Navigating Liminality: Jewish Refugees in Global Transit

Abstract

In late 1942, New York educator and social scientist Ernst Papanek (1900–1973), who had himself fled Vienna in 1934, was interested in learning about the experiences of unaccompanied refugee children, most of them Jewish, in New York. He sent out a large number of extensive questionnaires and received 214 responses—including from a 13-year-old boy who, like Papanek, came from Vienna. The boy had fled to Switzerland in 1938 and then through Italy to the United States in 1940, where he was reunited with his parents and sister after more than two years of separation. The boy provided a detailed report of the stages of his transit and his experiences along the way, both on the plane and the ship. To the question ‘How do you feel about your exile from your native country?’, he offered individual reflections on integration and identity, concluding that he would ‘try to go back at the earliest opportunity’.¹

At the same time, another young Jew, Heinrich Hartmut Arnhold (1921–2018), was impatiently waiting for a visa in Havana, Cuba. Neither his current country of residence nor his ‘native country’ was where he longed to be. Rather, he was drawn to the US, where his siblings and his mother had found refuge after stints in Switzerland and Brazil, while he had been stuck in Norway from September 1939. While there, he had forged bold plans for his future, all of which collapsed—like the route to Hong Kong by way of the Soviet Union.² After being interned twice, he managed to get away to Sweden, escaping from there on a cargo ship to Cuba in November 1941. Although Cuba was not his final destination, he began to process his personal transit experiences while there, writing (now using the name ‘Henry’) both a thirty-page report of his flight and letters to his mother in English. In these, he expressed his suspicion that, but for his Scandinavian friends bringing him illegally across the border to Sweden in June 1941, he might have had no transit at all—suspicions that were later confirmed: a large portion of the Jews who did not escape from Norway became victims of the Holocaust. Refugees could never be sure that they would reach the destinations they were aiming for. Henry Arnhold discovered this himself when his fifteen-year-old cousin died of a tropical disease in ‘Cuba as a waiting room’.³ Consequently, his letters from the Caribbean express a mix of gratitude for his successful escape from Europe and interest in the life of the Cubans, as well as concerns for his safety and impatience to move on. Having grown from a child to a young man without having graduated from any school, he struggled to come to terms with the inactivity to which he was once again condemned and the uncertainty about when he would finally be able to take his future into his own hands.⁴

Mapping a New Research Field

Transit has many faces, spaces, and timescales. Even when refugees manage to escape the dangers and persecution in their homeland—temporarily or permanently—they are far from settled in their new lives. Even today, many people experience similar fates. Refugees move along different escape routes and in different contexts. They have to find their way in unfamiliar places for an indefinite period of time without being able to put down roots. Many refugees who were able to escape from Germany and National Socialist-controlled Europe to a temporary ‘safe haven’ experienced a phase of ‘being in between’—an experience that often shaped them for the rest of their lives. The history of migration and, especially, of refugees can hardly be written without an awareness of this phase with its own specific structures, experiences, and psychological conditions.

Thus, it is all the more surprising that historians have largely neglected transit as an independent research object and as an analytical concept for understanding the intermediate phases of refugee migration and expulsion. Migration historians know that migration is rarely a goal-oriented, linear process. And they have long sensitized us to the fact that decisions and movements that migrants make before, during, and after emigration or flight are part of their migration history.⁵ Yet, even in the impressively broad body of research on the emigration and flight of Jews from National Socialist Europe, relatively little attention has been paid to what happened during transit. The fairly new field of refugee history covering a broader time span, too, has not adequately factored in the often long and eventful phase refugees experience between leaving and arriving to the degree we believe it deserves.⁶

Exile and literary scholars who work on the Holocaust turned to this topic much earlier. However, following the logic of their disciplines, they long focused primarily on intellectual elites, for whom they were able to draw from a comparatively rich source base. One feature specific to the transit periods of emigrated or refugee artists and intellectuals is their temporary nature: elites were less likely than the majority of Jewish refugees to be seeking a new home; rather, they largely sought sanctuary until they could return home safely.⁷

This special section derives from the International Standing Working Group ‘In Global Transit’.⁸ This working group and the growing network it has given rise to is linked to research in Exile Studies, Holocaust Studies, and Refugee History and expands these fields in three key ways. First of all, we in this network understand transit as an independent research field informed by global history with the aim of tracing people (and objects) far beyond the periods in which they fled (or were removed), thus expanding the spatial and temporal perspectives on refugee migration. Second, we are interested in refugees across a wide range of social and cultural backgrounds. We approach this intersectionally, that is, with sensitivity to categories of difference such as class, religion, age, and gender. Third, the historical perspective we develop is dual and entangled: for one thing, we examine the way in which specific spaces and actors of transit shaped the thoughts, actions, feelings, and memories of refugees, and, for another, how refugees may have influenced and altered these spaces and actors through their presence.⁹

