Jews in the Caribbean

Jewish refugees being refused entrance to Cuba was briefly mentioned in 'The Cuba Libre Story', and it immediately sparked my interest. After all, whenever you think about the Holocaust and WWII, sunny tropical beaches isn't exactly the first thing that springs to mind. So when I started doing actual research on the topic, I was surprised to know that a number of Caribbean nations played host to (or wanted to play host to), refugees from war torn Europe.

Refugees at Camp Gibraltar

Admittedly, upon further thought, it makes sense. There were a lot of refugees, and only a finite amount of space in England, Canada, and the US. Though it was miles away from anything they knew, large populations of Jews settled not only in the Caribbean, but in South America as well.

Now, keep in mind, this is, by no means, a comprehensive list, and there is no doubt that I'll be revisiting this topic in the future. But for now, let's talk about the US Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, and the (at the time) British West Indies.

In 1938 the US Virgin Islands looked at the situation in Europe, and did what any rational, human country would have done, they invited Jewish refugees into their territory.

It would have been a pretty good deal for both parties. The Islands were sparsely populated and underdeveloped; the Jews were being killed. The Islands could offer the Jews shelter, and the Jews could settle, and help boost the economy, and aid in development. The Islands' government drafted a resolution, and submitted it to the US State Department for approval. This is when things started to go wrong.

See, in a leap of logic that supports my argument that people, as a species, never change, the officials at the State Department were worried that with the refugees would come spies, and that even if the refugees were anti-Hitler, a large number of them would still be pro-Germany. So Cordell Hull, Secretary of State at the time, sent a note to the Islands informing them that their resolution was in violation of several laws. This was, of course, total baloney.

Because not all of the Roosevelt Administration were anti-Semitic douchebags, the Department of Labor and the Department of the Interior started looking into the State Departments ruling. They found, and published a statement saying that the US Virgin Islands' resolution was completely compliant with existing laws, and, furthermore, would help the US reach its stated quota of Jewish refugees they needed to take in from Europe.

Cordell Hull, Nobel Peace Prize winner,
and anti-semitic douchebag.

The State Department seemed reluctant to budge, so the Islands tried to negotiate. They conceded that their Islands could be a halfway point, a place where Jews could wait to be admitted to the mainland US. This was a more than reasonable compromise. The US would meet its quota, the Islands would get an economic boost, and the refugees could be kept under strict supervision. The State Department still didn't like this, but it wasn't technically illegal. So they embarked on a course of bureaucratic nonsense. The State Department and their buddies in the US Attorney's Office adopted a strategy of 'Delay and delay'. Every roadblock that could be put up was. The goal was to limit immigration into the US by making the process so lengthy that potential immigrants would either give up, or die before they could enter the US.

And, unfortunately, it worked. The Virgin Islands were never able to take in the refugees that they wanted to help, and hundreds of thousands of Jews died as a result.

The Dominican Republic (sometimes known as DR) was probably the most eager of any country to take in Jewish refugees, however, unlike the Virgin Islands, the republic's government's motives weren't noble. There were, in fact, motivated by Rafael Trujillo's (the dictator at the time) racism and need for some good PR. Motivations aside, the DR offered to take in some 100,000 Jewish refugees, and, in the end, took in about 4,000.

As mentioned, Rafael Trujillo had two goals in mind when he invited refugees to his shore. One, to try and make the world forget about his massacre of around 25,000 Haitians. Two, to try and lighten the skin color of the dark skinned Dominicans, and to try and 'Europeanize' the country. Trujillo hoped that the Jews would intermarry with the Dominicans, and produced lighter skinned children. Unfortunately, no one told him about that pesky little verse in Deuteronomy where Jews are forbidden to marry non-Jews.

Sosua beach, looks a bit like a desktop background
that came as a preset for Windows XP, no?

So, to prepare for the arrivals of his hopefully hundreds of thousands of potential gene pool modifiers, Trujillo prepared the town of Sosua, a former banana plantation, which he had purchased a few years prior.

