[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] All right. Welcome everyone!
I'm gonna say a couple of words, give a little introduction, let you know kind of the logistics of how
this event is gonna work, and then we'll go ahead and get started.
Thank you for your patience while we admitted you all from the waiting room.
So, good afternoon and thank you to everyone who's joining us today for Read Out Loud: Escaping the Nazis.
My name is Anthony Wright de Hernandez and I'm the Community Collections Archivist in Special Collections
in University Archives at Virginia Tech.
This event was originally planned as an in-person event related to the Americans and the Holocaust Traveling
Exhibition for libraries from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and
the American Library Association.
Due to the ongoing situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are not able to invite you to the library
to see the exhibit at this time.
We hope to share the exhibit with our local community at a later date in the exhibit tour.
You can check the current tour schedule at
ala.org/tools/programming/usholocaustmuseum/tourschedule
And I will put that in the chat so that you have access to that link.
[Pause]
Sorry.
Please note that the schedule may change as the situation with COVID-19 continues to develop.
Before we begin, I want to cover a couple of logistics about how the session will operate.
Ana Corral, who's resident librarian with Virginia Tech University Libraries, and I will be reading passages from
two books followed by remarks and a question-and-answer section.
As attendees, you will not be able to share your screen, share video, unmute to speak, or
send a chat message to the entire room.
We do want your comments and questions and we ask that you please send those in private message
to one of us who are the co-hosts.
We also have Bradley Nichols as a co-host and Jordan Kuneyl as a co-host.
Any of us can receive and read those questions for you.
Just send them via private message and then we'll read the question aloud and Bradley Nichols will respond.
Bradley Nichols is a visiting assistant professor of History at Virginia Tech.
He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "The Hunt for Lost Blood: Nazi Germanization Policy of
Occupied Europe," which explores how the wartime Third Reich sought to assimilate and naturalize millions
of foreign subjects on the basis of racial kinship.
He's also conducting preliminary research for a second monograph that will focus on the mass murder of
Soviet POWs in German captivity during the Second World War.
So, Bradley, I will pass this off to you to do a little bit of introduction and then we'll get started.
[Bradley Nichols] Sure. So I wanted to start by thanking both Anthony and Ana for inviting me
to participate in this event as well as thank all of you for attending.
The topic that we're here to discuss is the flight of Jewish refugees from the Third Reich.
This is a topic that has a variety of different facets that we could focus on, but I think it's useful for our purposes
to narrow it down to three overarching issues and place this phenomena within the broader context of
what the exhibition is all about: Americans in the Holocaust.
So first issue, and these are three issues that I would consider to be sort of the most important to consider
regarding this topic.
First, what did Americans know about the plight of European Jews at the time?
Second, how did Americans respond?
And third, what were the experiences of Jewish refugees who became Americans as a result of Nazi persecution?
We could spend the whole session talking about any one of these subjects on its own, but I'll just limit my remarks
to a brief overview of sort of basic facts and trends, again placing the phenomenon of Jewish flight in
the broader context of American responses in an interaction with the Holocaust.
To start with the answer to the question of what was known in America really depended on
how much someone wanted to know.
It's incredibly difficult to gauge the extent of public awareness at the individual level, in particular, so it really
depends on who we're talking about when we ask what was known about the Holocaust at the time.
Certainly events like Kristallnacht the nationwide pogrom in Germany in November 1938.
This was well covered in the press throughout the country.
And, as early as 1940, you also have footage depicting the dreadful conditions in the Warsaw ghetto in Poland.
You had footage of this included in American newsreels, mass produced for the public consumption.
Concrete information on the final solution itself, on the other hand, on the actual extermination of
European Jews, this was less prominent, less well-known, and even when it was known it was often
met with skepticism, in part due to the legacy of false atrocity propaganda during the first world war.
But also, in large part, even when it's stemmed from reliable sources, skepticism disbelief was due to the fact
that most people couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that the Germans actually intended to wipe out
an entire group of people.
People just couldn't comprehend that in the United States.
It is worth noting, though, again in terms of discussing sources of information.
The New York Times, for instance, among other newspapers ran semi-regular stories on
the mass murder of Europe's Jews for mid-1942 or early 1942 onward.
[Pause]
The bottom line is that it would have been difficult for contemporary informed Americans, at least,
to plead total ignorance about what was going on.
As for the matter of reactions to the Holocaust, here the evidence is more clear-cut regarding responses in the
United States and and it does not make America look too favorable in retrospect.
Both before and after the entry of the United States into the Second World War, Americans were by and large
hostile to the idea of taking in foreign refugees regardless of who they were,
regardless of where they came from, regardless of why they were seeking asylum.
There was a broad and widespread nativist sentiment, which found its most tangible expression of course
in the imposition and maintenance of some pretty restrictive immigration quotas.
[Pause]
Public opinion, in short, seriously hindered efforts to assist the Jews of Europe in their darkest hour.
These were limited efforts anyways, but they were very much hampered by fears of public reaction.
This was true for the Roosevelt administration, this was true for members of Congress.
For instance, there's a senator from New York, Senator Robert Wagner, who sponsored a bill in 1939 to allow
20,000 German Jewish children into the United States and it's quite telling that this bill ultimately fell through.
I mean it was never even voted on.
[Pause]
Now that's not to say that the public at large in America was completely apathetic to the Holocaust.
By around the middle of 1943, thereabouts, there was a pretty substantial grassroots protest movement
calling for some kind of American intervention to help European Jews specifically.
[Pause]
Even though many Jewish American leaders, like Rabbi Stephen Wise, were against this, they attempted to
silence these activists for fear of an anti-semitic backlash in the United States.
[Pause]
In the end, though, I think it's fair to say that that more could have been done and we can discuss later
what could have been done specifically.
I think it's fair to say that more could have been done.
That the average American, at the very least, should have cared more despite everything else that was going
on in the midst of a world war and that's important to keep in mind.
People had other problems on their plate, everyone.
[Pause]
Popular attitudes towards immigration took towards the persecution of European Jews.
These popular attitudes I was just discussing, they had a direct bearing on the third issue
I mentioned at the outset, the experience of European Jews who did find refuge in the United States whether
before, during, or after the Holocaust.