The starting and reference point for the network is the history of Jewish refugees from Germany and National Socialist-occupied Europe.¹⁰ Thus, it brings different research fields into conversation with one another. At the interface of migration, mobility, and refugee research, Holocaust Studies, as well as (Post)Colonial History and Empire Studies, transit research is taking shape as an independent focus of historical research. However, in taking shape, it does not seek to isolate itself from other fields—on the contrary, transit research absorbs impulses from other areas and enriches them. These areas include the history of knowledge, as well as the history of objects and infrastructures, both of which Anna-Carolin Augustin and Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş, co-editors of this special section, address in its epilogue.

‘Navigating Liminality’ is committed to the approach just outlined: the special section presents transit as a research concept and demonstrates its analytical potential in six case studies. The empirically rich contributions focus on states and colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that received scant attention in older research for a couple of reasons. For one thing, these places took in comparatively few refugees and, for another, they were rarely on the wish list of European Jews. Yet this is precisely why they are particularly relevant to the emerging field of transit research: most Jews who were accepted into countries in the ‘Global South’ lived there for many years—often well after the end of the war—even as they were generally aware that they would not be able to build a long-term existence in these places; in many cases, even the modest achievements of arrival, such as finding a suitable job or an appealing apartment, were fragile at best. Without using the term ‘transit’, these refugees knew and felt what Henry Arnhold felt in tropical Havana—they were living ‘in between’. What’s more, the people European Jews encountered in these highly foreign social contexts and power configurations were aware of their visitors’ special circumstances. Europeans, colonized people, and representatives of the colonial powers lived alongside each other, and less often with each other, for an indefinite period and in predominantly asymmetrical relationships. In such fragile social spaces, the structures of the transit of Jews and their strategies for coping with liminality become clear, as do the diverse, often interwoven facets of mobility and immobility.¹¹

Transit as a Historical Concept

Defining transit in a general sense is not easy. As the two initial examples and all the subsequent contributions show, each case entails specific and changeable configurations, life situations, and emotions. Nevertheless, some structures and features can be identified that mark transit as a particular phase of flight and migration in general.

A first typical feature of transit is a low degree of plannability and a high degree of contingency: refugees often experienced months or even years of uncertainty and indeterminacy between emigrating and immigrating to a place they had set their sights on as their new home—phases in which plans collapsed overnight, in which they had to take detours. They could not reliably determine the duration of this phase or their final destination, nor could they really plan the near or distant future. Both were highly dependent on external factors. If Henry Arnhold had tried to leave Sweden just a week later, he probably would have failed to cross the Atlantic; the Japanese Air Force’s attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 prompted severe restrictions on transatlantic shipping.¹² But even in transit countries, refugees were not at liberty to act as they wished—third parties often decided their fate.

A second key feature of transit is migrants’ structurally limited power. They were tremendously dependent on other actors, as well as on volatile geopolitical, legal, or infrastructural conditions. Refugees experienced extremely unequal power relations—as sufferers and as observers or actors in unfamiliar social, economic, and cultural settings—and chafed against extremely circumscribed access to important resources like jobs, food, and legal papers. In particular, the political and bureaucratic framework and the actors therein often had a huge influence on transit. Examples include visas that only allowed people to pass through a country, or internment in transit camps that set quotas, forcing some to stop against their will, generating new dependencies.

A third feature of transit relates to the contradictory temporalities of ‘living in between’. On the one hand, the lives of the Jewish refugees often changed completely in a short period of time, and they did not have adequate coping strategies for dealing with this, especially in non-European countries and colonies. Much of the experiential knowledge and cultural capital they had departed with quickly lost its value. Thus, they also experienced rapid changes in their emotions; the line between fear and hope was quite thin. On the other hand, many migrants perceived transit as a static state. They could neither fully arrive nor just leave the places they had wound up in. In societies in the ‘Global South’, especially, they neither felt at home nor were able to build a new home. As many of them struggled to cope with the loss of their assets, personal security, and social status, they found themselves caught between two places: between memories of a better life and their homeland and a sort of nowhere future whose space and timeframe they could not determine. All too often, life in transit was a state of perpetual transience with no foreseeable end. Even seemingly safe transit countries like Switzerland evoked contradictory feelings among Jewish refugees; they anticipated a European war or had limited financial resources and felt that the countries offered them little support, so they kept looking for alternatives.

