Giving Up: An American Story

A story:

My grandmother, Ruth, grew up in a middle class Viennese home. My great-grandfather was a jeweler. They celebrated Christmas secularly, intermarried, and rarely attended synagogue. They considered themselves Austrians. You get where this is going.

When it became apparent that the Nazis were annexing Austria, my family prepared to flee. They attempted to gain entry to the US, but the Austrian refugee quota was already full.

US legislature had passed laws limiting refugee intake in 1924, specifically from Eastern Europe, bringing Jewish emigration to a trickle despite their desperate attempts to escape as the fever of fascism took hold. Even in 1938, after Kristallnacht, the majority of Americans favored a closed-door policy.

My family knew what this actually meant: the US didn’t want Jewish refugees, who were blamed by people like Henry Ford for instigating World War I and were associated with Bolshevism. My family did not give up.

Little by little, Jewish-Austrian rights were stripped away. One of them was the legal change of every Jew’s name to Israel or Sara, so all visas were invalid, trapping them. Nana and her family still did not give up, opting for a dangerous multi-month journey via ship to Shanghai, a place without a visa requirement. There, they would wait to be admitted to the US.

Much of the extended family decided to stay in their homes, telling each other this would blow over. With a few exceptions, they were all systematically murdered in camps, ghettoes, and other places that I may never know of, visit, or honor.

Meanwhile, my family survived in a Jewish ghetto called Hongkew under the Japanese Imperial occupation, American bombings, and the subsequent beginnings of the Cultural Revolution. They did not stop contacting the US embassy for aid.

Ruth and her family finally received aid from the US, escaped China on the USS Gordon, but were immediately and inexplicably deported. Wooden pallets were laid down from the ship to a train so that they did not touch American soil. The train was bonded — boarded and locked from the outside — and they were not told where they were going. Nana disembarked in Vancouver, and made her way across the continent, determined to emigrate to the US.

She did not give up, even when her father died in Montreal and my family legally emigrated a few weeks later.

It had been over a decade since they had first attempted to enter the United States. Her family now consisted of 2nd and 3rd cousins, instead of the many aunts, uncles, and first cousins she had in Vienna.

I tell this story often, and every person tells me it is extraordinary. Immigrants like my Nana are the ones who make America great, again and again. I am grateful for the sacrifices my family made so I could be American, with all the opportunity and privilege that affords me. I am deeply proud to be American, though sometimes I am ashamed of my leaders.

Today I saw a map of all the states whose governors (unconstitutionally) want to close their doors to Syrian refugees, fearful of terrorists that might be lurking in the midst of desperate escapees. America has once again forgotten we were founded and built by the “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”.

When I showed this article to Nana, she admitted she herself had been against opening our doors to Syrian refugees, not recognizing her own story, and has since changed her view on the issue. Terror is that powerful.

During the Paris attacks, people could have run inside and locked their doors. Instead, they started the hashtag ‪#‎PorteOuverte‬ on Twitter, signaling where refuge could be found. Neither refugee nor place of refuge gave up on each other.

Both France and the US are built on the promise of liberty and equality. We don’t always succeed, but we cannot let our enemies frighten us into abandoning those ideals. We cannot give up on refugees, because we will then be giving up on ourselves.

Paris, Beirut, and Nairobi may have been attacked physically, but their spirit is unbroken. I hope in the weeks and months to come, we will all remember that first instinct: to open our doors to those who need us, to strike a deadly blow to terror with love. Don’t give up.

Edit: Original post said names were changed to Yaakov and Rachel. It was actually Israel and Sara.