[Pause]
In many respects, these people actually faced most of the same obstacles to assimilation that other immigrant
groups have encountered throughout American history: nativism, xenophobia, discrimination, and so forth.
[Pause]
Fitting in could be very much an internal struggle which, for many Jewish immigrants, produced a kind of
identity crisis about whether they were, who they were, essentially, were they still European?
Were they Jewish? Were they Jewish Americans?
This is especially the case for people who found it difficult to get used to the rhythms and rituals
and customs of American life, but there are also external forces that complicated the assimilation process.
European Jews had the advantage of being white, which definitely helped at the time, and, to some extent,
lessened anti-immigrant sentiment directed towards them.
[Pause]
That being said, we should not underestimate the prevalence of anti-semitism in the United States
during the 1930s and 1940s.
[Pause]
In other words, while Jewish refugees sometimes endured ostracism and discrimination and prejudice,
both formal and informal.
They experienced this simply because they were foreigners, simply because they were outsiders.
In most cases, this was definitely due to the fact that they were Jewish, specifically.
[Pause]
The isolationist movement, for instance, in the late 1930s repeatedly claimed that the Jewish immigrants
and American Jews themselves were agitating for the United States to join the war against Germany and
that they therefore should not be, more of them should not be let in and those who were there
should not be treated as equal citizens.
Ironically, once America did enter the war, some of these same refugees were labeled "enemy aliens"
and accused of working as spies on behalf of Germany.
[Pause]
Nevertheless, with all that being said, most Jews who fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution did
ultimately end up settling into their new lives, sometimes with the help of native-born Jews, with the help of
co-religionists, sometimes due to the hospitality of their Gentile neighbors, or non-Jewish neighbors.
[Pause]
Many of them, however, always retained a sense of longing for their lands of origin, for their homelands,
and many never felt truly and fully American.
Some did, others didn't.
Some had nostalgia for Germany, others definitely did not, but the feeling of Americanists, of really
belonging to America, of feeling that you were American, that really only came in the next generation among
their children, among the children of Jewish refugees.
So I'll leave it at that.
I hope this is overview has been informative to set the stage.
I'm looking forward to hearing and answering your questions, and I'll turn it back over to Anthony and Ana
for the reads.
[Pause]
[Ana Corral] Hi everyone, my name is Ana.
I am the resident librarian and I'm gonna start off with a combination of passages from
Gertie Frankel and Fritz Frankel.
The passages come from Ruth Wolman's "Crossing Over: An Oral History of Refugees from Hitler's Reich."
So, I'm going to go ahead and get started.
They're actually a married couple so...
[Pause]
The passages from "Crossing Over," they're in a type of interview setting and so they usually start off with
a question and then the person, the refugee, that they are interviewing responds.
So, the passage starts like this: "Miriam, what was it like for you when you first came to this country?"
And then, this is Gertie's response: "That is such a general question. I didn't have a choice.
If I had come under different conditions, just to look around and see what it is like to decide if I would want
to live here or not, I would have left.
I couldn't relate to the way people behaved or interacted or to the values.
I came first to Providence.
I was very lucky because for the first months here, I was under the protection of people I liked and who liked me.
People who tried very much to make me feel at home.
Bella knew about me more than anyone else by virtue of having lived with my family in Vienna.
In the meantime, she had gotten married and her baby Jonas was four or five months old.
So I came to Providence and lived in this very nice elaborate house: two stories, many rooms.
After that very cozy experience in Providence, where I really didn't want to stay anymore, I moved to New York.
One reason was that Fritz finally came to the United States.
I had come in the previous November 1939.
He came in February and went to his relatives in Middletown, New York.
[Pause]
I wasn't going to go to Middletown, but New York City was much closer than Providence and
Fritz could come into the city on weekends.
[Pause]
I tried to find a job.
Well, that was 1940, the United States was still at the tail end of the depression.
To find work was not easy for refugees.
People were getting sick and tired of refugees.
I was still under the illusion that I could find a job in the field that I had been trained, so I looked up addresses
of physicians, I followed up ads, and I went to offices.
They all wanted local experience.
Of course I didn't have any. How the hell could I?
One day I came and introduced myself to a physician. He had a Park Avenue practice. He was German.
He had come in the early 30s before the Hitler thing started and had built up a very nice x-ray practice.
He asked me questions and we had a very nice chat.
[Pause]
I had the feeling he liked me.
He asked me questions like: 'how would I do this? How would I do that?'
And I apparently answered to his satisfaction.
Then he said 'how long have you been in this country?'
And I said 'three months.'
He responded 'three months? After three months you expect to get a job in your profession?
We have been here three years and my wife is still washing dishes in a cafeteria
with a diamond ring on her finger.'
I didn't get the job.
I began to work as a maid. I was a lousy maid.
That anyone kept me was astonishing to me.
I would have fired myself within a week.
Mrs. Rothstein was a very stingy woman and paid me very little.
She probably could have couldn't have gotten anybody more efficient for what she was willing to pay,
so I retained the job.
To work as a maid with my arrogance of coming from a very good family, of having a desirable background,
of being intelligent and fairly well educated, and having a profession, so to speak, was a demeaning thing."
[Pause]
And then I'm gonna read Fritz's responses. Just a second.
[Pause]
So the question for Fritz is this.
[Pause]
It doesn't say who asked it, but this is the question: I'm curious what was it about you that made it possible
for you to make so many adaptations to this new country and culture?
What in your personality do you think made you able to make this very difficult transition?
And then this is the beginning of Fritz's response: "Nature works that way.
The culture here was so different that it is different still.
I'm not fully yet adapted.
There are certain features, functions, details, that I fully adopted.
What I don't adopt, I accept as a necessity but not as an ideal state of my being. This is very complicated."
This is the second question asked of him: "If you were traveling in another country and there was a group
of people all from different countries and someone said to you Mr. Frankel, what is you nationality?
What would you say?
And then, Fritz: "I'd say I'm an American. I'm a Jew."
[Pause]
Another question: "Does it feel totally comfortable to say you're American?"
Then Fritz: "I feel very comfortable, but it doesn't mean anything to me, basically.
What does it matter that I'm an American or I'm in Austria? That I can yodel like an Austrian?
To me it's irrelevant."
