In late November 1939, when life for many Jews in Europe was dissolving, Jakob Aufrichtig in Paris penned a letter to the Committee for Jewish Refugees in Amsterdam.
He was gravely concerned about his mother, Rachela, who was in her 50s and living alone in Vienna.
German officials had ordered her to vacate her apartment, threatening to deport her to Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp, if she didn’t. Aufrichtig asked the committee for its help in relocating her to the Netherlands.
“Although it is my greatest wish, I cannot bring her here,” Aufrichtig explained. “I am totally desperate, and if I can’t save my mother, I will take my own life.
The frantic efforts of terrified Jews in Germany, Austria and other parts of Europe trying to escape persecution filled letter after letter that came in to the committee.
Thousands of German Jews had already emigrated to the Netherlands, the closest safe neighboring country after Adolf Hitler’s election as German Chancellor in 1933.
Among them were Otto and Edith Frank, and their daughters, Margot and Anne Frank. But after May 1938, requests for entry to the Netherlands would be rejected because the country had already closed its borders to refugees.
“If you look at the results of this heartless policy, they are terrifying,” said Emile Schrijver, director of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam.
Aufrichtig’s letter is one of some 200 anguished, and ultimately unsuccessful, requests for help that were found in an Amsterdam attic more than four decades ago by a Dutch-Israeli documentary filmmaker, Willy Lindwer. The letters depict a landscape of despair as the depths of Nazi depravity began to become clearer, but the options for escape had dwindled.
Now several dozen of them are featured in a new book by Lindwer and the Dutch historian Aline Pennewaard, “Ik weet me geen raad,” which translates to “I’m at a Loss for What to Do,” published last month.
Lindwer, an avid collector of war-era documents and Judaica, said the building where he found the bundle of letters was being cleared. He doesn’t know how they came to be left in the attic. But when he opened one and started reading, he said, “It was chilling, really moving.”
Also familiar.
Lindwer’s parents, Jewish refugees from Ukraine, had arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1930s, leaving behind family members who would later be murdered by the Nazi mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen. Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and the Holocaust would ultimately claim 75 percent of the Jews who lived there.
But not Lindwer’s parents, who went into hiding and survived.
Lindwer didn’t know exactly what to do with the letters when he found them, so he put them in a drawer, where they stayed for more than 40 years. When a new National Holocaust Museum opened in Amsterdam last year, he planned to donate the bundle. But first, he and Pennewaard, his longtime creative collaborator, decided to try to research what had happened to the letter writers and publish their stories in a book.
Pennewaard was able to track down what happened to about 100 of the correspondents, and included 35 stories in the book. Most of the letters were written in German and sent to either the Jewish Community in Amsterdam (an official municipal group), or to the Committee for Jewish Refugees (a Jewish-run aid organization established in 1933). But by 1938, these groups could offer little hope, because the Dutch government cut off most paths to legal immigration.
Hendrik Colijn, the country’s prime minister, justified this decision by arguing that accepting Jewish refugees would increase antisemitism at home.
“If we were to admit here an unlimited stream of fugitives from abroad,” he said in a speech to Parliament, “the necessary consequence of this would be that the feeling in our own country with regard to the Jews would swing in an unfavorable way.”
As the world dealt with the lingering effects of the Depression, the Netherlands was not alone in deciding against expanding refuge for Europe’s Jews. In July 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened an international conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, with delegates from 32 nations, to discuss the refugee crisis. But few countries agreed to ease their immigration rules, and nearly all refused to admit more refugees.
The U.S. quota for German and Austrians stayed fixed at around 27,000 a year, and the waiting list for entry visas reached 140,000 in 1938, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Lindwer said it’s not hard to make a comparison between the difficulties faced by refugees in the 1930s, and those who are trying to escape persecution in their home countries today. “This refugee problem is a problem of our times,” he said, “and with the chaos we have in the world today, I’m afraid it will only get worse.”
Despite the 1938 border closing, thousands of desperate letters continued to flood into the Netherlands. “They all got an answer,” said Pennewaard, but it was usually a standard form letter, saying no aid was available.
The plight of the writers can be read in the exclamation points.
“Extremely urgent case!!!” wrote Blima Bierzonski, on Dec. 13, 1938 seeking entry for herself and her 7-year-old daughter, Gerda. Her husband, Viktor, had left earlier that year for the United States, where they hoped to join him. But now the Nazis gave her just a few weeks to leave the country or be deported.
Any stay in the Netherlands would be temporary, she promised. “I will really not be a financial burden to anyone,” she said. Blocked from the Netherlands, she and Gerda fled to Belgium and moved from country to country for the next few years, finding no safe place, until Bierzonski was forced to leave her daughter with a family in Switzerland. They would not reunite again until 1946.
One tragic tale that Pennewaard tracked concerned a 33-year-old father, Nathan Awrutin, from Berlin, who wrote begging for temporary entry. He only wanted to wait in Holland until his family received papers that would allow them to join his parents in Palestine.
The German police had ordered his family to evacuate their home by Jan. 1, 1939, he said. But he, his wife, Hertha, and their 5-year-old son, Ronald, had nowhere else to go.
“We’ve tried every possible means to emigrate from Germany, but without any success,” he wrote. “My family and I place all our hopes on you, because you are the only one who can help us. My wife and I aren’t able to sleep at night, because we worry about what will become of us. I cannot provide for my family here, and my son has become malnourished.”
Searching public records, Pennewaard found only a few documents about the Awrutins. The couple, she discovered had had a second son, Simon, born in 1942, but she could find no record of their whereabouts at that time.
Then she scoured a list of people taken on a transport from Berlin to Auschwitz, the death camp. On the list, dated July 12, 1944, were all four members of the family.
Hertha and her two sons were murdered on arrival in the gas chambers. Nathan was selected for “work duty,” and had prisoner number 42921 tattooed on his arm.
Nathan survived there until the Germans evacuated Auschwitz in January 1945, and made prisoners march to Natzweiler, a concentration camp, where he was forced to work until he died on Feb. 19, 1945.
No photos or other documentation of the family Awrutin were preserved.
Feige Bisseleches, a 76 year-old widow living in Vienna, had no better luck.
“I am totally alone,” she wrote in her letter, “and now I have to leave my home where I’ve lived for 46 years because it has been given to strangers. I cannot stay here as a Jew. I am desperate and completely helpless. In view of my situation, I ask the committee to have mercy on me.”
Bisseleches received no help. Two years later, she was deported to Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia, where she managed to survive 14 months until December 1942, when she was transferred to the camp’s hospital and died.
The Aufrichtigs were luckier. Although Aufrichtig’s request to the Netherlands on behalf of his mother, Rachela, was denied, he kept reaching out to other countries
Finally, she was granted a domestic worker’s visa to Britain, and was allowed to enter the country as a housekeeper. Eventually, mother and son reunited in New York. Rachela lived to be 91.
Her son’s first letter had not saved her, but he kept writing.
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