Michal Shapira (2025) ‘The Interplay between the Physical and the Psychological in the Overlooked Work of Jewish Refugee Psychoanalyst Barbara Lantos’, Psychoanalysis and History , Volume 27, Issue 2: 183–202

The journeys of Jewish migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe around the globe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are the focus of this provocative and inspiring book. After 1860 expanding railroad networks and steamships connected Eastern Europe almost literally to the world. Before 1914 almost 2 million Jews from this vast region moved to the United States. Small groups went to other destinations around the globe. The First World War was a watershed event: across Eastern Europe hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their homes, and migration restrictions that were imposed soon after the war, especially in the United States, targeted Jews from Eastern Europe. A substantial number of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe were stranded on the social margins across Europe after 1918. Unable to move to countries of their choice, they were exposed as unwanted refugees and disproportionally perished in the Holocaust. Even after 1945 Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors were stuck in displaced persons camps for years. The experience of Jewish migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe was closely tied to the emergence of the scholarship about migration and flight. Jewish scholars, aid workers, and journalists, most themselves migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe, coined terms such as “displaced person” and reimagined the United States as a pluralist society of immigrants.

Reviewed by: Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior by Albert Kaganovitch Serafima Velkovich Albert Kaganovitch. Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 336 pp. Albert Kaganovitch’s Exodus and Its Aftermath discusses the topic of Jewish refugees in the USSR during the Second World War. After the Nazi invasion in June 1941, millions of people fled to the inner territories, trying to escape the war and save their lives. According to various estimates, there were about two million Jewish refugees among them, who were evacuated by the authorities or fled on their own to the interior of the Soviet Union. Some of the refugees were Soviet citizens; others arrived forcibly from Poland, the former Baltic states, and Romania. The book is rich with examples from memoirs and a multitude of archival materials, which are accompanied by much statistical data, based on large-scale quantitative studies. All of these sources give a detailed picture of the situation regarding the places where Jewish refugees arrived. Kaganovitch reconstructs the circumstances from different perspectives: the official position and those of the refugees themselves. He raises important topics, including local situations of famine, diseases, epidemics, and deaths. The death rate of the population (Jews and non-Jews) in some places in Siberia and the Urals was almost 44 percent higher in comparison to previous years. In some places, the mortality was even higher than in forced labor camps. “The hotbeds of epidemics were the railway stations, where refugees spent long hours and days, waiting for the possibility to move somewhere” (107). At the same time, the author pays extensive attention to job conditions. The Soviet prewar slogan “He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat” serves as the title of the chapter about employment problems, which were quite common. Only those who worked could receive some food and goods, but in many cases, it was impossible to obtain a job. As a result of the lack of work and the impossibility of buying anything, theft, bribes, and black market operations thrived. [End Page 236] Kaganovitch devotes a prominent place to a discussion of the authorities’ attitude and measures toward Jewish refugees. Quite a few sources show the antisemitic policies of top-ranking personnel of the Communist Party in various regions. At the same time, lower-level local functionaries demonstrated negative attitudes toward the refugees, not only because they were Jewish, but mostly because they were strangers. It is noteworthy that Communist Party officials spread the myth that they had successfully absorbed over ten million evacuees, including Jews. At the end of the book, Kaganovitch deals with the return to life after the liberation. When the war ended, the situation of Jewish refugees did not change dramatically. They coped with the reality of antisemitic propaganda, the absence of housing, and the lack of permission to return to their hometowns via bribes, changing names to less Jewish ones, and even sometimes traveling to distant regions of the USSR in order to find a new place to live (such as Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Region, for example). The author does not really differentiate between Soviet Jewish refugees and Jews who were deportees or refugees from Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania, each of which faced separate issues. The most salient difference was that the majority of Polish Jewish refugees had an opportunity to leave the Soviet Union in 1946, by the repatriation agreement, a feat that was almost impossible for Soviet Jews, who continued to suffer from antisemitic policies in the USSR. Traditional and religious Jewish life, or the lack thereof, also differentiated the experiences of the two groups of Jewish refugees. The plight of Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union has recently become a focus of attention in the field of Holocaust studies. Within just the last few years, several books, in a number of different languages, have been published on the topic. Kaganovitch’s book joins Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival, edited by Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt; Syberiada Żydów polskich: Losy uchodźców z Zagłady...