[Pause]
And then another question: "When you first got to the United States, how did you feel about the fact
that you were an Austrian?"
Fritz: "It didn't mean anything. I was born in Austria, period. It was an accident."
Another question: "When people asked you where you came from?"
"[Fritz] I said Vienna I had nothing to be ashamed of."
Another question: "Did they realize you were Jewish?"
"Probably. That was not a problem that ever entered my [Fritz's] life."
Another question: "But during those first few years, you were considered politically an enemy."
"Right. I [Fritz] was an enemy alien and not permitted to be outside of the house after seven o'clock."
Another last question: "What was that like?"
"I [Fritz] could not go out, so what?"
[Pause]
And so that concludes the first two passages from Gertie and Fritz Frankel.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] All right.
I put in the chat some instructions, but if anyone has any questions about those passages that you'd like to ask
please send them via direct message to either Ana or me and we will read them out.
[Pause]
So I have not received any questions about those passages yet.
Ana what did you find interesting about those passages?
I know you had some time to look at them and think.
Did you have questions that you thought Brad might want to speak to?
[Pause]
[Ana Corral] I actually found it really interesting. They're a married couple.
I think they were married prior to trying to come to the US and so it was really interesting the difference in
their answers, especially when they were asked do you feel like you're an American?
What does that mean to you?
And so it was really interesting. Fritz was kind of like "What of it? I don't understand why you keep asking me
the same question?" kind of thing.
So it was interesting to compare that to his wife's response.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] We did get a question in in the chat.
[Pause]
What made the assimilation process easier for Fritz than Gertie?
If Gertie answered the same questions at the same time, would she respond in the same way?
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] So I think a part of this has to with occupation.
You notice that Gertie mentioned that she was working as a domestic servant.
In many cases, depending on what kind of work you could get and how your colleagues,
your co-workers were, how they treated you.
[Pause]
The work experience, in general, could go a long way to making it much easier to feel at home.
[Pause]
I don't know that these two individuals, in particular, like if one felt assimilation was easier than the other.
My reading of the testimony of the responses the interviews is to some extent that these issues,
people don't want to talk about them, really.
You'll notice that that Gertie is sort of more forthcoming about her experiences than her husband is
and I think that's worth bearing in mind too as a reflection of why this and how this trying to fit in
and in a totally new environment was difficult and painful.
We're all familiar here, I think, with this idea of America as a melting pot for immigrants, but I think we're also
all familiar with the difficulties that immigrants have faced in this country throughout its history.
And this was, again, Jewish refugees were no exception to that.
They fit within these broader patterns.
Is that? I hope that answers the question adequately.
[Pause]
Were there any other questions Anthony?
[Pause]
[Ana Corral] Anthony stepped away for a second, but I don't see any other questions.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] Just that it was a lot easier for younger people and children, in particular, to fit in and
feel American and get along than it was for people who are older like this couple, for obvious reasons.
Right? Like once you're set in your ways, once you're an adult, it's a lot harder to move into
a totally new surrounding and try to adapt.
And, again, you'll notice that this is true in a lot of the responses in "Crossing Over," which is that
people sort of cherry-pick what aspects of American life they like and want to be a part of and want to adopt
and others they just maybe accept.
I think the words were as a matter of necessity in Fritz's case.
So the age of a refugee, the age of an immigrant, their professional skills, these sorts of things mattered in
how easy or difficult it was for them to to feel integrated to feel welcome in the United States.
[Pause]
[Ana Corral] Actually we do have a question.
Is there a time when this discrimination ended?
Did this persist until the end of the war, after the war, or at another time?
If so, was there any anti-semitic discrimination as in like they did to African-Americans?
[Bradley Nichols] In terms of anti-semitism in America continuing after World War II, most definitely.
It's certainly not as pronounced and it's not publicly acceptable anymore in the way that it was,
in large part because of the Holocaust itself.
Once it became indisputable and pretty much all Americans were aware of the atrocities committed
by the Nazis, of the scope and extent of the final solution, then anti-semitism became more of a taboo
just because people realized the consequences of it in most cases, yet not all cases.
[Pause]
The real important moment here is when American troops, in many cases, stumble across
concentration camps in Germany during liberation in 1945.
[Pause]
And this is coupled with information from the Soviets from the Red Army, from the Russians, about the actual
death camps that they came across too.
That event, or this sort of cluster events, followed by post-war war crimes trials, the Nuremberg trials,
the awareness of the Holocaust that happens at that particular moment time makes anti-semitism
in the United States much less acceptable.
Nevertheless, a lot of this awareness is kind of suppressed for a while.
Again, in large part because Jewish survivors in the United States didn't really want to talk about it either.
They didn't really want to revisit this incredibly painful and horrendous chapter in their lives.
It's really only later, a couple decades later, that public awareness of the Holocaust starts to become what it is
today in the United States.
But the basic answer the question is no, anti-semitism doesn't go away.
It just kind of goes underground after World War II.
It's still prevalent amongst, for instance, like the Ku Klux Klan, who hated African-Americans.
They hated Jews, they hated anyone who was a non-white anglo-saxon Protestant Christian.
This is all of a piece with that kind of prejudice, definitely.
The correlation between racism towards African-Americans and anti-semitism in the United States
is very close and they almost always go together, not always but almost always.
[Pause]
Were there other questions?
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] I think that might be the last of the questions about that passage,
so I will go ahead and read our next passage.
The next passage is coming from "The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught In Between"
by Michael Dobbs.
This comes from Chapter 3 titled: "FDR."
[Pause]
Roosevelt had made no effort to change American immigration practices after succeeding Herbert Hoover
as president of the United States in 1933.
His predecessor had taken steps to further slash immigration following the onset of the Great Depression.
In September 1930, less than a year after the stock market crash, Hoover ordered the State Department
to ensure that immigrants would not compete for jobs with Americans or become a financial burden
on the government.
Prior to 1930, The Likely to Become a Public Charge Clause had been used mainly to exclude the
chronically sick and mentally unstable.
The clause was now interpreted to apply to all those unable to support themselves as soon as they
stepped off the boat.
In the fiscal year ending June 1931, for the first time in American history, more people left
the United States than arrived.
