And the World Closed Its Doors: One Family¿s Struggle to Escape the Holocaust

Rating:
Summary: Searing account of refuge from Holocaust denied.
Review: And the World Closed Its Doors
The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust
By David Clay Large
BASIC BOOKS; 278 PAGES; $26.00

Reviewed by Howard J. De Nike

There is irony in Leopold von Ranke furnishing the template for "And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust," by David Clay Large. Ranke, the great 19th Century German historiographer, inaugurated a scientific approach to history, insisting upon contemporary, firsthand sources. Large, a history professor at Montana State University and part-time San Francisco resident, takes this dictum to heart.
Ranke's exhortation prefigures the modern canons of "social history." Exploiting personal letters, family albums, diaries, census records, polling tallies, and the like, a diligent researcher will be able to piece together an accurate narrative, one ultimately more trustworthy than offered by after-the-fact, self-anointed chroniclers.
Large, whose previous work includes a definitive book on Berlin (2000) and a volume (co-authored with Felix Gilbert), that in its fifth edition is reputedly the greatest selling 20th Century European history text, takes advantage of a trove of letters exposing the increasingly despairing efforts by a German Jew, Max Schohl, to extricate himself and his family from the looming debacle.
In 1938, Schohl opened correspondence with Julius Hess, a cousin he had never met, in Charlestown, West Virginia. The objective was to enlist his relative's aid in emigrating to the U.S. Instead Max suffered a continuum of frustration owed to FDR's documented pre-war policy denying desperately sought asylum to the bulk of Europe's Jews. That Germany recognized Max Schohl's heroism during the First World War by bestowing various combat honors, and that Max reciprocated with unstinting patriotism adds mockery to the unrelenting Nazi drumbeat.
Alternating the letters between Schohl and his American cousin with a straight-forward telling of Roosevelt's tight-fisted diplomacy, Large does the rationale of social history proud: To reveal the effects of "great forces" upon individuals and the consequent actions of those individuals. Over half a decade, the Family Schohl attempted to emigrate, first to the U.S., then England, followed by Chile and Brazil, all to equal futility. Throughout, the reader knows the outcome - death at Auschwitz for Max, survival after forced labor for his wife and two daughters. But this hardly diminishes the suspense achieved through Large's taut prose and adept use of materials.
Max Schohl, a distinguished chemist, owned a successful firm on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Never eschewing his Jewish roots, Schohl became a pillar of community life in the village of Florsheim, where he was a chief employer of the townspeople. During the worst times of the 1920s economic collapse, he ran a soup-kitchen and paid his employees in hard currency in place of virtually worthless German marks, a barrel-full of which might purchase a loaf of bread.
Local esteem did Schohl and his family no good, however, during the infamous Kristallnacht. As with thousands of other Jews, thugs invaded the Schohl household on November 7, 1938, part of a Germany-wide attack. Shortly afterward, security officers took Max into "protective" custody and delivered him to Buchenwald concentration camp. Though his incarceration lasted but a month, the handwriting was on the wall, and Schohl redoubled his correspondence with Hess. Meanwhile, FDR contented himself with a perfunctory ambassadorial recall, and Hitler "billed" the Jews of Germany a billion marks as an "atonement fine" for cleaning up Kristallnacht debris.
A hard-hearted dilemma confronted the Schohls. On one hand, under U.S. immigration law Max had to demonstrate that he was not "likely to become a public charge," while on the other, the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885, aimed at barring Chinese, prohibited would-be immigrants from securing jobs prior to entry. As Large declares acerbically, "The famed lines on the Statue of Liberty might have been rewritten to say: `To hell with your huddled masses, send me your prosperous and well-connected, your stockholders, remittance men, and prospective heirs.' "
Though the Schohls' predicament was replicated a thousand-fold across pre-war Europe, there is enormous value in hearing its firsthand voices. Not only are general lessons about bureaucratic impersonality on offer, but about national blindness, as well. Whether they are Salvadorans fleeing Death Squads or Liberians facing slaughter by run-amok revolutionaries, those with the power to open the nation's safe harbor must ask themselves to what extent policy is driven by racial stereotyping and narrowly defined self-interest.
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Howard J. De Nike is a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at San Francisco State University.