An Earlier Age When the United States Kept Immigrants Out

America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between
By Michael Dobbs




Dobbs never says why he chose Kippenheim as the focus for his investigation, but the town’s survivors and their descendants have guarded a trove of documents that allowed him to render their stories in remarkable and poignant detail. Max and Fanny Valfer, for example, had a consular appointment in Marseille scheduled for Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but now Washington considered Kippenheim Jews like the Valfers to be “enemy aliens.” Had their appointment been one day earlier, they might have been able to travel from France to Portugal, where they were booked to sail from Lisbon to America. The Valfers were finally granted visas in August 1942, just weeks after the Germans shifted their policy toward Jews within their sphere from expulsion to extermination. The Valfers were never able to book passage on another ship; instead, they were deported “to the east” in the fall of 1942, and murdered at Auschwitz.

Hedy’s parents, Hugo and Bella, met the same end. In her final letter to Hedy, Bella wrote: “Continue to be always good and honest, carry your head high and never lose your courage. Don’t forget your dear parents.”

What’s most chilling about Dobbs’s book is how his account of the early years of World War II echoes our politics today. Xenophobia, isolationism, a fear of destructive infiltrators and an aversion to more war all conspired to keep refugee quotas low, when they were filled at all. Robert Reynolds, a Democratic senator from North Carolina, thundered in a Senate speech that “if I had my way I would today build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of the earth could possibly scale or ascend it.” It was sentiments like his that may have kept Franklin Roosevelt from raising immigration quotas and accounted for obstructionist (and anti-Semitic) State Department policies.

Until recently, it was considered a truism that American policy toward Europe’s Jews constituted an enormous moral failure. Today, as our politicians quibble and send refugees back in the direction they came, one can only wonder what misery awaits the displaced. When current policies and opinions so closely resemble those held during Hitler’s early days, one wonders, too, if the moral clarity of “never again” may have been fleeting. In raising those questions, Dobbs’s book provides a glimpse of how we may be judged by future generations.

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