Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940–1945, and: Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa (review)

In July 1941, the famous Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig hastily penned an autobiography. He had learned first-hand what it meant to be a man without rights and, therefore, proved a keen observer of the pathos that overwhelmed the lives of refugees. He recalled his encounter in London with a

once very wealthy industrialist from Vienna, who had been one of our most intelligent art collectors; he was so old, so grey, so weary that I did not recognize him at first. Weakly with both hands, he clung to the table. I asked him where he was going. “I don’t know,” he said, “who asks about one’s wishes nowadays? One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.” My heart skipped a beat: an old worn-out man with children and grandchildren, atremble with the hope of going to a country which hitherto he would not have been able to find on the map, there only to beg his way through and again be a stranger and purposeless! Someone next to him asked in eager desperation how one could get to Shanghai; he had heard that the Chinese were still admitting refugees. There they crowded, erstwhile university professors, bankers, merchants, landed proprietors, musicians; each ready to drag the miserable ruins of his existence over earth and oceans anywhere, to do and suffer anything, only away, away from Europe, only away!¹

For Zweig, Haiti, San[to] Domingo (the name of the capital city of the Dominican Republic was often used as a synecdoche for that state) and Shanghai represented the very ends of the world. Yet for Jewish refugees without any options, these names represented possible if indeed uncertain havens—or at least so did the Dominican Republic and Shanghai. The latter destination was an option because the so-called International Settlement in Shanghai was an open city for which Europeans arriving by ship did not need a visa to enter. As an extraterritorial city it offered an aberration within the realm of international law—an anomaly in which the normal rules governing the access of strangers to sovereign territories were suspended. Unlike Shanghai, the Dominican Republic was an ordinary sovereign state with the usual immigration controls. But unlike any other state, it appeared in 1939 that Jewish refugees were welcome there—as many as 100,000! Between January 1933 and May 1939 some 400,000 Jews had left Germany, Austria, and the Czech lands. Half had been able to immigrate into overseas countries of permanent settlement such as the United States (63,000), Palestine (55,000), and so on. But 200,000 were stuck in European countries of temporary refuge such as Britain (40,000), France (30,000), and the smaller democracies. The small and poor Dominican Republic was willing to take half of those stranded in limbo. As a token of his seriousness, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, committed 26,000 acres of land that included the remote village of Sosúa.

The story of the Shanghai refuge is well known: both the adventurous journey to, arrival in, and adaptation to the exotic location of some 15,000 Jewish refugees, their tribulations under Japanese occupation, and their attempts to escape the Chinese civil war provide a dramatic narrative that produced many interesting memoirs and triggered some substantial historical studies. The story of the Dominican refuge has attracted little attention. The remarkable offer made during the Évian Conference (1938) by the Dominican government to admit 100,00 Jewish refugees is normally ignored because “Évian” stands for the failure to respond to the refugee...