HIP BOOK REVIEW Escape Or Die: A Refugee’s Tale
The Right of Passage
By Julian Beecroft (with Sheri Blaney) Published by The History Press Hardback £25
REVIEW BY HUGH SULLIVAN
This book traces the endeavours of one German Jewish family to escape from Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War.
The inspiration for it came from a cache of anonymous but annotated negatives dumped in a street in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1980. Individuals and family groups were pictured across a range of European locations. The accompanying notes indicated that the majority of the photos had been taken between 1929 and 1935.
Sheri Blaney, a young Jewish American woman with an interest in photography, was offered them by a friend and, intrigued by their quality but without making a detailed inspection, squirrelled them away for future enquiry. It wasn’t until Covid lockdown 40 years later that she turned her attention back to them.
Ms Blaney noticed that one of the family pictures showed a Star of David on a drawing room wall. From clues in the annotations followed up by research into public documents, she was able to establish that the photographer was Marion Samter, an emigree to the USA from Germany in 1938. Mrs Samter was long deceased, but had a daughter living in Oregon, who was able to supply a detailed back story.
The result is this book, written by Hastings author Julian Beecroft from the photographic record, from manuscript notes compiled by Ms Blaney, and from his own meticulous documentary research.
The title is ironic, like so much of its melancholy narrative.
REFUGEE RIGHTS
The Nazi regime put obstacles in the way of emigration – initially financial rather than institutional. Up to August 1939 Jews could get out of Germany if they were willing to abandon their property and/or business assets. On the other hand, there was no international convention conferring any refugee rights. Other countries of Europe and the USA could pick and choose whom they would admit.
Since the Aliens Act of 1905, passed specifically to curb a previous wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, Britain had limited the arrival of foreigners to its shores; and under the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914, enacted on the first day of the First World War in August 1914, the Home Secretary was empowered to regulate their entry and subsequent residence. The increasing oppression of Jews in 1930s Germany did not persuade British governments of the time to relax immigration controls. On the contrary, with some exceptions such as the Kindertransport mission in 1938-39, they maintained a regime designed to limit the in-flow to very small numbers of applicants who could show they would not be a drain on the public purse.
Other European countries operated similar restrictions. Even the USA, traditionally the refuge of the Old World’s “huddled masses”, had imposed immigration quotas from the 1920s onwards. These quotas favoured entrants from northern Europe, but there could be no passage across the Atlantic without a prior visa issued from a US consulate, generally obtainable only under proof of a job offer or other evidence of both financial sustainability and political suitability.
Destitute Jews needed helping hands. This study shows how, within one family, some might be rescued, others not.
SOCIAL RESPECTABILITY
The family of Kurt Grelling, the central character, had enjoyed comfortable affluence over at least three generations. Louis and Isaak Simon, respectively his maternal grandfather and great-uncle, were cotton manufacturers, acknowledged before the First World War as ‘Kaiserjüden’ (Jewish associates of Kaiser Wilhelm). His brother-in-law’s father had been a coal magnate in Silesia. The next generation embedded themselves in professional and scientific circles at the heart (they believed) of respectable German society.
Early chapters of The Right of Passage set out this background, and describe briefly the ways in which, from 1933 onwards, the Nazi regime picked on its Jewish population and stripped it of status, money and employment. Kurt is immediately forced to resign his teaching post in a Berlin Gymnasium, and from then on struggles to find alternative work. He maintains intellectual friendships with leading philosophers of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, including Otto Neurath, and manages to relocate to Brussels, where a wealthy art dealer pays him a modest salary to undertake recondite investigations in maths and philosophy.
One after another of his extended family and associates take further flight – to England, Ireland, Switzerland or the USA, in most cases shorn of their wealth but able to start or renew professional careers. His academic friends have also been making their way across the Atlantic to fill philosophy posts in American universities.
LEFT BEHIND
Kurt gets stranded, having neither the money nor the social connections – nor, perhaps, the personal energy – to find his own lifeline out. His wife Greta is stuck in Berlin. She herself is not Jewish (and has brothers who are well-placed within the Nazi party), which seems a potential benefit for a while but ultimately isn’t. Their children are being educated in Switzerland, now in permanent separation.
From May 1940, when the Germans invade Belgium, Kurt finds himself interned as an ‘enemy alien’ and sent to a squalid internment camp in southern France. When France in turn is overrun, the new Vichy government continues to incarcerate those interns who are Jewish. They remain undesirable aliens as far as Laval and co are concerned, though those who can obtain entry visas to the USA (neutrals in the war until December 1941) are still allowed to depart.
The book’s narrative, supported by a full archive of contemporary correspondence, follows Kurt’s increasingly desperate efforts to become one of the escapees, preferably with his wife and children in tow. Meanwhile, it chronicles his continuing devotion to the abstract world of logical positivism despite such appalling personal circumstances.
A novelist might have been tempted to give Kurt a more endearing personality – more heroic, less socially awkward. But Beecroft has set himself the dual task of paying maximum tribute to his historic archive while keeping the attention of the general reader.
The story is told with unflinching honesty and painstaking objectivity. And it has resonance for our time, as millions of refugees worldwide look for their own right of passage.
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