A fourth feature is the accumulation of new, situation-appropriate knowledge that enables refugees to assert or regain historical agency. Some Jewish refugees fleeing National Socialist-occupied Europe, as well as those who wished to enable others to undertake flight, managed to accumulate such knowledge and utilize it in efforts to bring these phases to a positive conclusion. What's more, many Jewish refugees developed new forms of resilience and learned to make new, foreign spaces their own. Despite the contingency and dependency of their lives in transit, many Jews found creative ways to determine their lives to some extent; they learned to redefine both their sense of belonging and the boundaries between what they called their own and what they perceived as foreign and exotic. Refugees in transit learned a lot about colonial performativity, and they learned to deal with their own liminality and to discover stimulating and exciting things in the ‘in-between (spaces)’ of life, or to simply experience joy and happiness. This complexity and ambiguity come up in all the contributions to this special section. To utilize transit as a historical concept means to place these liminal experiences, encounters, and actions, as well as their after-effects and consequences, at the centre of studies on (Jewish) flight, migration, and exile.

Global Transit Experiences

The contributions in this special section have specific regional foci and methodological approaches that go beyond established research perspectives to open up new ones on transit. The authors—largely part of a new generation of historians raising awareness of the entanglements of historical studies of the Holocaust with studies of the history of colonialism and dissolving empires—examine how Jewish refugees from National Socialist Europe navigated completely foreign configurations and interacted with a wide variety of actors in different social spaces. Equipped with the language skills essential to analysing the broad range of primary sources, these historians are able to probe the interactions Jewish refugees had with, among others, civil servants and local authorities, other migrants, and indigenous, sometimes colonized, sometimes disenfranchised or marginalized population groups¹³ to bring these entanglements and their ambiguities to light. By analysing central questions—for example, about agency and influence or belonging and difference—they seek to understand the refugees not only through their interactions with those in power, but also through their relationships with the people they lived near, whose spheres they encroached upon, and whose self-image they called into question. A key element in this context is that the refugees, who had experienced racial discrimination as Jews under the National Socialists, were also perceived as representatives of the privileged class of white Europeans in colonial settings. One item on the agenda of global and historical Transit Studies is to ascertain how people living in transit countries—many of whom experienced discrimination themselves—perceived these newcomers, and to determine the factors that influenced these perceptions and interactions.¹⁴

In this special section, a number of the contributions highlight the difficulties newly arrived Jews faced in unfamiliar circumstances. Natalie Eppelsheimer's contribution on British Kenya, in particular, shows how they had to become properly orientated and learn to take action in the web of colonial actors and power structures, indigenous groups, and numerous migrant groups, some of which had already long been present there, with very little knowledge at their disposal. The contributions on the Philippines and Bolivia by Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and Sandra Gruner-Domic, respectively, also emphasize refugees’ resilience and learning, which enabled them to forge new lives despite their uncertainty and inexperience in the foreign environment.

The essays by Lisa Gerlach and Sarah Hagmann also draw attention to the spaces within which Jewish refugees found room to manoeuvre—either spaces that remained available or newly developed ones. Highlighting the knowledge refugees had at their disposal before departure, Lisa Gerlach, in her essay on letters of recommendation for Jews seeking refuge in Palestine or the United States, shows how they mobilized old networks or identified relevant new networks to make such letters more effective. Sarah Hagmann analyses the translocal communication and interaction network that Meyer Birman (1891–1955) operated as head of the Jewish aid organization HIAS-HICEM in Shanghai from 1939 to 1949. Birman provided Jewish refugees with knowledge, contacts, and resources to help them in their initial escape or onward journey. As these contributions demonstrate, Jewish refugees not only experienced the devaluation of their own knowledge and capital, but they also collected new knowledge and developed new strategies for dealing with new challenges and actors.

Other contributions in this special section also explore spaces of transitory encounter, communication, and translation. They show how encounters between European Jews and other actors shaped both the refugees’ experiences and their identities and changed individual biographies. They trace unexpected encounters, social practices, and everyday interactions, and they analyse how these interactions shaped the knowledge, emotions, and concepts that Jews in transit utilized as they attempted to navigate uncertainty and contingency. Kimberly Cheng, for example, spotlights the interactions between Jewish refugees and their neighbours in Chongqing, China, utilizing testimonies and memoirs—sources relevant for transit experiences in history that, to date, have hardly been tapped from this perspective. Other such sources that remain to be fully analysed include diaries, letters, bureaucratic records, social science surveys, ship tickets, household books, club lists, photographs, children’s drawings, and amateur films.

