Karen A. Frenkel

On this day in 1830, the House of Representatives passed the Indian Removal Act. The new law, signed two days later, authorized President Andrew Jackson to negotiate with southern Native American tribes––the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee nations––to remove them from their ancestral lands. Yes, Jackson is the guy Trump wants to keep on the $20 bill instead of replacing him with Harriet Tubman.

The Native Americans and their African slaves were forced to resettle on federal territory west of the Mississippi. The law amounted to systematic genocide because it completely discriminated against an ethnic group. On the 1838 march, known as the Trail of Tears, vast numbers of these tribes perished because of the cold, hunger, and disease.

A century later, my mother, Irena Goldberger, was a precocious teenager in Kraków avidly reading adventure stories about the American West. In books by the late 19thcentury German writer Karl May, she learned how the Old West was won by slaughtering Native Americans. He was influenced by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans(1826), which my mother also read.

When the Germans invaded Soviet-held eastern Poland in June 1941, my mother and her parents were in Lwów along with 250,000 other Jews. About half of them were refugees who, like Goldbergers, had fled western Poland when the Germans invaded on September 1, 1939. My mother, then 16, felt certain that she and her parents had no a chance of survival as Jews."I had the perception because I read about the American Indians," she told my sisters and me, "and I knew that we were doomed." She identified with the Native Americans and recognized the fate of Europe's Jews before her parents did.

In his tales, Karl May wrote of the friendship and adventures of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, an Apache chief. Although May never travelled to the West and there are inaccuracies, children in Middle and Eastern Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries read and adored him. In the first Winnetou book, Old Shatterhand meets a gunsmith who is fashioning a new kind of firearm with a twenty-five round repetition carbine. May raises the moral question of whether the gunsmith would be an accessory to murder, might even be as bad as a murderer, if every villain acquired his weapons. The Indians would be annihilated—slaughtered everywhere, Old Shatterhand argues—on the prairies, in the forests, in the canyons. My mother understood that May's main message was the injustice of the destruction of all the Native American tribes and collusion in that crime.

The Last of the Mohicans is set during the French and Indian Warin the mid-18thcentury. A white man named Hawkeye is friendly withthe Mohican chief, Chingachgook. The chief has one son, the brave Uncas.

During a raid on a settlement, Uncas tries to save the daughters of the camp's governor. But a villainous Huron warrior named Magua wants one of the daughters, Cora, for his wife. He captures her and they and his cohort traverse the rocky Catskill mountains back to his village. Cora refuses to cooperate and tells Magua that he can kill her if he wishes. As they approach a jagged precipice, Magua demands that Cora choose his wigwam or his knife. On the edge of the cliff with arms outstretched toward heaven, Cora cries, "I am thine! Do with me as thou seest best!"

At that moment Uncas, who with the girls' father and Hawkeye has been trailing the party, leaps toward them from a ledge above. During a struggle, Magua recoils and one of his loyal tribesmen stabs Cora. Magua then kills Uncas, but Hawkeye arrives and shoots Magua.

With these stories in mind, in the fall of 1941 my mother begged her parents to buy false papers so that they could impersonate Polish Catholics. My grandfather resisted because he did not have the money, was too proud to ask our wealthy American relatives here for it, and he feared the money would be wasted on useless documents. Afterall, they did not look the part.

Unfortunately, Adolf Hitler also was a Karl May fan. He, too, studied the United States government's treatment of Native Americans and applied it to the Jews. Ignoring May's Christian message of peaceful coexistence, Hitler praised Winnetou's tactical abilities and had special editions distributed to generals and soldiers at the front. Toward the end of the war, Hitler modelled the death marches of concentration camp inmates from one camp to another on the Trail of Tears.

My mother was spared the horrors of the camps and marches partly because she did not yield until my grandfather asked for money to buy false papers. She prevailed because of those stories of slaughter, her prescience, and enormous luck. Thus, she narrowly avoided destruction in one of the greatest crimes against humanity.

I'll tell you another time about how those stories helped propel my mother out of the Tarnów ghetto and her decision to go to Germany.

WeAre1: A Family of the Hounded
 

In May, 1939, my mother and her mother went to the dressmaker. Usually my grandmother's clothing was the reason for such an errand, but that spring my 14-year-old mother was to be fitted with new dresses. At the seamstress, my mother noticed that the seams and hems were generous and could be let out, if necessary. Nevertheless, that night she dreamt that she had nothing to wear, just a thin blouse and a skirt.

After the German invasion of western Poland the following September, my mother and her parents fled Kraków for southeastern Poland. They arrived in Tarnopol, the last stop on the railroad line, where a Jewish family took them in and gave them a room.

Then the Soviets invaded in May 1940. They gave the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from the west the option to return to German-occupied Poland, or to become Russian citizens. But they were not allowed to live in large cities or anywhere within 100 km of the frontier. My grandfather was an officer of the Polish Army reserve, so returning to the west was not an option. Instead, the family went to Zloczów where they lived with another Jewish family on the outskirts of town. And my mother had nothing to wear but a ragged shirt and a skirt.

Jewish refugees who opted to return to western Poland were eventually sent to Siberia, where they had a better chance of surviving than those who remained in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland because the Germans invaded in June 1941.

We Are 1: A Family of Asylum-seekers

WeAre1: A Family of the Unwanted

Eighty years ago this month, the St. Louis languished in the port of Havana with 937 German-Jewish refugees aboard. After Cuban officials refused them entry, American Jewish organizations negotiated in vain for asylum. Ultimately, the ship returned to Europe. Its human "cargo" dispersed to England, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The Jews' lives were again endangered a year later when Nazi Germany occupied the countries on the Continent.

In the 1980s, historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum researched the fates of the St. Louis passengers. Half survived; they either hid, or secretly and illegally fled to the United States or then Palestine. The others were murdered.

