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INTRODUCTION
 
This is the extraordinary story of more than 2,000 Polish Jewish refugees. Enduring the hardships of travel and restrictive immigration laws, they escaped wartime Europe to safety in the Far East just months before the start of the Nazi genocide that claimed the lives of three million Polish Jews.

WAR AND OCCUPATION
 
…whatever it was, was no more
Susan Bluman, postwar testimony

Throngs are leaving their homes on a dangerous migration to an uncertain future.
Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, September 6, 1939, Lodz, Poland.

It was a remarkable decision I realize at this time, for a woman to decide to take her less than four-year-old son and just essentially walk out of Warsaw with what she could carry. I mean she had me in one hand, by one hand, and in her other hand she had this small suitcase.
Norbert Swislocki, postwar testimony

And at that time we all of a sudden got the news that Poland will be divided between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. And we didn't know what to expect.
Yonia Fain, postwar testimony

It was not a premeditated decision. It was all last minute and it was all based on the assumption that in two weeks I'll be back, or that the war will end very soon.
Ruth Berkowicz Segal, postwar testimony

On September 1, 1939, German forces invaded Poland from the north, west, and south. Poorly equipped Polish troops were no match for the modernized German army and air force's surprise, rapid assault. After only eight days of fighting, German soldiers laid siege to the capital city of Warsaw.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews and other Polish citizens fled eastward. But any hopes of escaping the violence of war and terror of occupation were dashed. On September 17, stunning the world, Soviet troops marched into Poland from the east. Under a secret agreement, Adolf Hitler's Germany and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union carved the country up to enlarge their own lands.

Most refugees now felt little choice but to return home. Others chose the Soviets as the lesser of two evils. A third small group, including members of targeted political or religious groups, feared both Nazi and Communist terror and continued their flight. Thousands of Jews streamed into the region of Vilna, an old center of Jewish culture near the Polish border with independent Lithuania.

SEARCH FOR NEW HAVENS
 
Our whole existence while we were in Vilna was trying to get out, trying to get somewhere.
Lucille Szepsenwol Camhi, postwar testimony

I didn't want to go by myself across the Soviet Union and leave my father behind. My mother was in Warsaw with the family. It was no good.
Ruth Berkowicz Segal, postwar testimony

It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.
Dorothy Thompson, American journalist, 1938

And we were just going from one consulate to the other…
Susan Bluman, postwar testimony

We had memorized atlases and the globe and had become experts in outlining to ambassadors and consuls the most intricate travel routes. Where no route existed, it was for us to create one - if only on paper, for the time being.
Refugee leader Zorach Warhaftig, postwar memoir

Most of the 15,000 Polish Jewish refugees who reached Lithuania saw it as a temporary haven. Many hoped to continue their flight abroad, either to the United States or Palestine. In the meantime, the majority counted on others for support. Jewish organizations, including American ones, provided critical help. The refugees faced an uncertain future and worried endlessly about loved ones back home in German- or Soviet-occupied Poland.

Then events once more gravely threatened their security. On June 15, 1940, Soviet tanks rolled into Lithuania. Communist officials arrested persons deemed political enemies, and seized private businesses and properties. By early August, Lithuania was a satellite of Moscow.

The chances of fleeing now were slim. Germany had conquered most of western Europe and its ally Italy was invading France in the south. One of the few escape routes left was the long, eastward one, through the Soviet Union by train. Transportation was costly and official hurdles endless. Travelers needed passports or substitute papers stamped with several kinds of permissions: one for exiting the Soviet Union and others for countries of transit and of final destination. What country would accept Jewish refugees?

In the atmosphere of panic and fear and in the few weeks before the Soviets shut down all diplomatic operations in Lithuania, two men - “two angels” in some refugees' words - teamed up without ever meeting each other. Consular representatives Jan Zwartendijk from the Netherlands and Chiune Sugihara from Japan used their knowledge of rules and regulations to provide 2,100 Polish Jewish refugees an unlikely means of escape. They supplied the necessary destination and transit visas that enabled the refugees to leave Lithuania.

STRANDED IN JAPAN
 
Menaced by the increasing influx of refugees from Europe of all kinds - among others Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Baltic States - the various countries of America are shutting their doors more and more inexorably against them.
Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer, Tokyo, January 15, 1941

I'm all right, but all my documents are false. The Japanese visa is false, the Curacao transit visa, everything is false. They'll find out and they'll send me back to Russia.
Leo Hanin, postwar testimony describing a refugee in Tsuruga

It was deliverance. Germans are behind us. The Russians are behind us. And now, of course, Japan was a big unknown. We didn't know. But the entrance was beautiful.
Ruth Berkowicz Segal, postwar testimony

It was like a fairy tale. The difference between the harsh cold winter and fear that hung like ice from the buildings left, and suddenly you were in paradise. Blue sky, not the gray-laden skies of Siberia.
Leo Melamed, postwar testimony

Five thousand refugees wander aimlessly today in Kobe, Japan, awaiting precious papers for entrance to America.
San Francisco Chronicle, May 1941

We have to go to Shanghai. Terrible letters come from there. One runs again to see if our names are on the list to leave. Before, when one saw his name on the list, one was happy. Today...one cries.
Rose Shoshana Kahan diary entry, 1941

Most Jewish refugees who obtained Dutch and Japanese stamps in the late summer of 1940 did not leave immediately. Not until early 1941 did the Soviets allow large numbers of refugees to travel. They immediately scrambled to book passage on the Trans-Siberian Express.

