The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  The plane landed at Talara, a U.S. installation newly built to protect oil fields on the Peruvian coast. Skolnick and a buddy headed for the waterfront. They entered a shop wearing army air forces–issue short-sleeve brown work shirts. From behind the counter a man looked squarely at the name written on Skolnick’s pocket and addressed the American in Yiddish. The two carried on a lively bargaining session until Skolnick and his astonished friend walked out laden with more blankets than they had anticipated buying at a far lower price than they had expected to pay.

  “Shit,” said Skolnick’s buddy, “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish so good.”

  The following spring, Saul Skolnick received an invitation from the Talara merchant to return for a seder meal, and to bring friends. “The shop owner was drawing on a Jewish Passover tradition of welcoming the stranger,” said Skolnick’s son Paul, a retired broadcast journalist in Los Angeles who heard the story many times from his father, who died in 2002. “‘Every unmarried Jewish woman in the country must have been at that table,’ he used to say. ‘Here were a dozen nice-looking men, and not one of them a Nazi.’”

  The late Corporal Saul Skolnick, called by his son “a typical Brooklyn Jew,” was surprised to find so many fellow Jews in a tiny town on an overwhelmingly Catholic continent. “It opened his eyes,” said Paul Skolnick. “He wondered, ‘How did these Jews get here?’”

  * * *

  Unbeknownst then to Saul Skolnick as he sat with new friends at the seder table in Peru, and still a surprise to many first-time visitors to Latin America, Jews have been part of the hemisphere’s living fabric since the fifteenth century. In 1492, when Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand ended centuries of Moslem rule in Spain and banished Jews from the country, six Jewish crew members sailed with Columbus on his first voyage.

  They were conversos, Jews who converted or appeared to convert to avoid punishment. One of them, Rodrigo de Triana, was the first to sight land. Columbus describes another, Luis de Torres, as “one who had been Jewish and who knew Hebrew and some Arabic.” De Torres was the first to set foot upon the soil of the New World.

  By banishing Jews and Moslems, the Iberian monarchs were performing a limpieza de sangre, a cleansing of the blood. They decided the cleansing should extend to the colonies too, so they forbade Jews and converts to the fourth generation to settle in their American lands. But determined travelers could always get exemption permits from corrupt officials, and sea captains could be bribed to land “New Christians” at secret inlets, such as south of Veracruz in Mexico, or on the Honduran coast, or in southern Chile.

  The earliest Jewish arrivals in Latin America didn’t suffer the same kind of shunning and denunciation from neighbors that they might have experienced in Europe. Possibly the shared difficulties of setting up lives in a new environment even acted as a kind of leveler, as it might in any frontier society. While Spain and Portugal ruled Latin American lands, however, Jews could not escape the long arm of the intolerant Catholic Church of the Iberian Peninsula.

  On a pedestrian plaza near Avenida Juarez in Mexico City, the busy modern-day street that cuts into the heart of the capital’s historic center, a steady flow of foot traffic swirls around outdoor cafés crowded with fashionably dressed patrons. Amid the bustle, a visitor might miss a small, bright yellow church set back from the street. But it is worth pausing to read the stone inscription on a pillar that faces the plaza: “In front of this was the burning place of the Inquisition, 1596–1771.”

  Established in Europe in the early twelfth century, the Roman Catholic tribunal used torture and execution to punish those it judged heretics. At first the Inquisition set its sights upon erring Catholics, then Protestants and Jews and social outcasts such as homosexuals. In the New World, the indigenous and African slaves might be brought before the court. In the end, however, just like the Holocaust, the Inquisition was aimed at Jews.

  On the plaza in front of the stone pillar, the condemned of the Inquisition performed the auto-da-fé, a public confession of their crime of conscience. Many were imprisoned, although torture was less frequent than in Europe. From Mexico, the Inquisition governed nearby lands. A Portuguese-born Guatemalan, Nunes Pereira, died before the Mexican pillar for the crimes of “judaizing, heresy and apostasy.” Accused heretics were brought to the tribunal in Lima from as far away as Bolivia and Ecuador, to Cartagena from Panama. “The reality was that every town in Spanish America was affected by the foundation of the Inquisition,” a British scholar wrote.

