He saved 2,500 World War II refugees — but doomed his career as a diplomat
Proposed legislation would honor 60 diplomats who rescued Jews, including Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV, US vice consul in Marseille
Proposed legislation would honor 60 diplomats who rescued Jews, including Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV, US vice consul in Marseille
New Ken Burns PBS series shows divisions in American Jewish community's response to Hitler
IRSHAVA, Ukraine (JTA) — Like dozens of displaced persons camps that now dot Eastern Europe, the one in this Ukrainian town near the Hungarian border has inhabitants whose lives were turned upside down by Russia’s war. But the refugee camp at Irshava is different. For one thing, it’s equipped with a kosher kitchen and accommodates…
Every year for Hanukkah, my mother would gift me a book about the Holocaust. Every vacation we took, even within the continental United States, my mother insisted we carry our US passports, just in case we needed to flee at a moment’s notice. Those books and passports served as reminders of my Jewish ancestry —…
When Caroline Link reread “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,” decades after she first read it for school, she underlined a passage where Swiss boys throw gravel at the young Jewish protagonist. She couldn’t wait to direct that scene. It’s a curious, if not quite startling moment in the chapter book, a 1971 semi-autobiographical novel of…
She crossed so many borders I started to lose track: Poland into Germany via cattle car; Germany into Czechoslovakia on foot; Czechoslovakia into Germany when she and her parents fell asleep in a (supposedly) broken-down train car that inched back into service while they slept; Germany into Canada on a steamer, loaded down with a…
The awful night my family crossed the Soviet border is still seared in my mind. Hours of threats and violent searches had pushed us to the edge. I stared at the guards with machine guns. My father stared at the guard captain who was deciding our fate. But the rest of my family was looking…
They were called “so-called” refugees, told they were alien to American culture and warned against as potential enemies of the United States. This heated anti-refugee rhetoric in America was directed against Jews trying to flee Europe, not Mexicans or Syrians. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, the fear was of Nazi and Communist infiltrators sneaking…