted spatial environments. The book informs our understanding of Europe's Jews, even the comparatively lucky ones, on the edge of Hitler's Europe. Along with Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger, and other well-known cases, tens of thousands of ordinary European Jews, mostly from [End Page 203] central Europe, fled to Portugal as a singular safe haven. More than 70,000 reached Portugal in the chaos of Germany's 1940 western offensive, 10,000 more as the Vichy government began rounding up foreign Jews for deportation in 1942. The feeling that they were a step ahead of German forces as they moved through the Low Countries and France; confusion over the blizzard of exit, transit, and residence visas that one needed to flee through Spain; despondency over the queues to attain these papers from mercurial bureaucrats in French cities overrun by refugees; anxiety over the quality of forged papers or the lack of certain papers entirely; the ever-changing attitudes of Spanish and Portuguese border officials; the prospect of dangerous treks over the Pyrenees; and the crushing fear of being sent back, represented danger from all sides. Despondency famously drove Walter Benjamin to suicide at the Spanish border. But the confluence of fears, Kaplan shows, was one that many refugees never shook off, particularly as for most, Portugal turned out to be a longer stopover than expected. Lisbon, once reached, represented improvement, but not assurance. Ordinary Portuguese were generous despite their poverty. Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, meanwhile, never embraced the antisemitism of other European autocrats, a tendency buttressed by his friend Moses Amzalek, a respected academic and Portuguese Jewish leader. But Salazar's acceptance of Jewish refugees was grudging, as seen by the punishment of Portuguese consuls in France who had issued visas contrary to orders. Refugees represented a drain on the economy, they supposedly entertained cosmopolitan tendencies, and the unwillingness of the United States and other countries to take them extended their stay in Portugal despite the efforts of the Jewish, Quaker, and Unitarian relief organizations to support them and put them en route to permanent status elsewhere. Portugal's police authorities, more enamored of the Nazis, were unsympathetic, and the German colony in Portugal was predictably hostile. Living in crowded quarters ("Lisbon is sold out" was an oft-repeated line), unable to work by government order and chronically short on food, worried about loved ones in occupied Europe, and nervous that the Wehrmacht would at some point approach the Portuguese border, refugees were generally on edge. But the greatest immediate worry concerned expiring visas (or the discovery of fake ones) and consequent return to Germany. The October 1941 abduction and handover of German Jewish journalist Berthold Jacob in a Gestapo-inspired police operation, Kaplan says, "reverberated in the refugee rumor mill" (122), and even though the act was not repeated, the Portuguese police raided cafés from time to time, jailing those without papers. More common was police assignment to forced residence in remote towns in order to relieve crowding in Lisbon. The beauty of some places, like Caldas, was offset by their restrictiveness and long train journey back to Lisbon—undertaken only with police permission—where the essential consular, relief, and shipping offices were located. As in her past work, Kaplan is at her best when discussing the individual microhistories...