The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  Eventually an idea was spawned of how to put the women to work. In Caldas da Rainha some parents had considered sending their children overseas even if they themselves were unable to go. There was understandable fear, though, of never reuniting with them. Would the United States open itself to immigrants after the war? Would the children, after their lives with foster families, want to be back with their parents? The American women began meeting with the families to respond to such concerns and gather information about the children. Medical histories were taken, and after police permission was granted the children were transported to the Lisbon consulate for medical exams and the voluminous paperwork needed for immigration. In the end, twenty-two children from Caldas da Rainha were among the three hundred who sailed for America aboard the Serpa Pinta, with the majority coming through Spain from refugee families interned there for illegally entering the country.

  In weekend breaks from his AFSC work, Wriggins took in the usual pleasures of Lisbon. He went swimming on the Estoril coast and snacked on sardines roasted on beachfront charcoal fires. There were long walks in the Lisbon hills with their striking views of the shipping and ferry traffic on the Tagus. Narrow side streets near the docks smelled of fish and were vivid with baskets of flowers hanging from windows. And always there was the spectacle of light: shifting tints on buildings during the day, the war-defying brilliance of avenues at night.

  Late in the summer of 1943 Wriggins left Portugal for an AFSC post in North Africa. As a Quaker, one of his goals had been to resist generalizing about the refugees he worked with and treat them as unique individuals; nonetheless large thoughts now came to him about Lisbon’s particular brand of exiles. Removed from their pasts and faced with beginning a new life, while stuck in Lisbon they were in a fretful limbo—“rather like a patient with an unknown disease,” as Wriggins thought of the state, “who waits anxiously for an unknowable diagnosis.” Caught between accepting the condition with patience or trying to do something about it, in both cases the exiles were nagged by guilt for having reached Lisbon when others had not. The demoralized whiled away their days in cafés; others, responsive still to the effort or luck or connections that had carried them this far, compulsively competed for an edge—a document, a signature, a ticket for a ship—that would open the door to further movement. Perhaps the most fortunate among them, Wriggins decided, were women who calmly filled their days knitting sweaters and vests for winter.

  “In Lisbon,” he wrote of his own situation and that of other relief workers, “we had a more than ringside seat to the war.” From the exiles they learned daily of shattered lives and heard stories of men and women suddenly removed from French camps and shipped off to Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, presumably to work as forced labor in military industries. Rumors of extermination camps also trickled into Lisbon, though they tended to be discounted on grounds the Nazis surely would not spend energy and resources on nonmilitary pursuits. From the Portuguese, their attitudes about the war varying with the military news, they were made aware that radically different postwar futures were at stake. His contacts with the war caused Wriggins to question his position as a conscientious objector: “Was I really a ‘pacifist’ when I saw what a disaster it would be for all the people I was helping, even for the Portuguese, if the Nazis should come to control Portugal? Even worse would be a Nazi victory.” Yet just as Lisbon brought the implications of war close, it also held off Wriggins’s doubt. Work overtook reflection—work that fit within the Quaker tradition of affirming humane values while remaining apart from the struggle for power. In that sense, he told himself, Lisbon had not challenged his belief so much as offered a unique opportunity for putting it to action.

  *

  While in charge of the Quakers’ Lisbon office during a four-month home leave by Philip Conrad, Howard Wriggins had turned for help and encouragement to Joseph J. Schwartz, the head of the local office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—to most, simply the Joint. Tall, black-haired, and with what struck Wriggins as a sad face marked by an endless burden of work—Wriggins suspected he rarely slept—Schwartz was a rabbi with a doctorate from Yale who had turned to social work. In Europe when the war began, he was caught up in the refugee exodus to Lisbon, and in June 1940, with the Salazar government allowing Jewish relief groups in occupied territory to relocate in Portugal, he established in the city the Joint’s European headquarters.

  In the war’s early period Nazi policy continued to encourage the mass migration of Jews, and the overriding task for Schwartz and his group was housing and feeding them after they reached Lisbon, then finding and paying for overseas transport. With American Export Lines favoring American citizens returning home, the Joint relied heavily on a half-dozen Portuguese liners of medium size. With American visas granted only to those with proof of booked tickets, the Joint bought berths, then waited to see if its clients would turn up in Lisbon in time to occupy them. Later in the immigration process the shipping companies shifted from booking individual berths to securing block space and entire vessels, and costs soared accordingly. Yet money could be raised in the United States and elsewhere; the greater problem for the Joint was always a shortage of ocean transport. “A ship goes off,” an official wrote in late 1940, “but what we need is a bridge—a bridge that hundreds of thousands could cross—like over a rainbow—from despair to hope or even to despair with dignity.”

  In its Lisbon work the Joint drew on the support of the resident Jewish community, which in Portugal was small—perhaps about a thousand, including some 650 Jews who had arrived before the war—but ably organized under a notable university professor, Moses B. Amzalak, and with a relief committee headed by a young medical doctor and author, Augusto d’Esaguy. The two men had developed a working relationship with the police, and the Joint supported the local Jewish group with funds for distribution to refugees in Caldas da Rainha and other holding centers.

