I write as the descendant of refugees. My Jewish grandparents fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In December I wrote a diary describing my revulsion at Trump's anti-immigrant rantings, my emotion fed by the coincidence of Trump rising to power at the same time that I happened to be researching my grandparents’ immigration stories. I alluded to my great-great aunt Harriet, who stayed behind in Hamburg after nearly all of her family members left. She was deported to Latvia and murdered in 1941.
Had the U.S. not been largely closed to Jewish immigration at the time, she would have survived.
I don’t know much about Harriet. She was born in 1878 in Hamburg, in a family of four daughters. She married a pharmacist, and together they owned and managed a pharmacy for several decades. They had no children, but she was very close to my grandmother, her niece. Their bond may have come in part from a shared interest in medicine. My grandmother became a doctor, and as a young woman she worked in Harriet's pharmacy and learned the basics of the profession, along with bookkeeping skills.
In 1931 Harriet's husband, Joseph, died. In June 1934 my grandmother, then a recent medical school graduate, emigrated to the U.S. because as a Jew she would not have been able to complete her residency in Germany.
My grandmother saw her aunt Harriet again in 1937. She went to Hamburg that summer to retrieve her mother and unmarried older sister, who were hesitant to leave. I'm not sure how she managed to convince them to emigrate. Part of the reluctance was practical: elderly retirees and widows received pensions from the state, which they would lose on emigration. They would be penniless in the new country, or at best dependent on their children. Part of the reluctance was sentimental: they were Germans, Hamburg was their family home. In any event, my grandmother’s mother and sister did come to New York, where my great-grandmother lived for the rest of her life while the sister eventually joined one of her brothers in Israel.
My grandmother told my mother that Harriet didn’t want to leave Hamburg because she wanted to continue to visit her husband’s grave. Nearing retirement, she could look forward to her pension, and she still lived in the apartment she had shared with her husband. With no children to support her and my grandmother already stretched thin supporting her mother and older sister, Harriet no doubt did not wish to add to the burden. So, like many older Jews, she stayed, hoping it would all blow over or at least not get worse.
Of course, it did get worse. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, my grandmother tried desperately to get Harriet out, but it was expensive and my grandparents, themselves new immigrants, had very little money. It would have been easiest for Harriet to join the family in New York, but obtaining a U.S. visa was impossible. They considered Cuba and Sweden, which demanded a lot of money for security. When my grandmother finally got enough cash together for a Swedish visa it was too late. The letters weren't answered. Harriet was gone.
The archives at Yad Vashem record her fate. Harriet was deported from Hamburg on December 6, 1941 and sent with other Hamburg Jews to Jungfernhof Camp, near Riga. She was probably murdered soon after her arrival.
I have never seen a picture of Harriet. I do not know if any exist, floating somewhere among the belongings of one of the descendants of the surviving members of the Hamburg family, who ended up in the U.S., Sweden, Israel, England, the Netherlands, and Brazil. As far as I know, the memory of what she looked like died with my grandmother in 1981.
But I see her face all the time.
I see her face in images from Syria, Iraq, Sudan …. I see her face in the fearful, anxious, hopeful faces of those who would come here.
For her sake, for our sake, let them in.