  Among ordinary New World Catholics, religious practice was not as fiercely intolerant as it was in Spain—neighbors knew that friends and other neighbors were Jews, but did not denounce them. Jews settled openly and built synagogues in Recife and other towns on the Brazilian coast as long as the Dutch held sway there, beginning in 1630. The region was free from the Inquisition until the Portuguese took it back in 1654 and tribunal authorities sent prisoners to Lisbon.

  Over its two-hundred-year existence in Latin America, the Inquisition held about three thousand trials; probably a total of one hundred persons were killed. Sometimes the Inquisitors’ motives were political—the Mexican independence hero and Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo, charged before the tribunal and eventually found not guilty, said he would never have been accused had he not supported the liberation movement. But Jews, or targets branded as conversos, were nearly always vulnerable.

  As Latin American countries broke away from Spain and Portugal in the early nineteenth century and the Inquisition disappeared from Latin America, a dramatic turnaround occurred: the newly independent nations began to accept Jews as immigrants.

  Beginning in 1880, Sephardic Jews traveled to the most inaccessible jungles of Peru and Brazil. In improvised boats, they “navigated the waters of the Amazon and its tributaries in the incessant search for rubber and trade,” wrote a Peruvian Jewish community leader almost a century later. In 1969, Yaacov Hasson visited descendants of the pioneers in Iquitos, at the Amazon headwaters. He reported that records and oral testimony showed that some of the earliest settlers had regarded the Amazon region as a possible utopia, and that they “identified their personal hopes with the prospect of a Jewish civilization here.”

  The crash of the rubber boom in 1912 dashed dreams in the Amazon, but Jewish pioneers were already settling elsewhere. As turn-of-the-century pogroms wracked imperial Russia and Constantinople, thousands looked to the vast expanses of Brazil and Argentina for refuge. The London-based Jewish Colonization Association, founded by the German banker and philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch, obtained land and organized their travel. Russia was intransigent on its deplorable treatment of the Jews, and the fabulously wealthy de Hirsch saw emigration as their only hope.

  In Russia, Jews were banned from professions and trades, including agriculture, but the Jewish Colonization Association purchased tens of thousands of acres near Buenos Aires to farm. Few of those who traveled with the colonization efforts had experience in the fields, but they joined the exodus anyway, looking for lives where they could practice their faith in freedom. In the Argentine province of Entre Rios, the colonization association planted miles of alfalfa, and settlers raised cattle. In the wilds of the New World, they worked in common, inspired by the same spirit of shared faith and work on the land that later gave rise to the kibbutzim in Israel. They would “keep their plows in good repair and watch the wheat grow like a vast green sheet,” wrote the Lithuanian Argentine author Alberto Gerchunoff in 1914. “They kept the holy days and enjoyed the results of their labors.”

  Gerchunoff’s landmark series of scenes taken from his life growing up in Entre Rios, The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, is dedicated to de Hirsch and considered the seminal work of Latin American Jewish literature. The small book reads like a paean to the enthusiasm and idealism of early settlers. In one vignette, new arrivals sing, “To the Argentine, We’ll go—to sow; To live as friends and brothers, To be free!”

  Beginning in 1904, the colonization asso
ciation bought tens of thousands more acres in Brazil’s southern province of Rio Grande do Sul, but after a couple of decades experiments there failed, partly because of the colonists’ inexperience with farming. Some of the disaffected, and those who were simply worn out, became peddlers, often walking long distances to sell wares at shops, homes, ranches. Photos of the 1910s and 1920s show the typical Jewish peddler wearing a hat and tie but burdened from top to toe by a cargo of goods—a pack on his back filled with fabric and notions, pots and pans strapped across his chest, brooms in one hand, and a rake in the other.

  Jews leaving the agricultural colonies gravitated to cities where they lived side by side with new arrivals who had disembarked at Veracruz in Mexico, Guatemala’s Puerto Barrios, Cartagena in Colombia, Buenos Aires in Argentina, or Havana, Cuba. From Brazil’s southernmost port, Rio Grande do Sul, they traveled to Uruguay and Paraguay. Others directly headed some two hundred miles north to the province’s capital, Porto Alegre, where they lived in a shtetl-like neighborhood called Bom Fim.

