Oral History Series: Crossing Over: An Oral History of Refugees from Hitler’s Reich

Among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who scattered the world over to elude the grasp of Hitler’s Third Reich were 36 men and women who came to know one another in Los Angeles as members of the Gruppe. What began as a casual gathering of Austrian and German Jews for conversation, coffee, and dessert became for some the source of lifelong friendships and a kind of extended family. The Gruppe is also the source of the stories told here of crossing over – from brutal oppression to safety and freedom, from familiar Old World to foreign New – as experienced by 18 of its members.
As related by the immigrants themselves or their children to Ruth Wolman, herself the daughter of two Gruppe members, these stories convey in intimate detail the experience of Hitler those who suffered the intensifying malevolence of Nazism in the 1930s but managed to escape before it evolved into the Final Solution of the Holocaust.
In vivid recollections Gruppe members convey the climate of anti-Semitism and near chaos that characterized the prewar years in Western Europe and that provoked their decision to emigrate.
Their recollections also make clear how hard it was to make good on that decision. The papers to be secured, the lines to be waited in, the means of transport to be arranged and paid for, the emotional pain of separation from loved ones to be enduredall compounded the difficulty of taking leave. The divergent routes these immigrants took out of their homeland as they tried to reach the United States – traveling through France and Great Britain, even Finland, China, and Cuba – further testify to the mazelike logistics of escape.
Gruppe members conclude with stories of their resettlement in Los Angeles, where they succeeded in building that new establishing careers, making homes for themselves, raising families. From start to finish, their stories not only invigorate history but touch on enduring human the difficulty of change and loss, the value of connection with other people, the hope inspired by a chance to begin again.