“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.”
In the excerpt from her essay “We Refugees”, Hannah Arendt describes the loss that for her and other refugees constitutes the “collapse of our private world”: The German language, indispensable for her as a German-speaking publicist, also plays a major role in her professional life. She also mentions the loss of friends and family due to the National Socialist persecution. Arendt’s remarks evoke the lack of prospects that many Jewish refugees faced on the run and in their host countries as they lost their language, profession and social environment.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a Jewish German-American political theorist and writer.
After being detained by the Gestapo for several days in 1933, she fled to France and worked there, among other things, in Zionist organizations that helped Jews to escape. In 1937 she was deprived of German citizenship, which made her a stateless person for almost 14 years. After she was imprisoned for a few weeks in the French internment camp Gurs, she managed to escape from there as well. In 1941 Arendt came to the USA, where she spent the rest of her life and was granted US citizenship in 1951. In her first years in New York she worked as a publicist, editor and contributor to several Jewish magazines (including “Der Aufbau”) and organizations (including the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction). Under the impression of the experience of flight and arrival that she and other European Jews had had, she also wrote the essay “We Refugees” in the Menorah Journal in 1943. From 1953 to 1967 Arendt taught as a professor at Brooklyn College in New York, at the University of Chicago and at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Arendt, Hannah, 1943: We Refugees, Menorah Journal.
Shortly after the German attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, it was decided within the first week of the war that the Polish government was to be withdrawn eastbound as Warsaw was threatened. The Polish press, among them representatives of the Jewish Polish press, was to be rescued as part of the evacuation plans.
On 8 February, 1940, Pese R. entered the office of the "Committee to Collect Material about the Destruction of Polish Jewry, 1939" in Vilnius, Lithuania in order to give an interview. She was one of many Polish Jewish refugees who had found shelter in Vilnius.
On 21 December, 1939, Chaim-Leyb D. was interviewed by the "Committee to Collect Material about the Destruction of Polish Jewry, 1939" in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Among the more than 10,000 Jews who were stranded in Vilnius in the fall of 1939 there was the librarian and political activist Herman Kruk from Warsaw. His exceptional diary records and press reports sketch a mosaic of the heterogenous society of refugees in Vilnius since the beginning of the war.
13
Photo series by Bolesława and Edmund Zdanowscy
Herman Kruk writes about his pain facing the catastrophic war situation in his chosen hometown Warsaw.
This list documents a selection of names, “nationalities”, arrival dates and places of origin of refugees who arrived in Vilnius in 1939.
On 24 June 1941, Kruk writes about his discouragement regarding his futile attempts to leave Vilnius for the USA shortly after the German attack…
Herman Kruk writes in his diary about his flight from Warsaw to Vilnius, September 1939.
Benzion Benshalom wrote in the winter of 1939/40 about the desperate atmosphere and the sad cityscape in Vilnius.
4
Photo series by Bolesława and Edmund Zdanowscy
Mendel Balberyszski (1894-1966) was born in Vilnius but had been living in Łódź for over a decade at the outbreak of the Second World…