The number of German immigrants admitted to the United States declined precipitously from 27,119 in 1930
to 10,100 in 1931, to 2,086 in 1932.
Preoccupied with the domestic unemployment crisis, FDR did little to address the immigration question
until the beginning of his second term.
In January 1937, two months after he was swept back to the White House, the State Department quietly relaxed
the public charge provision.
Rather than reject anyone who might possibly become a public charge, consuls were now told to reject only
those applicants who would probably constitute a long term burden.
Visa applicants were no longer required to produce financial guarantees from immediate family members
already living in the United States.
Non-binding affidavits of support from more distant relatives were deemed satisfactory
under the new regulations.
Such tweaks in the interpretation of the immigration law led to an immediate increase in the granting of visas
during Roosevelt's second term.
The granting of immigrant visas to Jewish applicants tripled between 1936 and 1938.
It was not until the middle of 1938, however, that consuls began using all the slots in the
German and Austrian quotas.
Admissions to the United States rose sharply, but failed to keep pace with the ever-increasing demand
for German quota visas.
The tumultuous events of 1938, beginning with the annexation of Austria and ending with Crystal Nacht,
created a refugee crisis of entirely new dimensions.
While a president enjoyed some latitude and interpreting the immigration laws, he could not waive
the quota limits unilaterally
Admitting 20,000 refugee children into the country outside the quota system
would require an act of Congress.
FDR had to carefully consider how much political capital he was prepared to invest in the passage of
new immigration legislation at the expense of other priorities.
[Pause]
So, if you have questions about this passage or want to hear Bradley's thoughts on this passage,
please send your questions via chat to me or Ana.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] You know if there's no questions I'll just comment on the fact that it's important to keep in mind
that there were efforts within the Roosevelt administration, as well as among diplomats and
aid workers abroad on the ground in Europe.
There were efforts, as I sort of hinted at my overview, to help get Jews out of Europe.
Again, particularly children.
And Roosevelt, as you heard in the passage, he wanted to do more, but doing anything substantial
really would have required public attention, would have required an act of Congress in many cases,
because of these restrictive immigration quotas that were in place.
So any rescue efforts were conducted kind of piecemeal throughout the Second World War.
[Pause]
But there were efforts within the administration, particularly Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary,
Henry Morgenthau Jr.
He was particularly concerned with staying abreast of efforts, and getting involved in efforts, and
trying to support efforts to help European Jews before the war of German and Austrian Jews and Czech Jews.
He was one of these figures who was very invested in this.
Morgenthau was himself a Jew and his father had actually been the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
during World War I during the Armenian Genocide.
So Henry Morgenthau Sr. passed on to Henry Morgenthau Jr. knowledge of what this kind of prejudice
could lead to and Morgenthau was among the more prominent officials within the Roosevelt administration
that were trying to help.
[Pause]
That being said, on the flip side, there were many officials, particularly within the State Department,
who did not want to help Jews at all.
In part, because they were anti-semites.
There's one figure by the name of Breckinridge Long, who was an Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs
who was sort of in charge of trying to get Jews out of Europe and this is like putting the worst possible person
in charge of this initiative.
He didn't want to help at all.
He basically torpedoed all kinds of different rescue operations at various State Department officials and
diplomats suggested or were engaged in trying to pull off.
Again, in part, because he was afraid of these "enemy aliens," foreign spies, fifth columnists.
They were often called a fifth column, being sort of an enemy behind the lines.
There was a fear that if Jewish refugees themselves weren't agents of the Axis powers of Nazi Germany,
that spies would would hide and find their way into the United States by sort of mixing in with these refugees.
But again, Long was a pretty obvious anti-semite too, so it's a mixed bag when we look at sort of the
federal government's response to this and efforts to help.
[Pause]
[Ana Corral] So, I have a question.
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] I've got a couple too but you go first.
[Ana Corral] Okay. It seems to me that this rhetoric about immigrants being burdens to the economy
is a repeating theme throughout our history.
I just wrote a paper on it and analyzing it.
Did other countries also have this quota, like Canada or Great Britain?
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] Great Britain did, although there's were not nearly as restrictive.
They had immigration quotas.
I mean, most Western countries had immigration quotas of one kind or another after World War I in that period
because it was a huge refugee crisis after World War I and many of the refugees were Jews fleeing persecution
in Eastern Europe in what had been the Russian Empire, which became the Soviet Union as well as in these
smaller so-called successor states that emerged after World War I sort of carved out of the
old Austrian Empire.
[Pause]
In Britain it's not as restrictive, but you still see the same kind of anti-immigrant sentiment
enhanced by anti-semitism.
[Pause]
There is an equivalent.
So in America they had the German American Bund, which is like basically the American Nazi movement.
In Britain they had the same kind of thing.
They had a fascist party there that was pro-Hitler, that was pro-Nazi, that was anti-semitic.
And both in Britain and the United States, the fear was not that these political movements were, like,
substantial enough to tip an election or anything like that, but that you didn't want to play into their hands
by looking overly sympathetic to Jews.
This is what was meant by sort of political capital in Roosevelt's case and he might not necessarily want to
spend this when he could use it for other "priorities."
Canada, I don't know as much about.
A lot of Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors after the war would certainly go to Canada.
I'm not entirely sure, though, what their immigration system was like in the late 1930s and 1940s.
[Pause]
I can sort of infer, though, that it wasn't much better than America because we have numerous instances of
all kinds of different German Jews who were trying to flee somewhere, anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
The voyage of the ship St. Louis is the most famous example of this.
This ship full of German Jewish refugees sort of went all around the Caribbean after crossing the Atlantic and
went to Havana first in Cuba and no one would take them in.
The United States would not take them in, I think Canada falls in that as well.
As far as other Western countries, at least before 1940, France already had a huge number of Jewish refugees
from Eastern Europe and they were very disinclined, shall we say, to take in many from
Nazi Germany, at least permanently.
They allow them to remain as stateless persons, second-class citizens, but they did not want to
make them actual Frenchmen or French women.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] All right. I have two questions waiting in the chat.
So, here's the first one.
At what point, if any, did moral considerations supersede economic considerations when deciding
how many immigrants to allow into America.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] I don't know that it's ever the case that moral considerations superseded economic ones.
Just, it's more, kind of, they're sort of mixed together and accounted for and balanced against one another.