The St. Louis was yesteryear's Caravan. The ship and the forsaken Jewish refugees became a symbol of callous indifference to the plights of the displaced just as are today's Latin American asylum-seekers and the world's 68 million refugees.

It is especially horrifying that on the eve of this remembrance, President Trump is reinstating his inhumane and illegal policy of denying asylum and tearing apart migrant families. "Our country is full, our area's full, the sector is full. We can't take you anymore, I'm sorry, can't happen. So turn around," he said on April 5. Full? What does that mean? Turn around–again?

I have a personal connection to the St. Louis crisis through a little-known, small French ship that also steamed into Havana harbor that late May 1939, having spirited 104 Jewish refugees from Central and Eastern Europe trying to escape Hitler and 327 Spaniards fleeing Franco. I know of that French liner because my father, David A. Frenkel, MD, was on it.

My father left Poland on March 18, a day after his 26th birthday. He was newlywed, having married an American tourist named Rose, who already had departed for New York City. My father traversed Germany and Belgium by rail to France and lingered there until he bought a "landing visa" from a Cuban official and booked a berth. Le Flandre sailed from St. Nazaire on May 16 andstopped in Havana on May 28 en routeto Veracruz, Mexico.

I imagine my father leaning over the deck rails, elated to be so close to the United States mainland and to freedom. Further in the harbor, he would have been puzzled by the St. Louis at anchor and encircled by a flotilla of rowboats. I can only surmise this because my father refused to discuss how he got here. What he had to do to save himself was so humiliating and dangerous that he chose to spare my sisters and me. Until he died, we knew nothing of his marriage of convenience and harrowing voyage to freedom. Then we learned the barest outline from our mother and our father's brother. I ferreted out some details from his 1939 passport and several archives.

When Flandre docked, the Jewish refugees were not permitted to disembark. By then, my father would have heard that the rowboats bobbing around the St. Louis were filled with relatives clamoring for their loved ones to be freed.
On the dock, among 2,000 relatives and press, stood Rose, according to a June 9 story in the Austin American-Statesman. She asked an immigration official, "Why? Why can't he land? His papers are all in order." The immigration official shook his head and replied, "He's a Jew." "Yes, he committed a crime the minute he was born," Rose responded. Then she changed her approach and pleaded with the bureaucrat. "Won't you let me speak to him for just a minute? We haven't seen each other for such a long time." The official gruffly motioned her up the gangplank where she and my dad met halfway. There was time for a hurried kiss.

The reporter wrote that this was one of many scenes of people split apart. Sounds a bit like our DACA "Dreamers" and Caravan parents and their kids, doesn't it?

I suppose my ever-optimistic father said he would see what happened in Mexico, for which he had no visa. But that is how I like to think of my father. In truth, I cannot bear to contemplate how he really felt, displaced and abandoned.

When Flandre arrived in Veracruz, the Spaniards disembarked, but Jewish refugees were unwelcome. An unexpected commotion irrupted on the quay––a medical emergency. True to the Hippocratic Oath he had sworn at the Medical School of Vienna one year earlier, my father treated whoever was ailing. Then he must have convinced officials that he would not be a burden on the state because his American wife was arranging for his visa. He offered to work for free in a hospital until his visa came through. That's when they probably stamped his passport "Turista" and had his valises transferred to the dock.

Flandre returned to Havana where, again, no Jews were permitted on land. The passengers cabled President Roosevelt requesting that he intervene. He did not. Even though the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee raised $500 per Jew, the Cubans still refused the money. Six or seven Jews were allowed to disembark. Flandre sailed back to France where the government interned her 96 passengers. Their fates remain unknown.

You would not know by my complexion and last name that I am the daughter of a man who married to save himself and that by a fluke he was not forced to return to Europe. Could you have guessed that my father's first wife had a lover who was a gangster and that she expected her greenhorn husband to be her cover? Talk about criminal elements invading our turf. While adjusting to his new country, my dad extricated himself without arousing the suspicions of Immigration Services from a union that could have entangled him with New York's gangland. Then he enlisted in the Army and treated American soldiers in the European Theatre.

What happened to my parents did not occur long ago. In the human psyche, traumatic events are timeless and impact entire families. Certainly my parents' worldviews were permanently affected by their wartime experiences. They would not have recognized their haven today. They would have been appalled at the cruel actions of the Trump Administration and felt that it demeans us. Because they suffered from the world's unresponsiveness to their persecution, they raised my sisters and me to be empathic. We champion solidarity with the displaced and all victims of war because we understand their suffering.

We have a history here of immigrants from all walks of life and places who have contributed vastly to our society. The assumption that Central Americans will not is bigoted and all about satisfying Trump's base­­––those "fine people" whose chant at Charlottesville, "Jews will not replace us," threatened the rest of us.

The consequences of war and indifference last for generations, whether due to Anti-Semitism in 1939, or now from both the Left and the Right, or systemic racism affecting people of color. We must recognize and prevent the suffering of asylum seekers. The trauma inflicted by wrenching apart Caravan families, of a young Somali girl surviving in a Kenyan refugee camp, of slavery and Jim Crow, of the losses European Jews suffered during World War II, must not be diminished. We are one—a family of the displaced. There is no hierarchy of suffering, just timeless trauma. It is universal and immeasurable. The amygdala may or may not recover from the imprint of violence and prejudice singed into that part of the brain. And we all have amygdalae, just as our blood bleeds red.

On the 60th anniversary of the St. Louis crisis, the situation of the Jewish passengers was likened to the victims of the conflict in Kosovo in then Yugoslavia. If we cannot resuscitate tolerance and empathy, yet another group of refugees will be referenced upon the centennial of the St. Louis and Le Flandre, and on and on through the ages.