Synopsis
1996, English hardcover edition, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL. This title first appeared in German in 1993. 173 total pages, with a most impressive photo section, reproducing letters, documents, and other correspondence. Today, the headlines constantly discuss the issues of various peoples wanting to get into this country. During the 1930's and 1940's, German Jews, facing extermination, had to leave their homeland. Here is a documented case of one such family that tried their best to escape to America and failed. This is a story of government red tape and a lot of other things. Most sobering, to say the least.
Reviews
A unique Holocaust biography focused on the bureaucratic nightmares of a family fighting to leave Nazi Germany. Armin and Renate Schmid are German journalists who pieced together the Frhauf family's wartime ordeal, based largely on a paper trail of tears. While most of this Jewish family perishes in the death camps, the villains here are not infamous camp commandants but the bureaucrats who consigned them to Hitler's killing field. These faceless and merciless pencil pushers include American immigration officials, Belgian relief workers, Spanish shipping clerks, Swiss consuls, and a dozen German bureaucrats of organizations ranging from Lufthansa to the Gestapo. Because Hilde Frhauf was born in the US, the best way out of post-Kristallnacht Germany seemed to be through the family's American ties. Reams of desperate red tape, all documented here, do not help the doomed family get past the evil of bureaucratic banality that conspires to destroy them. After exploring expensive and complicated escape options involving China, Cuba, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and various South and Central American states, the family's matriarch hangs herself in exasperation as German legislation chokes off the Frhaufs' ability to survive. Over time, all but one family member are shipped off to labor or death camps. The lucky one, Helga, is young and pretty enough to slip into Belgium with the help of various men--but we never learn what she has to compromise to survive. Where emotion or drama is called for, all the authors can provide us with are flat lines like: ``Felix had to turn to the Swiss legation and beg `most humbly' for an extension of the Cuban visa. Once again it had all been in vain.'' Because we don't get to know the principal subjects well enough, the appeal of this book, though not its historical significance, gets lost in the labyrinth of red tape. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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