Category: Holocaust

For me, Election Day is the story of a refugee family walking to a brand-new life over ashes.

My grandparents, Brucha and Emanuel (Monye) Patt, fled their home city of Warsaw in early September 1939, four days after the Nazi invasion of Poland and just weeks before their city was occupied. They were 24 and 27 years old, respectively, and had married the year before. In 1992 I managed to get my grandmother to tell me a little about their escape. “We walked out from Warsaw,” she said. “We were told that any day the Germans will come. We were mountain climbers, so we put on our mountain climbing shoes. And we walked for a long, long time…until we came to Vilna. It’s like a dream, we kept on walking and walking and walking.”

The distance between Warsaw and Vilna—then still a part of Eastern Poland—is some 270 miles. Google Maps tells me it can be walked in about 90 hours. My grandparents carried nothing with them but two rucksacks, and I have no idea how they procured food, where they slept, or what they did in Vilna, where they ended up staying for many months.

This was the first leg of an exit journey from Europe that took the better part of a year and included my grandfather’s immediate family: his sister Emma and their mother Rifke, along with Emma’s fiancé, Motl, and his parents and brother. Following Monye and Brucha, and in between various bombardments and relocations, the others left in separate groupings from Warsaw, Bialystok and Lodz between September and December 1939, all managing to arrive  and meet in Vilna (Vilnius). By this time, Vilna was occupied by Soviet forces and had been transferred by the Soviet Union to still-independent Lithuania.

All of my escaping family members belonged tothe Jewish Labor Bund, the secular Jewish socialist party in Poland and Russia. For my grandparents’ generation, the Bund was more than a political party; it was a way of life. Besides fighting for democratic socialism and fair treatment for all working people, the Bund campaigned against anti-Semitism, defended Jewish civil rights, and worked to preserve Jewish culture and the Yiddish language. My grandfather Monye and Motl’s father Efroim were well known Bundist leaders.

When the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in the summer of 1940, that country became a dangerous place for members of the Bund, which did not support Stalinism. Fearful of being arrested, at some point Monye assumed a fake identity and went into hiding in nearby Kovno (Kaunas), where he was less well known. (He later returned to Vilna.) At the same time, the German army was continuing to advance eastward (occupying Lithuania in the spring of 1941).

The entire family scrambled to get exit visas that would allow them to leave Lithuania and Europe entirely. Eventually they received so-called “Curacao visas” from the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk—essentially, a stamp on their papers stating that Curacao did not require entrance visas for foreigners. Over 2,000 Jewish refugees received these, although none ever made it to Curacao; the “Curacao visas” were a strategy to get approval from Soviet authorities to leave the country. But anyone wanting to leave also needed a transit visa to someplace outside the Soviet Union. Here, the Japanese consul, Chiune Sugihara, stepped in and issued more than 2,000 ten-day visas to Japan for the refugees, even though most had no valid destination visas.

My grandparents and the rest of their group all obtained Sugihara visas. But before they could leave Lithuania, Rifke Pat, my great-grandmother, suffered a heart attack and died. She’s buried in Vilna; I have her unused Sugihara visa—apparently a very rare document.

In early September 1940, the group made their way to Moscow, then took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, a distance of some 4,000 miles. Today, this trip takes seven days; in 1940 probably twice as long. From Vladivostok, they took a Japanese steamer ship to Kobe, Japan. They were among the minority of Jewish refugees in Japan able to leave quickly for the United States; indeed, only a tiny handful of all European Jewish refugees were permitted entry to the U.S. during this period.

It was only through their connections with the Jewish labor movement that this was possible. My great-grandfather, Jacob Pat, was a journalist, writer and activist in the Bund before the war. In 1938 he had traveled to the U.S. on a fund-raising trip and was compelled to remain there due to the war. He threw himself into rescue efforts, working with the U.S. Jewish Labor Committee to obtain US entry visas and the necessary funds for some 170 Jewish refugees—all involved with the labor movement— to sail from Japan to the United States between 1940 and 1941.

My family group boarded the Heian Maru, a Japanese passenger-cargo ocean liner, in October 1940. My grandmother would recall how fancy the ship was, and how exotic and unfamiliar the food (reportedly American style). She kept the menu as a memento of this part of the journey, when they were pretty much assured to make it to safety.

At the end of October, they landed in Seattle, where they boarded the Transcontinental Railroad for the east coast, another 3,000 miles. Finally, they arrived in New York City, on Tuesday, November 5, 1940—Election Day.

For the rest of her life, my grandmother treasured this memory, and spoke of it often. To her, arriving in New York on Election Day meant arriving to freedom, to a land where people’s voices mattered. This was the Roosevelt era, on the heels of the New Deal, and she was impressed by all the social programs and benefits for ordinary citizens that had their start under FDR. Indeed, 1940 was a presidential election year, in which the incumbent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt roundly defeated Republican corporate business executive Wendell Willkie to win a first-ever third term in office. It was an exciting time for a refugee from fascism to arrive here. (Despite, of course, the persistent closed-door immigration policy and still isolationist stance on the war.)

Brucha and Monye went to the apartment in Sunnyside, Queens where Monye’s father lived, dropped off their rucksacks, and went straight back out to Manhattan to observe the crowds in the city center, many of whom were headed for the polls. She felt the mood electric. They went to a diner in midtown, where she drank tea, opening and emptying the teabag (something she’d never seen before) into her cup.  “In America, to serve tea like this!” she thought, baffled. She described her first afternoon in New York to me as being full of wonder, symbolically enhanced by the fact that it was Election Day, a holiday of democracy.

Brucha was exceedingly proud to be an American and described herself as a “sickening patriot.” This did not mean she agreed with everything the U.S. did or that she never questioned the government, or other citizens. She was outraged at the racism and other gross injustices of her adopted country. But she understood that creating and maintaining democracy involved active and thoughtful participation on the part of ordinary individuals, and that began with voting. She considered voting a sacred obligation and responsibility of every citizen and was frankly appalled at the idea that anyone would choose not to do so.

My grandmother died in 2002, and I certainly don’t know what she would say about this year’s election, or about the long chain of oppressive and regressive events of the past several years. I imagine she’d be horrified, terrified, and furious to see her beloved United States flailing in disunity, conflict, irrationality and inhumanity. But of one thing I am certain: she would be voting, and calling everyone she knew to make sure they voted too.

Everyone in my family is a passionate voter. That’s the ripple effect. Despite the obvious problems and biases of the electoral college, the limitations of a two-party system, the absurdity of campaign financing, and all the rest, I still vote. I still feel a little bit excited when I go to the polls, remembering the promise that this day held for a young refugee couple pregnant with the promise of democracy (and, in fact, with my mother by the time they arrived in the U.S.—but that’s for another post).