  The number of Jews who passed through Lisbon in the early war years is uncertain. In November 1940 the Joint put the number of Jewish refugees actually in Portugal at 10,000. In February 1941 Augusto d’Esaguy estimated that 32,000 went through the country in the first months after France fell. Another estimate has it that about 40,000 Jews moved through Lisbon in 1940 and 1941. Given the difficulties of obtaining overseas visas and transport, Lisbon is thought to have had a shifting population of some 4,000 Jewish refugees throughout the entire wartime period.

  When the United States joined the war and widespread removal of its citizens from Europe began, the work of all Lisbon-based American relief groups was in doubt. “Believe entire staff should be evacuated immediately,” New York cabled Schwartz after Pearl Harbor. The Joint’s director agreed, and a three-month budget was set and Moses Amzalak appointed to look after the agency’s local interests. But Schwartz could not leave his post quickly since large numbers of Jews with valid overseas visas were still caught in Lisbon, and aid money coming in from Jewish contributors in the United States was increasing. In the end, the Joint removed its workers from everywhere in Europe except Lisbon, though a volunteer in Switzerland, Saly Mayer, maintained a JDC office there and grew in value as a collaborator of Schwartz through the rest of the war.

  From his Lisbon location Schwartz found he could continue such European operations as sending aid parcels and gathering information on Jews still trapped in occupied territory as well as monitoring overseas shipping. A persistent concern was the situation in neighboring Spain, where stateless Jews and Jews without transit visas were confined along with other refugees in overcrowded camps and prohibited from making outside contact. In Schwartz’s view, the newly appointed American ambassador, Carlton Hayes, failed to mount a vigorous intervention on their behalf.

  Together with Philip Conrad of the Quakers, Schwartz joined in a proposal to Hayes to place a relief agent within the embassy to represent both the Quakers and the Joint, thereby getting around the Franco government’s opposition to having non-Catholic rel
ief groups working on Spanish soil. Hayes agreed, and in early 1943 David J. Blickenstaff, who had a background of relief experience with the Church of the Brethren during Spain’s civil war, arrived in Madrid and was recognized as the representative of American relief organizations. Blickenstaff and his co-workers—the group enlarged to include the Unitarians and a Catholic organization—eventually moved to offices near the embassy, with expenses contributed by the Lisbon relief agencies. Needed food, clothing, and medical supplies were brought in from Portugal, though only with permission of Portuguese authorities and often after lengthy bureaucratic delays.

  When the Quaker office in Lisbon discovered that five tons of clothing sent to it from Philadelphia had been sitting for months in a warehouse by the Tagus, it was able, with dogged effort, to arrange a transfer to Blickenstaff in Madrid. (Goods waiting in Lisbon for one reason or another was a familiar headache for the relief groups. In early 1941, Reverend Clayton Williams of the American Church of Paris spent several weeks in Lisbon seeking railway transport through Portugal and Spain for two carloads of clothing and medical supplies held for half a year in the city. It took him, so it was said, eighty visits to officials in Lisbon and Madrid to get the cars moving to France.) And when Blickenstaff pried loose refugees from Spanish camps, they had to be met by relief workers at the Lisbon train station, then provided with food and lodging during the time that elapsed before departure on a ship. After he was able to get the release of three hundred stateless men from a camp—by arguing that, since they lacked nationality, they would not be drafted into military service by the Allies if set free—they were placed in a holding center similar to those in Portugal, with the Joint in Lisbon covering most of the costs.

  *

  Joseph Schwartz had enough on his hands at the Joint without conflict with another Jewish aid figure. An especially testy situation arose with Isaac Weissman, a Turkish-born Polish Jew and ardent Zionist who had come to Lisbon as a refugee in June 1940 and labored zealously for fellow exiles without discriminating between legal and illegal entrants. Apparently through his contacts with the Portuguese police, Weissman was able to get some two hundred illegal Jews released from prison and placed in Ericeira, a small fishing port on the Atlantic just north of Lisbon. When he asked the Joint to support them, Schwartz said help would be available but distribution would not come through him.

  Moses Amzalak and others in Lisbon’s Jewish community were already wary of Weissman’s unbridled rescue methods, believing they threatened the status of all Jews in Portugal. Weissman kept going about his work as he saw fit, eventually becoming the Lisbon representative of two Jewish aid groups, the Committee for Relief of the War-Stricken Jewish Population and the World Jewish Congress. Not surprisingly, a key associate in his rescue work was the Unitarian Service Committee.

  Weissman was considered for yet another Lisbon post, the representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, until opposition from the Joint and the local Jewish community blocked any possibility of his appointment. For some time the group had been looking for someone to facilitate the movement of stateless Jews to Palestine, and it was not until January 1943 that it finally settled on Wilfrid Israel as its agent. He was still in an early phase of carrying out his assignment when, in June of that year, he was among the passengers who perished in the shooting down of the Ibis on its flight from Lisbon to London.

