Jewish Refugees’ Responses to Entrapment in Places of Temporary Sojourn during Flight from Holocaust Persecution

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Session Sponsor: The organization of this panel is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101034371.

Abstract

Jewish refugee flight should be re-conceptualized as a sequence of entrapments. The word “flight” evokes movement, but very many Jewish refugees were held up for days, weeks or months in one or more locales, in the process of fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. This panel will examine refugees’ entrapment in sites of enforced sojourn. It will address the issue of how refugees subjectively experienced and responded to this entrapment, to the persecution that some continued to experience there, and to their new social and physical surroundings. The papers examine three inter-related kinds of response: emotional, agentic, and cultural, in different national contexts. One paper focuses on refugees in neutral Portugal, and their emotions when experiencing a warm reception by locals and, in a contrasting case, rejection at the Portuguese border, involving ten days’ imprisonment on their train and then forced return to France. A second studies a girl and two women refugees in Vichy France and their quite different approaches to escaping to Franco's Spain, seeking to explain these differences. A third explores the responses of a refugee photographer in Amsterdam and Paris, and his coping by producing photographs displaying dark humor. The fourth examines sojourn in colonial India and a young, male refugee in Bombay and his incessant walking through the city, taking photographs; a boy whose curiosity was aroused by his new surroundings; and a woman who coped with the social and physical environment with the help of dance. Together, the papers will re-conceptualize refugee flight as serial entrapment and suggest how refugees responded emotionally, culturally and with their actions to this entrapment.

Sub Unit

• Holocaust Studies

Chair

• Rebekka Grossmann, Leiden University

Individual Presentations

• Jewish Refugees’ Differing Responses to Entrapment while Fleeing: Two Women and a Girl who Fled from Vichy France to Franco’s Spain - Jacqueline Adams, University of Salamanca, Department of History

• Jewish Refugees' Reactions to Welcome and Rejection in Portugal - Margarida Ramalho, History, Territory and Communities, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal

• Looking through Erwin Blumenfeld's Darkly Comic Lenses, or How a German-Jewish Photographer Coped with Life as a Refugee (1933-1941) - Louis Kaplan, University of Toronto

• Schaeffer, Tauber, and Holger: Emotional and cultural strategies for coping with a temporary stay in British India as refugees from National Socialism - Margit Franz, Clio Graz

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 13