In some cases, we know that visas are accepted and granted, I should say.
Exit visas from Germany, in the equivalent of green cards or nationality papers in the United States.
These are granted for purely moral reasons.
I mean, purely for asylum because these people are fleeing persecution.
[Pause]
At the individual level, it's almost always moral considerations.
This was true of American diplomatic officials working in embassies in places like Germany, places like Austria.
[Pause]
But at the top level, they're at the higher echelons of government.
There, it's more of these both economic and political considerations and calculations
which are intertwined, right?
I mean you don't want to bring in too many immigrants who are gonna take jobs from Americans who are still
suffering from the Great Depression because that will then have political consequences for you at the polls.
So these things are all tied together, but I think they're, sort of, if there's a distinction to be drawn,
it's between moral considerations among individual officials.
[Pause]
State Department officials, diplomats, foreign aid workers, as I mentioned before.
There's a distinction to be made between their, sort of, moral considerations and the more economic and
political calculations of those in high office, including Roosevelt
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Okay.
It was mentioned earlier that there was some popular support for Jewish immigration to America.
Were there any noticeable regional pockets of support for allowing Jewish refugees into the United States
i.e. northern cities or the Midwest etc.?
So this is centered in New York, New York City.
[Pause]
There are kind of small pockets all over the country.
Not a lot in the south.
A pretty substantial sort of branch of this movement on the west coast in California in Los Angeles
in particular, but it's mainly centered in New York City and Los Angeles.
In Washington DC itself, you did have a number of, in many cases, Zionists, Jewish political figures
and leaders who were in favor of establishing a Jewish state in Israel.
They're the ones who really, kind of, took lead in this grassroots intervention movements
by petitioning Congressmen.
[Pause]
So there's a movement in Washington DC, but it's mainly in the cities I mentioned.
More prominent in the north than in the south or the Midwest.
But yes you can definitely see sort of geographical differences between where this was more popular
or more of an issue for people than others.
[Pause]
And I should just add New York City because it already had an enormous Jewish population,
both native born and immigrant
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] So I don't see any additional questions in my chat.
Ana, do you have any?
[Ana Corral] No, I don't have any others.
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Okay. Then let's go ahead and do the next passage.
[Ana Corral] Okay. That is me.
So it's gonna be another passage from Wolman's "Crossing Over" and this one is from Anken Ickenberg.
So the question mentions the Group A, which was a group of Jewish refugees that settled in LA, or sorry,
Los Angeles.
So the question is: "In what ways is the Group A still important to you?"
[Pause]
Response: "Nostalgic value I would say. It was an important time in our lives.
We had to get adjusted to a new life.
And now, also, interest in the children's and grandchildren's development."
Question: "Now I have a question along a different line. If someone says to you, what are you? What do you say?"
Response: "American, unequivocally. I don't consider myself a German anymore.
We never wanted to go back. We never wanted to read a German paper. Nothing again.
Completely over from the moment we got here, we made this home.
I told you we had a choice to go back to Germany with full colors.
It would have been of great monetary value to us.
Fred could have been reinstated as a full judge and I, as the wife of a high official, would have had
a very different life."
Question: "Did you speak German at all when you came to America?"
And response: "No we did not talk German at home."
Question: "Did you make that decision when you left Germany?"
And response: "No, but when I studied medicine I learned that you should raise your child in the language
of his peers or you make trouble for the child. Some of our friends did not do that.
Their children were fluent in German, but had difficulty with their peers.
When my mother was still alive, we did talk in German sometimes, although she knew English.
Question: "When you came to the United States, did you have anything to do with the synagogue?"
[Pause]
Oh. I might not know how to pronounce this, so Ann's response: "We were angry with dear God,
but it's in German, to tell the truth, because our parents were killed.
I will still never go to a temple unless I have to because I start to cry and make a spectacle of myself.
I don't want people to look at me.
The only temple I sometimes went to was a Leo Baeck temple where Ruthie got married.
In Germany, we were so assimilated that we rarely went to Temple there either.
Only my father went. He tried to give my sister and me money to go to synagogue on High Holidays.
My sister refused to be corrupted. She would not accept his money, but I did.
By law in Germany, you had to belong to a temple if you were a Jew.
Some of your tax money went to it automatically.
On our birth certificates, marriage certificates, everywhere, it mentioned religion.
Even on the matriculation diploma.
You could later on refuse to have it mentioned, but I didn't care to refuse.
My father's parents were Orthodox and wouldn't eat in our house.
We belonged to a conservative synagogue. Girls sat upstairs, boys downstairs.
All we did was fool around with the boys until the Cantor, who was our religious teacher in the school,
came up and reprimanded us.
Religion class was required.
I made a nuisance of myself. For punishment, I always had to copy the Prophet three times."
[Pause]
Sorry, just a second.
[Pause]
I think these are the last two questions.
Question: "You made a comment earlier that there was more anti-semitism in the United States
than in Germany.
Did you ever experience any incidents here?"
Response: "No I didn't. In all the years, nothing personal.
Fred, yes. At work in his first job, he was told 'go back to the country you came from.'
You lie. You cannot even write correctly.
Although nothing has ever been directed at me, I know anti-semitism is here.
You read it in the paper, you see it, you just know it."
[Pause]
Question: "When did you return to Germany for the first time?"
Response: "In 1963."
Question: "How did it feel to be there?"
Response: I couldn't even recognize the house where I was born and lived because it had all been bombed.
My school was bombed too.
I think only the obstetrician, a classmate of mine, was still living there in his old house.
The rest of the town was destroyed by the Canadian and British Air Force.
Most people had moved to southern Germany, mostly to Württemberg or to Berlin.
They couldn't stay in Wuppertal. Everything was destroyed. They too had to run for their lives.
I visited several friends elsewhere.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Okay. If you'd like to ask a question or make a comment about that passage,
please send it via chat to Ana or myself and we will read the question or comment.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] And while we're waiting I'll just add.
This is actually sort of a addition to the response that I gave to a question earlier about
anti-semitism in the United States.
And I forgot to, sort of, address whether there was ever any formal persecution of the kind
that African Americans faced.
And it's worth mentioning it here because of the question being asked about anti-semitism.
