After the defeat of France in June 1940, Portugal became the best waystation for Jewish refugees to escape West Europe for the United States, Palestine, or Latin America. Although its dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, did not want Portugal to become a dumping ground for refugees, between 40,000 and 100,000 Jews found a temporary refuge there. The majority came from the urban middle classes of Germany and Austria, a minority from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and France (227).

Marion Kaplan explores how specific Portuguese locations, including the Spanish-Portuguese border, the consulate lines, the smoky cafés, the docks, and the overcrowded transatlantic ships, touched on Jewish refugees’ inner lives (2). Drawing on the methodologies associated with the spatial turn and utilizing a wide range of ego-documents, including a collection of 290 unopened letters and unread postcards found in the archives of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York (194), Kaplan offers an “emotional history of fleeing” (2). Focusing on the spaces that “refugees traversed or waited in,” she argues that the feelings these space triggered matter (9) and that age and gender made a striking difference. Although Jewish children and young people could treat their stay in Portugal as an adventure, Kaplan suggests that their elders considered such dislocations nightmares. Further, she contends that if Jewish refugee men and women faced similar anxieties, German-Jewish men, who made up the majority of male refugees, perceived their losses as greater and struggled even more to accept forced idleness (140–41). This study thus represents a significant intervention in the histories of refugees, gender, and the Holocaust.

This book is organized chronologically and geographically, along the trajectory of Jewish refugees’ journeys. The first three chapters trace how refugees arrived in Portugal, examining how they left Nazi-controlled Europe legally and illegally and crossed “sites of anxiety” (37), such as the Pyrenees. Kaplan unearths refugees’ fears and hopes while on the run. Methodologically, these three chapters build upon recent studies of geographies of the Holocaust by, among others, Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, and a growing scholarship on Salazar and the Holocaust by, among others, Avraham Milgram, Irene Flunser Pimentel, and Cláudia Ninhos. Acknowledging that Salazar's government opened and shut its door unpredictably and that the Portuguese police harassed refugees, Kaplan insists on ordinary Portuguese citizens’ generosity. According to her, this type of generosity was “particularly noteworthy from a population that had little experience with foreigners” (30) before the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent entry of Republican refugees. When Portuguese people complained about refugees, they did not focus on the influx of foreigners but “on the unusual public appearance of refugee women” in cafés (93). The Portuguese borders and landscapes that Jewish refugees encountered were highly gendered. Central European women, with their unusual public appearance, smoking habits, and short-sleeved colorful garments, broke taboos and challenged the double standard of gendered behavior in Portugal. They transformed cafés from exclusively male spaces to “international sites in which sexes mixed and families, including children, found seats” (96).

In the last four chapters, Kaplan moves the narrative forward, by unpacking refugees’ experiences at bureaucratic sites, including consulates, post offices, aid bureaus, and docks before departure. She demonstrates that refugees faced dreadful time pressures and were forced to adapt to Portugal's rhythms, and the “slower pace of a warm climate” (136). To obtain the right papers within strict deadlines, they had to wait in long lines and faced capricious bureaucrats. Those lucky enough to acquire their crucial visas often struggled to purchase ship tickets to “new worlds and new lives” (210). After Pearl Harbor, when American steamship lines stopped and Spanish lines interrupted sailing to the United States, shipping options decreased and prices skyrocketed. In Lisbon, ticket agents lost all sense of compassion (218). Although refugees often remembered positively their stay in Portugal in their postwar memoirs, Kaplan's last chapter powerfully demonstrates that their welcome was conditional. By early 1944, only about one thousand Jewish refugees remained (230).

Kaplan uses innovative methodologies to trace how Portugal emerged for many Jewish refugees as a “site of temporality and transition,” a “‘no-man's land’ between a painful past and a hopeful future” (235). Her book is firmly situated in the microhistory turn in historical studies of the Holocaust, with some scholars increasingly reducing the level of analysis in an effort to capture the complexity of what was available to individuals at different moments in their journeys, what Claire Zalc and Nicolas Mariot have labeled “their world of possibilities” (Microhistories of the Holocaust [2016]). Chapter 7 unearths, for instance, what Jewish refugees learned about the genocide occurring in East Europe during their stay in Lisbon. Kaplan also draws upon a rich literature on displacement and material culture. When discussing refugees’ sense of the places they left behind, she pays close attention to the symbolic meanings of the suitcases and objects carried by refugees, which represented “memories of one's personhood and cultural background” (134).

Crucially, Kaplan prompts historians to rethink the merits of refugees’ letters and the necessity to put their behaviors and subjectivities at the center of the historical analysis. Acknowledging that there is “no way to know how random or how typical these sources are,” she demonstrates that they are “telling” (17). While in limbo, refugees created makeshift communities and attempted to build “safe havens”: letters and “packages of love” sent to Nazi-occupied Europe, in particular, kept relationships with loved ones alive as long as possible and served as a form of “therapy,” a “means for self-preservation” (187, 194).

It is probably unreasonable to ask for more in what is already a thought-provoking book. But it would have been interesting to examine further the sites in which Jewish refugees lived and the feelings triggered by their encounters with Portuguese local residents outside of what Kaplan calls international spaces. This point should, however, not distract from the fact that this book is a significant intervention in understanding the ways Jewish refugees navigated an overall hostile environment, coped with losses, and “strategized means of escape” (233) as mass murder unfolded. As Kaplan powerfully demonstrates, this is a history that resonates deeply with the challenges that refugees continue to face today.