The article discusses the relations between the Polish government-inexile in England and Polish Jewish refugees stranded in Spain in the years 1943– 1944. The study is based principally on previously unexamined correspondence between Jewish refugees in Spain and Ignacy Schwarzbart, the Jewish representative of the Polish National Council in London, which was preserved at the Yad Vashem Archives, and the records of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that are accessible at the Hoover Institution. This article focuses on three thorny issues related to governmental assistance for Jewish refugees: the recognition of their Polish citizenship, the material relief provided to them, and their evacuation from Spain. Polish decision-makers responded to all problems reported by their Jewish compatriots. However, their actions often left Jewish refugees dissatisfied, and their attitudes were considered callous, unjust, and at times outright antisemitic. The author argues that, while some of the shortcomings can be attributed directly to the work of Polish officials in London, such as the bureaucratic sluggishness of some governmental agendas, others arose from wartime constraints that the Polish government was not entirely able to control or influence, such as the deficient communication with its representatives abroad and the inhospitable stance of the international community towards Jewish refugees. The article not only examines the Polish government’s attempts to address refugee matters in Spain, but also sheds light on the perspective of the Jewish subjects involved in the described events.

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the case of Greek Christian refugees who fled to Cyprus and to the Middle East during WWII in an effort to point out how their settlement was related in a way to the simultaneous movement of the Jewish refugees, mainly survivors of the Holocaust, who tried to reach Mandatory Palestine. The exodus was part of a general movement from many occupied countries, mainly Greece, Poland and Yugoslavia, towards safer areas under the control of the Allies in the Middle East and Africa. It has been estimated that more than 73,000 refugees from these countries had been established in these areas in 1944. The Greek Christian refugees were placed in Nuseirat and Moses Wells camps, while Atlit remained mainly a camp for the Jewish refugees. The majority of Greek Christian refugees were repatriated by UNRRA in Greece after the liberation of the country, in 1945 and 1946.

El exilio incómodo: México y los refugiados judíos, 1933-1945

The article is devoted to representatives of two foreign countries, to the Consul of Japan Chiune Sugihara, and to the Consul of the Netherlands in interim Jan Zwartendijk, their activities in Kaunas, in the summer 1940 and their relations with the Jewish war refugees. Both diplomats became the historical personalities recognized on the world level since due to their activities they rescued several thousands of people of Jewish origin.

The article analyses the role family networks in Australia played in Holocaust rescue before and shortly after the outbreak of World War 2. Working with sources from the official archives as well as private documents, I argue that the networks enabled hundreds of Jewish migrants and refugees to escape Europe. Furthermore, they facilitated the arrival of migrants, who otherwise would most likely have been rejected as unsuitable applicants by the Australian government. First, the article analyses the Australian immigration laws before 1941, focusing predominantly on the sponsorship pathway, which allowed Australian residents to apply for the admission of their relatives and friends. In the following parts, the article uses case studies of individual migrants and their families to demonstrate the possibilities but also limitations of the sponsorship program. It concludes that despite the limitations, family networks need to be recognised for their contribution to Holocaust rescue, and this applies also to the case study of Australia, which otherwise was for a long time not considered an ideal destination by Jewish refugees.

The German invasion eventually led France to surrender and sign an armistice with the Third Reich on June 22, 1940. Germany occupied about three-fifths of France north of the Loire River and extending south in a narrow strip along the Atlantic coast to the Spanish frontier, a tightly guarded demarcation line cut off the territory from the rest of the country. South of the line were forty departments constituting “Free” or unoccupied France. The Vichy regime immediately acted against those it considered not truly French, implementing measures directed against foreigners in general followed by repressive policies aimed exclusively at Jewish immigrants and refugees in the unoccupied zone. This chapter examines the situation of Jews in France's unoccupied zone from May 1940 to August 1942, focusing on the experiences of Sigi Hart, Charles Roman, Menahem Marienberg, Walter Marx, Miriam Löwenwirth, and Boris Carmeli.

After their arrival, the European Jewish refugees had established close contact with the local Sephardi Jews and Russian Jews. However, they had different religious activities and living customs, so there were clashes. Over time, the European Jewish refugees gradually formed their own communities, and also established their own organizations. As the number of European Jewish refugees in other cities in China was small, this chapter focuses on the European Jewish refugee community in Shanghai with more than 20,000 members. It should be noted that, as Jewish refugees could move around in China, the Shanghai Jewish refugee community and their organizations had influenced Jewish refugees in other Chinese cities.