It's more informal. There's nothing, like, official in the way of segregation, for instance, Jim Crow laws.
But it's more just this, kind of, informal country clubs, for instance, rarely, if ever, accepted Jewish members until
well into the 1960s and 1970s.
That's just one example, but also American Jews could sense this in their daily lives that
people treated them differently.
Not necessarily badly, but just differently. They were in many ways isolated, excluded in many ways.
That's the kind of discrimination. But it's not official legal discrimination. It's more informal but it's definitely there.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] So I'm not seeing any questions about this passage. Ana?
[Ana Corral] No I don't have anything either.
[Bradley Nichols] My students are out there do you guys have questions?
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] We just had one pop in.
Did this informal anti-semitism mirror any of the more subtle persecution and rhetoric that was seen in
Germany in the lead-up to World War II?
Yes. You hear a lot of the same arguments about Jews representing this kind of international conspiracy,
only working for their own ends while subverting the nations to which they belong.
This was a very common trope in anti-semitic rhetoric in the United States and it stems,
I mean if we want to go all the way back, it stems from Christian Church fathers writing about Jews,
but in the modern period, in the 20th century, it stems from a document known as the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which purported to show that there was again this sort of international
Jewish conspiracy bent on world domination.
This text, more or less, gets translated into English and published in the United States on by
Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company.
He referred to it as "An International Jew," that was the title he used, but it's this same idea,
the same accusation, the same again trope assumption.
And you also see in Nazi Germany, anti-semitism, at least official anti-semitism,
was based on racial ideology: on the idea that Jews were a separate race.
You see some of that in the United States, but more common would have been religious anti-semitism,
which you can pick up in all kinds of different derogatory terms and epithets referring
to Jesus Christ killers, for instance.
This was extremely common in the United States.
That's more religious based, but you could find that kind of thing in Germany too.
The accusation that Jews were greedy and/or stingy or shady, this is just as common and this perception was
arguably just as common in the United States as it was in any European country.
But again the difference is that you know see any formal legislation put in place to discriminate
against Jews or persecute them.
[Pause]
The American Constitution, although again allowed for persecution of other groups, namely African Americans,
discrimination of other groups, at least in the case of Jews, because they were identified as
a religious minority, there would have been a lot of pushback against that.
Going against the ideal of freedom of religion, that was more powerful than, say, ideals of racial equality
between whites and blacks persons.
But yes, the short answer is yes there are similarities.
Even in, you know, anti-semitic rhetoric propaganda, the United States was usually not as disgusting and
semi-pornographic and truly vile in the way that it was in Nazi Germany.
[Pause]
Other questions?
[Pause]
[Ana Corral] I have a question.
Did radical white supremacists such as the KKK, who use Christian scripture to justify their actions, perpetuate
the religious discrimination against the Jews like in Europe?
Yes they are, but it's more kind of, like, they're way more opposed to integration with blacks.
I mean that's the main thing they're fighting against, but you find, again, well into the Civil Rights era and
afterwards this notion that racial mixing integration, what they called miscegenation,
the interbreeding between races.
There was a theory within white supremacist groups, within the KKK, that Jews were responsible for this,
that this was part of this international Jewish conspiracy to weaken the "white race" by having
whites and blacks intermingle.
This is an idea that we still see today on the far right,and the white supremacist right, the alt-right,
whatever they want to call themselves.
This idea that Jews are instigating and orchestrating the immigration of Latin Americans and Latinos
into the United States to "weaken" the white race, to cause "white genocide," which is of course ridiculous,
but you see the influence of these kinds of delusions in the attack on the Tree of Life Center synagogue in
Pittsburgh, for instance, a couple years ago.
So yes these ideas are definitely promoted by white supremacists, anti-semitic ideas are promoted by them,
anti-semitic violence is an outcome of these beliefs as well in the United States up to a couple years ago.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Okay I'm not seeing any additional questions about this passage, Ana?
[Ana Corral] No, that was the only one.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] My students who are out there, do you guys have any questions about the passage
or just in general?
[Pause]
You can send one direct to me too, that's fine.
[Pause]
I'll give you a minute.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] I'm gonna go ahead and read the next passage.
If you have questions, feel free to send them in chat whenever if you want to send it while I'm reading,
that's fine and we'll have time for more questions after this passage.
This is returning to "The Unwanted" by Michael Dobbs. This is from Chapter 12 entitled "To The East."
"In some quarters discussed with Vichy France was accompanied by bitterness toward the United States.
The head of the Marseilles office of HICEM, Vadimir Shaw, complained about the hypocrisy of
American refugee policy.
Representatives of the Great Northern or North American Republic protested against the deportation
of alien Jews to the east without giving them the possibility to go to the west.
The discrepancy made it easy for Pierre Laval to argue that he was sending alien Jews to the one country
that was prepared to accept them, namely Nazi Germany.
It is difficult to protest against the deportations towards the east when everybody knows that it would have been
possible to send the unfortunate refugees to the west, provided that the United States had opened
their doors a little wider.
Shaw reported to his superiors, 'What harm would two or three hundred thousand Jewish refugees
threatened with deportation have done to the United States with its 140 million inhabitants?'
In claiming that two or three hundred thousand Jews might have been saved, Shaw was referring to
the four years since the Evian Conference on refugees.
Led by the American delegation, speaker after speaker had expressed sympathy for the victims of
Nazi persecution and The Intergovernmental Committee had been created to deal with the refugee crisis.
There had been much well-intentioned talk about creating Jewish homelands in Africa, South America, or
even Alaska, but little substantive had been achieved.
By the summer of 1942, mass escape was no longer feasible.
The borders of Germany and occupied countries such as Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands were sealed.
Even supposing that a refugee was able to reach Marseille or Casablanca, obtaining passage
across the Atlantic was increasingly difficult.
Without the right connections and a lot of money, it was next to impossible.
Even so, Shaw refused to concede defeat.
HICEM had managed to charter two ships from Casablanca at the end of August, one to New York,
the other to Mexico.
Shaw believed it might still be possible to send up to 30,000 persons to the United States.
He urged his American colleagues to persuade President Roosevelt to wave entry formalities
for the threatened Jews.
Upon their arrival, they might be placed in concentration camps until investigation is made
concerning each of them.