  There among shops, synagogues, professional offices, and vacant lots where youngsters gathered after school, the late 1930s and early 1940s passed in a microcosm of what Jews experienced, to greater and lesser degrees, throughout Latin countries.

  Summer arrived and with it, Hanukah, the Festival of Lights. Joel and Nathan lit lights in remembrance of the Maccabees. After that would come Pesach and they would eat unleavened bread in remembrance of the flight from Egypt, and then there would be Good Friday. And finally Holy Saturday, a day on which even the stones of Fernandez Vieira Street were filled with hatred for the Jews. The cinamomo trees would lower their branches to punish them, the fierce hound of Melâmpio would come in from the outskirts to pursue them with his barking. The goyim hunted down Jews throughout Bom Fim. They would be reconciled the next day and would play soccer in the field on Cauduro Avenue, but on Holy Saturday it was necessary to thrash at least one Jew.

  —MOACYR SCLIAR, The War in Bom Fim

  Hitler’s rise spurred new Jewish migration, but just when refugees needed open doors most, Latin countries closed them. Radical rightist groups appeared in countries from Mexico to Argentina, sometimes supported by German Nazis but essentially homegrown, products of some of the same kind of forces that fed European fascism: economic depression, ultra-nationalism, fear of “outsiders” competing for jobs, suspicion of unfamiliar customs in an overwhelmingly Christian culture. Even in neighborhoods like Porto Alegre’s Bom Fim, where Jews had lived for decades, anti-Semitism rose.

  “At that time you couldn’t open your mouth, you had to be quiet,” said Sofia Wolff Carnos, who was born at one of Baron de Hirsch’s agricultural colonies in 1909 and moved with her parents to Bom Fim. “Anyone who spoke out was condemned and persecuted.”

  Carnos’s memories are among hundreds recorded by researchers from a Bom Fim synagogue in the 1980s. During her childhood in the 1910s and 1920s, Carnos said, girls who wanted to study at the good local school identified themselves as Germans, not Jews, because the school did not admit Jews. In the era of the fascist-friendly dictator Getúlio Vargas, anti-Semitism became ubiquitous.

  “You couldn’t speak Yiddish in the street,” said Carnos. With her husband, a shopkeeper, Carnos collected clothing and supplies for aid packages and sent them to European Jews during the war. In Porto Alegre, she said, neighbors turned their backs on their own heritage. “People denied they were Jewish, not out of shame, but to save themselves” from harassment and from suspicion that they were communists.

  An ultranationalist mass movement, Integralism (Ação Integralista Brasileira), drawing heavily from German and Italian Brazilians, became prominent in Porto Alegre, as elsewhere in the country. Because Vargas was competing with the well-established Brazilian Communist Party for the loyalty of workers, he tapped the fascist Integralists as a convenient base of support. People called them “Greens,” or “Green Shirts” for their favorite attire.

  “They just talked about exterminating the Jews,” Carnos said. Residents expressed shock watching non-Jewish neighbors with whom they had grown up playing soccer in Scliar’s “field on Cauduro Avenue” donning green shirts with the lightning-like Sigma patch. The symbol for a Greek letter (for a hissing sound), rendered in black on white with sharp edges, the Sigma was reminiscent of a swastika.

  Today numerous synagogues remain in Bom Fim, but most Jews have moved out to other parts of the city, leaving the old neighborhood behind to gentrification, peppered with new cafés, Pilates studios, and gated houses. On a typical day, Osvaldo Aranha Avenue, which runs along the edge of the community and is now named for Vargas’s foreign minister, carries seven lanes of traffic past towering palms. During the 1930s, however, the avenue was the scene of Integralista paramilitary parades. Marchers dressed in the green uniform raised their arms in a Nazi salute, like the followers of Hitler and Mussolini. They scuffled with Communists in street-corner battles.

  Integralistas were not the only fascists in Brazil: “What seems much more serious to me … was a parallel movement … the descendants of Germans from the German colonies who, out of inherited patriotism (because it wasn’t their own patriotism—they were Brazilians—it was the patriotism of fathers and grandfathers) accepted Nazism and the idea of Nazism,” said Mauricio Rosemblatt, a Porto Alegre intellectual whose testimony is in the synagogue archives.