This chapter focuses on the Jewish refugees in the Holy Roman Empire in 1648–1654. Though the vast majority of the Jews fleeing the Khmelnytsky uprising preferred to remain within the Commonwealth, there is evidence of Polish Jewish refugees in the empire from as early as 1649. There are no relevant data concerning Jewish refugees in Silesia before 1654, but it seems clear that Jewish refugees from Poland, together with displaced local Jews looking for a new home, were active in repopulating the towns in Bohemia and Moravia at that time. Since Jews had long been seen as important sources of income for their lords, there had often been power struggles for control over them between the monarch and the nobility. Thus, there was more going on than anti-Jewish legislation. In his orders of 1650, the king of Bohemia may have been continuing his efforts to put a brake on the nobility by depriving it of one of its sources of income: Jews. The chapter then considers the relationship between the Jewish refugee society and the local Jewish society. It also shows the limits of mercantilism, looking at the Polish Jews in Brandenburg.

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees was established in the waning hours of the failed 1938 Evian Conference. Its purpose was to con- tact various governments to explore their willingness to accept European Jewish refugees for settlement. The Philippine Islands, a United States Commonwealth, responded to the committee's inquiry with a proposal to allow ten thousand Jewish refugees to immigrate as agricultural settlers. Negotiations to settle Jewish refugees on the large island of progressed over the next three years, but the Mindanao ultimately failed because its architects underestimated the extent of local opposition and the complexity of land acquisition in the Philippines. The United States' entry into the war in December 1941 ended all further efforts on the settlement project. This article examines Philippine President Manuel Quezon's key role in this process, as well as the often skeptical positions of U.S. State Department officials and the surprisingly supportive stance of Paul McNutt, the U.S. High Commissioner for the Philippines. In the months that followed the Evian Conference, the Philippine Islands, an American Commonwealth at the time, submitted a proposal to accept Jewish refugees as agricultural settlers on Island in the Philippine Archipelago. The story of this proposal, which represented the earliest evidence that the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria had been taken seriously by a government outside the Western Hemisphere, has come to light only recently. Materials related to the Jewish refugee settlement in the Philippines and the Plan were found at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the National Archives, where they had been little used for nearly sixty years. 3

Despite Mexico’s highly restrictive policy toward Jewish refugees during the 1930s and the Second World War, nearly two thousand Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazism managed to enter the country. While previous historiography has primarily focused on government policies toward Jewish refugees, it has paid little attention to the experiences of those who actually arrived in Mexico. This article fills this gap by analyzing the forced migration and transit process of thirty Jewish refugee families who arrived in Mexico between 1937 and 1949. Mexico emerged as a crucial option for refugees throughout their flight when they utilized and established transnational links that would ultimately lay the groundwork for their rescue. By expanding the field of Holocaust studies to encompass the experiences of refugees in Latin America, this study provides important insights into the global dynamics of the Holocaust.

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...

This book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. As the Nazis launched the Holocaust, Lisbon emerged as the best way station for Jews to escape Europe for North and South America. Jewish refugees had begun fleeing the continent in the mid-1930s from ports closer to home. But after Germany defeated Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, and Italy joined the war, all in the spring of 1940, Lisbon became the port of departure from Europe. Jewish refugees from western and eastern Europe aimed for Portugal. An emotional history of fleeing, the book probes how specific locations touched refugees' inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.

In order to understand the development of Mexican immigration policy as it pertained to the Jewish refugees during the years 1939 and 1940, it is necessary to bear in mind that it unfolded at an especially difficult moment, nationally as well as internationally. During the early months of 1939 President Lazaro Cardenas considered the possibility of receiving Jewish refugees, carrying out a study of various colonization plans while allowing some refugees to disembark at Mexican ports. Towards the second half of the year, immigration policy once again became more restrictive, reaching its climax in 1940. The first experiments in agricultural colonization that took place in the country in 1939 were largely due to the attempt by Jewish refugees who had already entered Mexico to legalize their immigration status; they were not intended to accommodate more people from Europe.Keywords: agricultural colonization; Jewish refugees; Mexican immigration policy