[Pause]
So if you have any questions or comments that you'd like to make, please send them via direct message and
we will read them out.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] Just to elaborate on some of the policies of the French that are being referred to there,
this ties back to what I mentioned before about a large number of Jewish refugees, immigrants in France
already before the war, before the Nazis, before the Germans took over,
before the Germans conquered France.
And this is a number that had been steadily increasing again since after the first world war and the tendency
for French officials in the unoccupied part of France, Vichy France's it was called,
who collaborated with the Germans.
Their policy was, basically, we'll hand over these foreign Jewish refugees for you to take to the death camps,
and they knew what their fate was going to be.
We'll give you these foreign-born Jews whom we don't really like, but we're not really gonna give you
native-born French Jews.
They actually even had a... my students will remember this because we just talked about it recently
that the native-born Jews were referred to as isriatic days, Israelites, whereas foreign-born Jews, Jewish
immigrants, Jewish refugees in France, were referred to as JewJews, Jews and it's the latter whom the French,
the Vichy collaborationist government, they were perfectly fine with handing those people over
to the Nazis even though they knew they would be murdered.
They were perfectly fine with that, they just didn't want assimilated native-born French Jews.
That was a bit too much for them to stomach.
Hence, this irony you have where the Germans are the ones willing to accept these Jewish refugees because
they're going to kill them and countries like the United States in particular in the Western Hemisphere were not.
[Pause]
So I have a question here directly from from one of my students.
It asked: were there any Jews that made it to a place like Casablanca and ended up staying and settling there
after the war?
In terms of North Africa, I recall some Jews escaping via Spain to North Africa, even some German Jews
who went all the way from France to Spain to North Africa, but I don't think any of them ever settled there.
I think this is just sort of like a temporary refuge for the time being.
Particularly after the Allies seize North Africa, first Morocco and then really the rest of it: Tunisia, Algeria,
and so forth.
Before then, it was more difficult because these same Vichy French officials were in charge there because
they controlled significant parts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
These were all French colonies and so these pro-German, pro-Nazi Vichy officials were there for a while
after the Allies come some more refugees but it's really Jewish refugees go there but it's really mainly a trickle,
not too many.
I don't think any of them stayed there.
I would seriously doubt it, though, given that you're surrounded by a predominantly, if not
Arab Muslim population.
[Pause]
Do you guys have questions coming in?
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] I don't currently have any.
[Ana Corral] I don't currently have questions.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] Oh Anthony this one's for you, referring to what HICEM was.
[Pause]
Other questions?
[Pause]
So I have a comment from another one my students here who notes that it's not the same as escaping
to North Africa, but the woman whose testimony I listened to for the oral history project in
our Holocaust class, she left Europe for Africa in 1946 and stayed there for the rest of her life.
Yeah I mean that after the war, once it becomes apparent what the Nazis have done, then you start to see
countries all over the world being much more welcoming in terms of allowing Jewish refugees, European Jews,
in general who survived, to come and live there, whether it's South Africa, the British Dominion countries,
whether it's South Africa, Canada, Australia was a big location where Holocaust survivors went, New Zealand,
and so forth as well as the United States, which was numerically the largest other than Israel itself, of course.
But again it's only like after the war is over when borders are open again and once it's apparent to the world
that Jews need to get out of Europe, not because of an imminent threat, but because of what has been faced
and indeed continuing persecution.
There are pogroms, there are massacres of Jews by the poles, for instance, after the war ends
and this really motivates a lot of countries to take in more Jews including the United States as well.
Like, okay, if anti-Jewish violence is still going on after everything they've been through,
then we need to open the door.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Okay, I'm not seeing any more questions at the moment Ana?
[Ana Corral] No I don't have any questions.
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Okay let's do another passage.
[Ana Corral] Okay, yeah. So... sorry were you gonna say something?
[Bradley Nichols] No I said sounds good to me.
[Ana Corral] Okay. So this is from Wolman's "Crossing Over: The Oral History" and so these are questions that
were asked of Faiza Summers and these questions actually have the person's name like who asked them.
So I'm gonna go ahead and get started.
So, Sybil: "How did you feel about the Germans? How did you feel about being German?"
Faiza: At that time, the Germans were my enemies absolutely.
But I can't say that I hated them.
Maybe people who got out of Germany later or were in the camps had different reactions.
Part of me is German and part of me still has the tendency to see what's good in Germans.
Ernie has that too, sometimes, I think too much.
He doesn't see that there's some neo-Nazism going on in Germany.
He will still try to defend them with 'but the youth is different.' I don't agree with him.
I'm very much worried about the German unification."
Debbie: "Did you have any different feelings about Judaism because of what you had just been through?"
Faiza: "I was naturally Jewish like I was in Germany.
I was once asked to be on jury duty.
When the judge said it would be a long trial and asked if anybody would not be able to stay, I felt so proud and
happy when I said that I couldn't do that because the Jewish High Holidays would be soon.
In Germany you could never say that. Then, I felt really good to be in America."
Debbie: "How long did it take you to feel 'American'?"
Faiza: "This is a very big question.
Do I really feel American today? I feel German. I feel Jewish. I feel Polish. I feel Dutch. I feel Cuban.
I feel very much American also.
I have spent most of my life in America, but basically the first years of one's life are much more important.
That's where you got your upbringing, your education. So basically I'm still European."
Sybil: "If you are asked what are you do you unequivocally now answer an American?"
Faiza: "I would probably put Jew first."
Sybil: "Are you 100% at home now in Los Angeles?"
Faiza: "Of course. I'm living here, but I don't have the nostalgic feeling that some people have.
What bothers me is that you have 50 here and 50 there and Bank of America everywhere.
The uniqueness that you find in some of the European towns and cities and villages gives you the
home feeling of 'this is mine.'
Even when I'm thinking of some of the places where I lived in Germany, I get more of a home feeling.
I don't have that feeling when I come to Ventura Boulevard and Van Nuys that this is home."
Debbie: "Don't you think that's because of the times more than the shops themselves?
There are probably chains of stores in Dresden now."
Faiza: "You might be right."
Sybil: "How long did it take you to feel Los Angeles as your home?"
Faiza: "I think right away because there was no choice. Where else?
I did not think it was a nice home, obviously, but this was where I was.