  A million German Brazilians lived in southern Brazil in the 1930s, and German speakers to the second and third generation comprised as much as 50 percent of the population of some municipalities. Sometimes they used no Portuguese at all, their lives revolving around German churches, German schools, German social clubs. There were innumerable German associations for sports, gymnastics, shooting, and singing; for paramilitary training; Nazi clubs for boys, girls, and women, a veritable German world on Brazilian soil. To this day in the town of Joinville, where older residents remember the thrill of watching the Graf Zeppelin fly above rooftops in the 1930s, street signs in Portuguese also carry their former German names.

  Most of the rest of Brazil was Roman Catholic, but in the German south residents attended Lutheran services led by German ministers. Most of the pastors were National Socialists, loyal to Hitler. In 1935, the head of the German Nazi party in Brazil, Hans Henning von Cossel, who lived in São Paulo, was amazed when he visited the southern city of Blumenau, which even today seems plucked from a European motherland with its German bakeries, blond children, and houses that look as if they come from Bavaria.

  “Who could understand that sensation of finding in the heart of South America a city where it’s difficult to hear a word in Portuguese, and the houses recall a small city in central Germany, in which the shops and signs are in German?” von Cossel exulted. “Palms grow here and there, but seem out of place where even the few existing dark-skinned people speak German and seem like good ‘Germans.’”

  Among the good “Germans” in Brazil, Nazis were influential. When magazines published anti-Integralist or antifascist articles, the German or Italian embassies complained to publishers and authorities, and the issues were removed from the stands.

  In Germany, Dr. Alexandre Preger had thought that the German people were “too well educated to pay attention” to Nazis, until April 1, 1933. An SS man posted a sign at Dr. Preger’s practice: “Do not buy here, because the owner and attendant is Jewish.” Preger sailed to Brazil, but even within the relative safety of the Jewish neighborhood of Bom Fim, he faced trouble.

  In 1937, the ultranationalist Vargas forbade the use of foreign languages. “During the war we couldn’t speak German, and I had to make sure the children didn’t speak a word,” Preger said.

  When Vargas allied himself with England and the United States in 1942, Brazil slapped selective measures on residents with roots in Axis countries, over and above language restrictions. As a resident German, Dr. Preger’s practice was placed on a commercial blacklist, and he was required to deliver regular payments to the Bank of B
razil. But his worst fear was that of going to jail. “For the Brazilians I was a German, for the police and all, born in Berlin. Not a Jew forcibly fled from Germany.” Authorities threw Germans and German Jews into the same cells for violating the new laws.

  * * *

  Of all the anxieties Jews in Latin America suffered during the war, among the most painful was the lack of information about what was happening to loved ones in Europe. Everyone knew Jews were suffering, but details of repression were vague. Mail and telegrams didn’t work, telephone calls were only a dream. Mordechay Bryk, a construction worker, came to Porto Alegre in 1935 at age sixteen and corresponded with his family in Poland until their letters stopped. Only in 1948 did Bryk find out that his parents, brother, and his brother’s children were shot to death by a German-Ukranian patrol as the family huddled in a shelter in the woods—an eight-year-old girl hiding nearby was a witness.

  Judith Scliar, an educator and widow of the novelist Moacyr Scliar, told me that throughout the war years her parents sent rice and flour from Porto Alegre to her mother’s parents in Warsaw. But they too lost contact with each other. Her parents “had no idea of the death camps, the extermination that was going on,” Scliar said. Later, they would discover that her grandparents died at a Nazi annihilation camp, Majdanek, in occupied Poland.

  Until her death, Judith Scliar’s mother lamented that she could not save her parents from their fate. But even if Latin American Jews might somehow extricate loved ones from Nazi hands, their relatives were unlikely to find shelter on Latin American soil. Countries restricted Jewish immigration, often secure in the notion that by doing so, they were only following the example of the United States, which imposed strict quotas on Jewish refugees. Washington’s quota policy was shaped by xenophobia, anti-Semitism, worry about competition over jobs, and fears that Jews with close relatives in German-held lands could be blackmailed into working as agents for the Reich.