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"It was a search for an asylum no matter where." | |||
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Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort Born 1923 Breslau, Germany 
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Well, as you can imagine there was a terrible mood. Everybody was very depressed. A few people committed...tried to commit suicide as I think uh the one man...he, I think he cut his wrists and they, he was the only one who landed because they had to take him to the hospital to...to tend to him. I don't know whether he stayed or not. I think he did. He must have been the only one who stayed. But you know, humans are always hopeful. You know, we always cling to the hope something is going to happen. They're not going to let us rot on the ocean. I mean, something had to happen to us. Of course, the fear was that we would go back to Germany. That was the big thing you know. So we...the food got worse and worse and the water was...water supply, I mean we had water but we had to be careful, and of course the parties were over. No more parties, no more, no more fun. We were just sitting and waiting--what's going to happen, you know, and uh here again the committee tried everything and sent telegrams all over the world trying to get us in but it was.... Everyday they had like newsletters printed and put out on board to tell us what's happening and everyday there was another country we were supposedly going to go, but we never...and nothing came about until finally at the--we were already--well, first we came to, to the coast of Miami and we thought we could, you know--I heard later that the captain had agreed that we make some kind of a forced landing or something but we didn't know anything about it. We just saw the uh Coast Guard boats surround us near Miami to make sure that we wouldn't even come close to the border, to the...to shore, so that was out. So we saw the lights of Miami. We saw the lights of America and that was it. So we slowly sailed back to Europe. And of course behind the scenes--you know--there was a lot of negotiations going on with the United, the United Jewish Appeal and there was a Mr. Tupper in Paris and he finally got it together that we will be divided between Belgium and Holland and France and England. | ||
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Hessy Levinson Taft Born 1934 Berlin, Germany 
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When you get an American immigration visa--which is hard to get, because you need to prove that you can sustain yourself and, you know, you're not going to land up being on welfare or a burden to anyone in this country, uh...and that you are in good health and so on. But even after all this, you are told that you have ninety days to reach American shores. And my father realized as time was going by, that there was no way in which he could get his family to the U.S. within the time frame left. Thirty days before the visa expired, he requested an extension from Washington. The Atlantic, you know, across the Atlantic, there were no commercial flights at the time. Uh, this was in 1941. Uh, the ocean was patrolled. Submarines...uh...Anyway, we waited for a reply from Washington. And [it] eventually came, and it said, "No." They denied us an extension. So, again, I guess I could say it's not thanks to Uncle Sam that I am sitting here today. My father tried every avenue available to him. He went to a series of Latin American consulates in France, and uh...in Nice; and eventually landed up with a Cuban consulate who would listen to him, also accept some money, and granted him visas to Cuba. | ||
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Susan Bluman Born 1920 Warsaw, Poland 
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So finally, when we finally got to Vilna we were happy to get there because here we had the opportunity to get to the consulate and embassies who were representing most of the countries in the world. And we were just going from one consulate to the other, to the embassies, begging, and telling them about our tragic situation. And no one would pay any attention to us. No one wanted us. We were just rejected by all the consulates, by all the embassies. We were desperate, absolutely desperate. We didn't see any hope, absolutely no hope. We just...we were a people with no land, nobody to turn to. And then we heard about Chiune Sugihara, by hearing about other refugees going to his consulate and getting a transit visa, if...if you had a visa, Curacao visa, which is one of the small Dutch islands in the Caribbean. The problem was that I did not have a passport, so my husband had then difficulties putting me on...me on his passport. And then by the time we had all those formalities, the Dutch consul, which was an honorary consul, he already left the city. So we went to the consulate of, the Japanese consulate. And it was my husband who got to see Mr. Sugihara. And he told him about what...what was happening to us. And he already knew about it from other refugees. And despite that we did not have a visa to get somewhere--because transit visa is only to get you somewhere--Consul Sugihara granted us this wonderful visa for life, this transit visa. | ||
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