There was my family, my furniture, and my piano. That's home."
Debbie: "Were you involved in any political groups in the early years?"
Faiza: "No. We were really very busy.
Ernie always worked long hours and I was teaching and I made a home and cared for a child."
Debbie: "When Sybil came to Havana at age three, I guess you spoke to her in German.
I know that at some point she only wanted to speak English. When was that?
Faiza: "Especially in the beginning, we spoke German.
But when other kids were around, she wanted us to speak English.
If we talked German when her friends were around, she became a hundred and fifty percent American.
She felt like talking German was equivalent to talking with Hitler.
I was the same with my parents. When other kids were around, I didn't want my parents to speak Polish to me."
Sybil: "What about you made you able to make all the adaptations necessary for living a new life?"
Faiza: "I liked changes. I like adventure. And another thing: this was it.
There was no choice and this was the best there could be.
It couldn't have been better. I couldn't have made a better choice."
Debbie: "Was America what you expected it to be?"
Faiza: "I thought many things were very funny and I still do.
And I still find many things should be different and many things I do not like.
My friend Trudy Glauber told me Americans never grow up. They're teenagers all their lives.
There is something to this. Much here is superficial, very businesslike.
I don't know whether people go really into the depths of life and what life can be.
In many ways Europeans have more substance."
[Pause]
And that is it for that passage.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Okay. Again, if you want to ask a question or make a comment on the passage,
just send a direct message to either Ana or myself or to Bradley and we will read out your question or comment.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] Nothing?
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Nothing.
[Pause ]
Well, if we don't have questions or comments on that passage I can read one final passage from
"The Unwanted" and then we can look at closing up.
Okay, so this one, again, is from "The Unwanted" by Michael Dobbs.
[Pause]
Turn on my video here.
[Pause]
This comes from the epilogue and it's titled "Memory."
Wealth, education and family ties in the United States all contributed to the ability of Jews
to organize their escape.
The attitudes and prejudices of individual consoles and the visa review committees back in Washington
also played a role, but there was another force at work whose importance should never be underestimated:
plain dumb luck.
Elsa Valfer filed for immigration to the United States on August 8, 1938 together with her husband Heinrich.
They were among tens of thousands of Jewish refugees admitted to Britain during the first eight months of 1939
on the strength of their low American registration numbers.
Elsa joined Heinrich in England less than a month before the outbreak of war on September 1st, 1939.
Had she not left Germany when she did, she would likely have been condemned to years of disappointment
and heartbreak, ending in death.
Max and Fanny Valfer submitted their immigration paperwork to the United States
a few weeks after their daughter.
As luck would have it, the lines outside the Stuttgart consulate had become unmanageable
by September 1938.
A slew of anti-Jewish decrees had resulted in a huge spike in U.S. visa applicants.
Max and Fanny were assigned high American registration numbers
which made them ineligible for asylum in Britain.
They were about to sail for Cuba when that escape route was shut down following the abortive voyage of
the St. Louis in May 1939.
They were promised US visas in December 1941 only to see the promised snatched away
in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
A subsequent summons to the American consulate in Marseilles in August 1942 came a few weeks too late
to save them from Auschwitz.
[Pause]
So if you've got any final questions or comments, anything that you'd like to ask about anything
we've talked about today, feel free to send that via direct message to Ana or me
and we will read the question or comment.
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] I'll just underscore that really was in many cases a matter of dumb luck:
whether people got out or not.
Being in the right place the right time, when you were able to get into American consulate, whether,
in some cases, you had family members or connections, as was mentioned, in the United States,
sort of direct circumstances like that.
Money, those things matter. But a lot of times it was just dumb luck.
And it was very, very close in terms of some people getting out of concentration camps, for instance,
and being allowed to emigrate when they otherwise would have been sent to their deaths.
In many cases, were sent to their death because they were not granted an exit visa.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] So I have one comment it says 'thanks so much for doing this;
it was very interesting and enlightening.'
[Pause]
[Bradley Nichols] You're quite welcome
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] And I put a link in the chat. This is a link to a short survey about the event.
It's maybe five questions, it shouldn't take long at all to complete. We'd really appreciate any feedback.
This is the third event that we have done as a library in this kind of virtual format.
The first one was much more open, but as things have progressed and some disruptive attacks have started
happening on the Zoom platform, we had to lock things down a little bit more so this was a much more
restrictive event and I'd love to hear any thoughts that people have on how well this format worked for
the event that we managed or that we put on today.
But I don't see any additional comments, Ana do you have anything?
[Pause]
[Ana Corral] No I don't have any additional comments, but I did want to mention if anyone is interested
both those books, they're currently checked out, but they are a part of the library's collection so once Newman
reopens you should be able to check them out if you're interested in reading more on them.
Especially the oral histories they were pretty fascinating.
[Bradley Nichols] Yeah I have them checked out, so.
[Ana Corral] I didn't want to point fingers.
[Bradley Nichols] I'll return them soon. Although, again, the library's not open so you're gonna have to wait.
[Ana Corral] You can just hold onto them until we reopen.
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Definitely "The Unwanted" by Michael Dobbs is readily available.
You might be able to get it from your public library.
It's definitely available on Kindle if you have a Kindle and wanted to purchase a copy for yourself.
[Pause]
There's a comment in here, 'thank you to everyone for putting on this presentation.'
And then I did just get a question, 'what was the book the last passage was read from?'
That last passage was from Michael Dobbs's "The Unwanted."
[Pause]
So that one is easily locatable.
I purchased it on Kindle earlier today for myself so that I could have a good place to read the passages from.
[Pause]
But if there's no more questions or comments I think we will go ahead and close out the session.
We're ending about a half an hour earlier than our scheduled time, but that has been the case
for all of our previous virtual events.
I would very much like to thank everyone who came, It's really nice to see people attend and take part.
Thank you to everybody who asked questions and we do know that we will be getting the related exhibit back,
likely not until 2022.
We're just waiting for final confirmation on what the new dates will be, so look for it in a couple years time or
if you're not local here in Blacksburg, check to see if your local library will be hosting it.
And with that I think we'll call it a night.
Thank you everyone.
[Ana Corral] Thank you everyone.
[Bradley Nichols] Thanks guys.