In the 1930s and 40s, the Portuguese prime minister António de Oliveira Salazar had the dubious distinction of being the least brutal of Europe’s many dictators. He kept his country out of World War II, and didn’t share the fanatical anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler or Romania’s Ion Antonescu. As a result, Portugal became a destination for Jews fleeing the Nazi advance, whose experiences are detailed in Marion Kaplan’s new book Hitler’s Jewish Refugees. (Ruth Wisse describes her own family’s sojourn in Lisbon here.) Allan Arkush writes in his review:
Tens of thousands of Jews made their way into Portugal in waves between the fall of France in 1940 and the end of World War II. The ordeals Kaplan depicts were not terribly long, but to the people who endured them, they often seemed endless. Things might have been different if they had been allowed to work, but most of them were not. This prohibition had the beneficial side effect of preventing the Portuguese people from resenting their competition, but it left the Jewish refugees poor and despondent.
Some, such as the not-yet-famous thinker Hannah Arendt, were lucky enough to be able to leave for America quickly. The rest would have been happy to go anywhere, especially before November 1942, when the Allies landed in North Africa and the danger of German invasion of Portugal seemed to dissolve. But to get out, one needed the right kind of papers, and to obtain them was a struggle that usually required excruciating negotiations and large sums of money—and the clock was always ticking. Portuguese law permitted Jews to stay in the country for only 30 days, though it wasn’t strictly enforced. Those in violation were sometimes imprisoned, sometimes expelled from Lisbon and confined to small villages, and sometimes left to live in uncertainty as they ceaselessly struggled to find a way out.
It took somewhat longer for Miriam Stanton to get on her way. A Polish-born woman living in German-occupied Paris, she escaped in March 1941. She was soon engaged in a daily routine of “visiting the English and Polish consulates, telephoning her parents, stopping at the post office to check on the elusive visa” that would enable her to rejoin her fiancé in England.
Like many of the refugees profiled in Kaplan’s book, she began to hang around Lisbon’s cafés, which became a kind of home away from home for her. In the café located seven floors below her room in a walk-up building, she attended a Passover seder. “When the man leading the ritual arrived at the traditional question, ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ spoken in Hebrew, he broke down and cried. He had lost his wife and only child. In trying to console him, the group grew closer to one another and, for that moment, ‘felt like a family.’”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/10259/time-ticks-away-in-portugal/