The Trans-Siberian journey took refugees 5,800 miles in ten days to the port of Vladivostok. Hindsight would show how narrow this window of opportunity had been. All Trans-Siberian travel for private citizens ended on June 21, 1941, when German forces invaded the Soviet Union.

When the refugees left Soviet territory on steamers headed for Japan, the refugees danced and sang, enjoying their freedom. But no one knew what lay ahead. After landing in the port of Tsuruga, the refugees traveled by train to Kobe, where a small community headed by Russian Jewish merchants assisted them. The Japanese people regarded the Jewish travelers with curiosity and kindness. Japanese authorities were not hostile toward Jews, but were concerned that persons supposed to be traveling through Japan did not end up staying there.

A few of the refugees proceeded quickly to the United States and other countries. The stay of hundreds of others stretched from weeks into months. Many despaired of ever obtaining final destination visas from American and other diplomats. Concern for loved ones left behind increased when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

World tensions mounted after Japanese forces occupied French Indochina in July 1941. All passenger routes from Japan to North and South America, Australia, and India were terminated. In mid-August, nearly 1,000 refugees were still stranded in Japan. Japanese officials forced the remaining refugees to leave for the dreaded destination of Shanghai, China, then under Japanese control.

DESTINATION OF LAST RESORT
 
Everyone was in shock at what we saw. We'd never dreamt it would look like it did. We never had any idea what China was about, how poor it was.
Hanni Sondheimer Vogelweid, postwar interview

All of “Hongkew” presents itself as a terrible portrait. Dilapidated houses, ruins from bombs, skeletons of former factories, and bombed out shops.
Rose Shoshana Kahan diary entry, 1941

We didn't know what was going to happen. We didn't know how we were going to survive. We didn't know how the Japanese would treat us. Everything was very, very confusing.
Yonia Fain, postwar testimony

We felt that we lost everything ... we ever knew .... We tried not to struggle with the question: Why do I deserve to be alive, when my brothers died, when my family died
Yonia Fain, postwar testimony

The fields of Poland lament, the trees of Lithuania weep, and cursed Europe is crying - where are our Jews? Why did our earth become a grave for them?
Yiddishe Shtime

And I asked my father about what happened to our family, 'cause I knew that all of them virtually stayed behind, and he never answered me. He just walked away. We never talked about that.
Norbert Swislocki, postwar testimony

While in Japan, the refugees heard that Shanghai was crowded, unsanitary, and crime-ridden. Still, they were shocked by what they saw when they landed. In the city's International Settlement, hundreds of thousands of destitute Chinese lived amid a foreign community led by wealthy British and American traders and financiers. An established community of 4,000 Russian Jews assisted the refugees from Poland who joined a much larger refugee community of more than 17,000 German and Austrian Jews who had fled Nazi persecution.

Trapped in Shanghai by the Pacific war, Jewish refugees suffered from shortages of food, clothing, and medicine. They endured unemployment and isolation, with no news from families still in Europe. The refugees were subjected to countless Japanese decrees. In 1943, Jews from Germany, Austria, and Poland were forced into a designated area for “stateless refugees” - soon known as “the ghetto” by residents.

The treatment of Jews by individual officials was sometimes unpredictable and cruel but Japanese policy in Shanghai was based on nationality, and did not involve persecution of Jews as a group, let alone their mass murder and genocide. Russian Jews in Shanghai continued to live and work freely through the war. Members of the Mir Yeshiva continued their studies, and became the only eastern European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust nearly intact. At war's end in August 1945, this distinction in treatment became fully apparent to the refugees as they learned about the Holocaust and mourned the tragic loss of family, friends, and entire Jewish communities.

REFUGEES TODAY
 
Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 9. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 14. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights

If life presented itself to us and asked, “Break the rules, understand the emergency, take responsibility, and reach out beyond the ordinary to save,” what would we do? That is why the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was established: to be more than a repository of memory but also to be a living goad to good conscience.
Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Chair, United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 2001

As before and during the Holocaust, people flee when their lives and communities are at risk. The massive movement of populations can therefore be a warning sign of genocide or the threat of genocide. In Sudan's western region of Darfur, for which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared a Genocide Emergency in July 2004, hundreds of thousands of Darfurians fled across the border into Chad. Some two million more were displaced inside Darfur, while up to 400,000 perished from violence and the conditions of life inflicted on targeted groups.

The recognition of a moral failure in responding to Jews and others fleeing persecution before World War II, and the need to deal with the many people left displaced at war's end, led to important international developments. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed that everyone has the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution. In 1950, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created. And in 1951, the United Nations Convention on Refugees laid the foundation for the basic international obligation not to return people to countries where their life or freedom would be threatened, an obligation the United States accepted in 1968.

These critical landmarks established the plight of refugees as a responsibility of the international community. They continue to shape policy today. Addressing the needs of “internally displaced persons” - who are not legally “refugees” because they have not crossed an international border - presents another complex challenge.

The number and size of refugee crises in the world at any given time - as well as the expectations for aid - often exceed the international community's capacity to respond. Whenever populations are at risk, there are those who attempt to flee to safer countries. Yet the problems surrounding adequate response in terms of protecting refugees' rights, finding safe havens, and supplying aid in times of massive upheaval have not lessened with time. The protection of refugees and response to refugee crises are crucial to genocide prevention efforts today.

 

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