The analytical lens of transit allows us to better understand migration regimes and—as Anna-Carolin Augustin and Carolin Liebisch-Gümüs show in the epilogue to this special section—the importance of transregional infrastructures, national bureaucracies, and both material and abstract border practices. Above all, though, the transit lens allows us to see how refugees reacted to these regimes and practices, how they suffered under them, or how they escaped from them.¹⁵ Many refugees experienced their transit as a strange and seemingly never-ending present, as the loss of a plannable future. They could no longer reconcile their ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectations’, to use the concepts historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) described in his analyses of the consciousness of time in modernity.¹⁶ The following contributions reveal what the implications of this circumstance were for the way Jewish refugees experienced and processed the specific temporalities of transit, just as they highlight the importance of cultural translations in transit—a topic that has not yet received much attention. How did Jews introduce and utilize the knowledge they brought with them as ‘cultural baggage’ from Europe in their transit countries, how did they adapt it to their new framework and needs, and to what extent did they incorporate colonial, local, or indigenous knowledge and its associated practices into their own knowledge base and cultural codes?¹⁷

Over ten years ago, Atina Grossmann suggested that historians ought to remap the rescue and aid measures for Jews during the National Socialist era.¹⁸ This spawned a large body of research on this subject, and it is upon this foundation that the authors of this issue aim to build.¹⁹ They craft a dual approach with a focus on transitory peripheries of the 1930s and 1940s: they ask how transit processes, spaces, and actors influenced individuals and social groups and forged new networks. They also examine the traces Jews left behind in their transit countries, such as in the economy, culture, or education, or in Jewish communities and anticolonial movements.²⁰ At the same time, they reflect upon the fact that some of these countries, colonies, or dominions entered into a different anticolonial and nation-building transition right when most of the Jews stranded there finally departed for a new life or—more rarely—a return to Europe. Similarly, they consider that the transit period for some refugees lasted until the early 1950s or started anew due to internal political conflicts, as in Latin American countries, for example.

Transit and Memory

It is difficult to imagine researching ‘transit’ without referring to Memory Studies. ‘Memory’ had several dimensions for many refugees who were unable to truly arrive in a new homeland and put down roots. For one thing, they brought memories with them into their transitory spaces: memories of a fulfilled or at least tolerable life, of successful or failed professional careers, and of the social standing they had enjoyed, as well as memories of relatives or friends who stayed behind and were in extreme danger or who fell victim to the racial madness of the National Socialists. Such memories, often nostalgically charged, could make this in-between life either easier or more difficult. For another thing, memories of the transit phase would later figure prominently in the lives of Jews from all backgrounds and age groups. This was particularly evident in the case of Henry Arnhold, who even shortly after his arrival in Cuba noted the formative nature of this phase in his life. For some, memories of this phase remained vivid for so long that it is difficult to say whether and when the phase of being in between actually came to an end.

During and after their transit, European Jews lived simultaneously in and with different realities, ecologies of memory, and future horizons. The young person from Vienna quoted at the beginning is a telling example of this experience. Without knowing whether he would ever be able to return, he still felt in early 1943 that Austria was his home; this feeling was so strong that the United States remained foreign to him. For a 13-year-old who was fortunate enough to be able to reunite with his refugee parents—rare for unaccompanied minor refugees at that time—this seems remarkable. Maybe the social scientist Papanek provoked this response with his terminology (‘exile’), maybe the boy was just repeating what he heard from his parents, or maybe he missed his former friends so much that he simply could not feel at home in the country where the language and behaviours were so different from those in Austria. We do not know what lay behind his answer. Yet countless primary sources make it abundantly clear that transit was an intense experience, both while it was happening and in retrospect, in which refugees deposited and mixed different layers of memory that both converged and conflicted with one another. Refugees projected these experiences into the next phase of their lives and the spaces of their new home. For most Jewish refugee families, the time in transit formed a crucial part of their memories of the Holocaust. How exactly Jews thought about these phases of uncertainty in their post-war lives—individually and collectively—and what role transit memories played in the identity formation of subsequent generations are important research questions that have not yet been fully explored.

Another approach with untapped potential is to analyse transit as a ‘space of knowledge’, while taking unorthodox temporal dimensions into account. This would be worthwhile for investigating the experiences of Jews who were driven back into a phase of uncertain migration by postcolonial upheavals or political violence in the post-war period.²¹ Among the questions to ask in this context would be to what extent they were able to benefit from the experiential knowledge they acquired in other phases of transit. The answers to this and many other questions would, of course, vary according to the factors that influenced their respective transit experiences and their interpretations of them. Three factors were particularly important alongside gender, age, and occupation or qualifications: first, the specific location where Jewish refugees were stranded, including the preferred languages in those areas and the size of the Jewish community; second, the temporalities of the transit, in particular, the specific time individuals or families left their homeland (because it largely determined their choices) and the duration of their stay; and, third, the successes and failures in the remainder of their lives. The contributions of this special section take an initial look at all three dimensions. We hope that these examples of this approach will spur other historians to undertake similar studies and, eventually and in concert with others, to conduct a systematic analysis of these facets of transit.²²

Footnotes