  *

  From a prosperous Jewish department store family in Berlin, Wilfrid Israel—he had been born in Britain and held a British passport—had fled Germany for London in May 1939. He left behind a sterling record of efforts to relocate Jews in the period of Nazi policy directed to emigration rather than extermination. With the aid of the Quakers and British Jews, he had overseen the movement of ten thousand children to England. He and his co-workers also packed Jews into ships leaving Germany for Shanghai, where few if any travel documents were necessary; for destinations where they were required, he purchased passports, visas, and residence permits that were openly on sale in Germany. From the Gestapo he ransomed the release of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Jews held in internment camps. After his flight to England, he returned to Berlin once more, in August 1939, to get a last contingent of Jewish children across Holland to England and to aid the departure of some of his parents’ friends. When through the American embassy in Berlin he heard stories that all those with dual national identities were about to be interned, he finally abandoned Germany for good.

  Although the family fortune was lost, Israel himself was financially independent. Yet rather than settle into life as a prosperous and cultivated English gentleman, he chose to view himself as a refugee with continuing responsibilities to others who had escaped Nazi Europe. Like Isaac Weissman, he was also committed to the Zionist cause, and in the early spring of 1940 he traveled to Palestine by way of Trieste to observe developments there. He had been in the Middle East before and was a co-founder of a movement known as Youth Aliya, which as early as 1932 had sent Jewish children to resettlement in Palestine. What he saw now was deeply pleasing: young pioneers had transformed a barren environment into fertile and thriving communal societies. He gave thought to living in a kibbutz himself, perhaps resuming work as a sculptor, a career path he had once thought of following.

  Israel was still in Palestine when Germany invaded the Low Countries. He immediately returned to England and to the refugees, working now as a middleman between British officials and Jewish and non-Jewish aliens who had been rounded up and placed in improvised camps for fear they were enemy agents or fifth columnists. At the same time he lobbied for refugee rights, he retained his concern for Jewish children, especially those of the Youth Aliya movement, now caught in what had become occupied countries. In early 1941 he wrote to a friend urging Jewish groups to mobilize to get them out of Europe though Portugal: “I maintain that Jewish organizations should be working in Portugal saving as many youngsters as possible from Central Europe and France, in close touch with the Joint and Hadassah [a Jewish women’s group in the United States and one of the financial supporters of Youth Aliya].” With the fate of Jews in Europe still unclear, some Jewish aid organizations resisted the many perils of transport operations in wartime conditions.

  Late in 1941 Israel tried to join the RAF but was turned down for age—he was over forty—and health reasons. In November of that year he took a position at Oxford University as a consultant in the German section at the Foreign Research and Press Service of the Royal Institution of International Affairs (widely known as Chatham House). It was a paid job—five pounds a week—and Israel enjoyed Oxford’s monastic atmosphere and high-table dining as well as the intellectual work of research and report writing. He rose quickly from the fringes of the group to its center, yet the yearning to settle in Palestine stayed with him. He took up the study of Hebrew and sought and received an immigration certificate from the Colonial Office.

  In January 1943 he was asked by a London official of the Jewish Agency for Palestine to go to Lisbon to—as Israel loosely outlined in a letter the appealing nature of his task—“help in salvage work, refugee selection, or something on that line.” The refugees he would try to save were Jewish children, and several new developments had given that long-standing ambition fresh possibility. Israel wasted no time in obtaining a two-month leave of absence from his research position and arranging a March air flight from England.

  His brief from the Jewish Agency was to distribute two hundred immigration certificates among the thousands of Jewish refugees gathered in Portugal and Spain, to plan for their transportation to Palestine, and to look into chances of rescuing some one thousand children still caught in occupied France. He hoped to accomplish even more, but plenty of doubt attached to even this challenging agenda. Transportation was a main problem. In the midst of war he could not expect to use Allied ships to move refugees, and commercial shipping was severely limited and expensive. Even if ships could be found, there was a question of the route to take through the war zo
ne of the Mediterranean.

  Since the number of certificates he had to allocate fell far short of those needed, Israel was careful to inform the Joint in Lisbon before leaving England to “on no account give any binding undertaking to individuals concerned. Do not wish to face any faits accomplis or raise false hopes.” In a letter to an old friend in rescue operations, he tried to tamp down hopes for his mission by noting he was not “coming to the Iberian peninsula as a deus ex machina” to “save the situation.” Perhaps with awareness that his air flight to Portugal was inherently risky, he took the precaution of making his will before leaving England. Among many bequests was that of a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture to the Hazorea kibbutz in Palestine.

  In Lisbon, Israel knew he needed the cooperation of the relief agencies, and especially Jewish groups such as the Joint, yet he also realized he had to keep some distance from them in order to independently make his immigration selections from the enormous number of possibilities. He went alone to inspect the refugee centers in Caldas da Rainha and Ericeira, and came away with a view that Jews in Portugal were in a more secure position than those he was likely to find in Spain. He also made the rounds of Lisbon’s embassies and legations, explaining his mission and his added hope of rescuing a large portion of an entire generation of young Jews—he set the ideal age for immigration as between fourteen and sixteen—from throughout occupied Europe.