Marion Kaplan's study of Jewish refugees in neutral Portugal during the Holocaust is most welcome in terms of both content and method. Studies of refugees generally focus on governmental policy with a sprinkling of lived refugee experience based on poignant moments. Drawing on an array of sources from personal letters to memoirs to Jewish organizational records over the refugees’ longue durée in Lisbon and other Portuguese locales, Kaplan provides an everyday history that is darkly colored by the brittle emotions and anxieties of the refugees themselves as they navigated their unsettled status over months and even years in constricted spatial environments. The book informs our understanding of Europe's Jews, even the comparatively lucky ones, on the edge of Hitler's Europe.
Along with Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger, and other well-known cases, tens of thousands of ordinary European Jews, mostly from central Europe, fled to Portugal as a singular safe haven. More than 70,000 reached Portugal in the chaos of Germany's 1940 western offensive, 10,000 more as the Vichy government began rounding up foreign Jews for deportation in 1942. The feeling that they were a step ahead of German forces as they moved through the Low Countries and France; confusion over the blizzard of exit, transit, and residence visas that one needed to flee through Spain; despondency over the queues to attain these papers from mercurial bureaucrats in French cities overrun by refugees; anxiety over the quality of forged papers or the lack of certain papers entirely; the ever-changing attitudes of Spanish and Portuguese border officials; the prospect of dangerous treks over the Pyrenees; and the crushing fear of being sent back, represented danger from all sides. Despondency famously drove Walter Benjamin to suicide at the Spanish border. But the confluence of fears, Kaplan shows, was one that many refugees never shook off, particularly as for most, Portugal turned out to be a longer stopover than expected.
Lisbon, once reached, represented improvement, but not assurance. Ordinary Portuguese were generous despite their poverty. Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, meanwhile, never embraced the antisemitism of other European autocrats, a tendency buttressed by his friend Moses Amzalek, a respected academic and Portuguese Jewish leader. But Salazar's acceptance of Jewish refugees was grudging, as seen by the punishment of Portuguese consuls in France who had issued visas contrary to orders. Refugees represented a drain on the economy, they supposedly entertained cosmopolitan tendencies, and the unwillingness of the United States and other countries to take them extended their stay in Portugal despite the efforts of the Jewish, Quaker, and Unitarian relief organizations to support them and put them en route to permanent status elsewhere. Portugal's police authorities, more enamored of the Nazis, were unsympathetic, and the German colony in Portugal was predictably hostile.
Living in crowded quarters (“Lisbon is sold out” was an oft-repeated line), unable to work by government order and chronically short on food, worried about loved ones in occupied Europe, and nervous that the Wehrmacht would at some point approach the Portuguese border, refugees were generally on edge. But the greatest immediate worry concerned expiring visas (or the discovery of fake ones) and consequent return to Germany. The October 1941 abduction and handover of German Jewish journalist Berthold Jacob in a Gestapo-inspired police operation, Kaplan says, “reverberated in the refugee rumor mill” (122), and even though the act was not repeated, the Portuguese police raided cafés from time to time, jailing those without papers. More common was police assignment to forced residence in remote towns in order to relieve crowding in Lisbon. The beauty of some places, like Caldas, was offset by their restrictiveness and long train journey back to Lisbon—undertaken only with police permission—where the essential consular, relief, and shipping offices were located.
As in her past work, Kaplan is at her best when discussing the individual microhistories that represent broader issues of social and emotional dislocation. “The simultaneous loss of home and Heimat,” she writes, “magnified refugees’ distress,” as they realized there was no returning to their past lives. And though Theodor Adorno claimed that “writing becomes a place to live” (133), men in particular lost their sense of self and status. Morris Troper of the Joint Distribution Committee described “honest, decent-looking men … in tears … sorry they ever escaped” (141). Some used pills for sleeplessness, some suffered breakdowns, and some turned to suicide. Women, who had often urged emigration in the first place and whose skills in managing the household were more critical than ever, had a somewhat easier adjustment even as they shared the burden of securing documents for and from various officials.
All of which makes Portugal's cafés an atmospheric fulcrum. Once centers of intellectual refinement in Vienna, Prague, and elsewhere, they now offered spaces, Kaplan says, for the frazzled emotional networking of shared experience as well as for news gathering from the ever-active rumor mill. The so-called “refugee telegraph” in cafés provided information on everything from shipping agencies with extra tickets to available visas to South American countries to connections to quality forgers, all with the caveat that information could be wrong and that the waiters might be police informants. Though individual cafés tended to attract those speaking German, Czech, and so forth, Portuguese cafés were also levelling establishments insofar as all income groups were welcome, as everyone's income was depressed. Jewish women also frequented the one-time men's world of cafés, which broke taboos within traditional Portuguese families, particularly as some wore short sleeves and even pants.
By the end of the war, a thousand refugees remained in Portugal, a few electing to stay, the remainder leaving by 1951. Kaplan demonstrates that in the interim, the lives of Jews temporarily stranded in Portugal were anything but ordinary, embodying to a painful extent “the abnormal as routine” (231). In capturing this mood through many individual narratives, Kaplan provides a new tack in refugee studies. She also reminds us that tens of millions of displaced peoples today face similar anxieties in a deeply indifferent world.
