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farm in preparation for life in Palestine; the Communists thought of
going East; and the nonpolitical ones, for the most part, looked west–
ward. Most of their families were comfortably middle class, some-as
those of the historian George Mosse and George Weidenfeld, among
others-were wealthy and renowned, and some were fairly poor. But
Germany and Austria were
Heimat
to them all; and so was the German
language. More or less suddenly they were ostracized by friends and
neighbors, kicked out of schools and universities, and had to scramble
for visas to whatever country would have them.
That this "generation" was born between
1914
and
1928,
of course,
makes sense, given the five years of incremental horror in Germany and
the abrupt realization, if not immediately after the Austrian
Anschluss
then after
Kristallnacht,
that escape alone could save them. Laqueur
quickly disposes of the ludicrous supposition by a few historians, and by
some of the so-called second generation, that they might have left sooner.
Such hindsight ignores that during these years of depression, anti-Semi–
tism and fear of competitive labor were rampant everywhere; that most
countries' borders were tightly closed after March
1938
if not sooner;
and that the Nazis took every precaution to hide their (incrementally
passed) "Jewish laws" from their prey, as well as from the rest of the
world. Neither Laqueur nor anyone else is able to provide exact statistics;
accurate numbers of escapees are unavailable in most countries; many
crossed borders illegally, often more than once; and many others did not
directly reach their final destinations. And a large number changed their
names. (Laqueur bases his approximations on all the obtainable facts.)
For instance, among those who settled in the United States, some first
went to England, France or Cuba, to Shanghai, Ecuador or Italy, and so
on. Among those were the women who left for England as domestics, the
ten thousand children who arrived there on a Kindertransport, the few
hundred who were allowed into Holland and Belgium (1 was among
them), and the adventurous ones who made it on their own by crossing
the borders of Holland and Switzerland, and the Baltic sea.
Laqueur follows up on what happened after a successful flight, which
depended on the political moment, on whether it had been before or
after the outbreak of World War II, and on the strength and determina–
tion of the local German forces . By the end of
1942,
nearly everyone
knew that none of those who had been transported to the east had come
back, which sent twelve to fifteen thousand Jews from Germany into
hiding-with or without false papers. These so-called U-boats changed
their identities, impersonated Nazis, and moved from place to place
every few days-which was possible only with the help of friends. Fear