Sosua was about 70% jungle at the time, but it was good land for farming. One of the visa requirements for Jewish refugees coming to the DR was that they be willing to take up an agrarian lifestyle. There was an intensive screening process of all potential immigrants, and, in addition to their willingness to take up farming, candidates were also chosen for their youth, strength, and health.

It was difficult to transport refugees from Europe to the Caribbean. Jews could only make the crossing on Allied ships, and aforementioned ships were often needed to move troops and supplies. Add in the amount of Axis submarines floating around, and you've got a rough journey. Consequentially, only 500 families, or around 4,000 people were able to settle in the Dominican Republic.
And for a bunch of city slickers transported to a tropical island, told to do a job they didn't quite know how to do, they did pretty well. The Jews at Sosua resuscitated a struggling pig population, opened the first salami factory in the DR, and became a major producer of milk and butter. (to this day Sosua is the dairy capital of the Dominican Republic)

Sosua synagogue

Very few of the refugees were content to stay on the island however, or even in Sosua. As I mentioned before, the Jews transplanted to Sosua were a bunch of city people. They came from Vienna and Berlin, two cities not exactly known for their agriculture or their tropical climate. Moving from the Old World to the sunny island of Hispaniola was enormous change, and, as might be imagined, may Jews just weren't quite down for that in the long term. Several families left for the capital city of Santo Domingo, and even more left for the United States, where the culture and climate were much more familiar. Out of the 500 families that came over from Europe, about 50 stayed in Sosua.

Today Sosua remains an enormous producer of dairy products, but there's very little of its Jewish population left. However, the Jewish history of the town still runs strong. There's a Jewish museum attached to the historic synagogue, and the Star of David is incorporated into the city seal. Trujillo's dream of a 'whiter' Dominican population was never realized, but about 4,000 souls were saved from dying horrible deaths at the hands of the Nazis, which, in my opinion, is a more than acceptable trade off.

The Gibraltar Camp

The Gibraltar Camp, built on the Mona Estate just outside the capital city of Kingston in British owned Jamaica was initially supposed to house refugees from British colonies that were affected by the fighting--Gibraltar and Malta*. Along with the refugees came some 200-3,000** Dutch, Polish, Czech, and Luxembourgish Jews.

Out of all the refugee camps to end up in, the Gibraltar Camp was one of the best. The camp was, more or less, a functioning town. They had doctors, hairdressers, teachers, as well as a functioning police station, hospital, and synagogue. The refugees had access to books, newspapers, the radio, the camp even showed movies! It was, by all accounts, a cozy little place, but life wasn't as idyllic as you might think.

Despite the fact that they were well looked after, the refugees were still held in a camp. There were strict rules that ensured that they could only leave between the hours of 8 am and 10 pm, and guards recorded the comings and goings of every person. Additionally, the only option for work was inside the camp. In order to protect the local economy, the Jamaican government had placed a ban on Jews working or living outside of Camp Gibraltar, something that many refugees were unhappy with.

Warning run in a Jamaican newspaper

Additionally, like the refugees in Sosua, there was an enormous culture shock. Admittedly, the refugees had come from Lisbon, which isn't exactly an arctic climate, but it's still quite different from Jamaica. Many of the Jewish refugees didn't speak the language, and the Jews that were already in Jamaica practiced a different form of Judaism than the refugees.***

And if that wasn't enough, with a new world came new diseases. In 1944 a large portion of the camp was hit with Dengue fever, a disease the refugees had no previous antibodies to fight. They were laid up with a fever and a horrible rash, then quarantined for six weeks. It was enough to put even the most gung ho of refugees off the island.

It isn't surprising that many of the refugees in Camp Gibraltar returned to Europe, or immigrated to America after the war. Most of the Gibraltars and the Maltese went back to their island/rock, and most of the Jews went to different places in South America. A very few stayed. This is a pattern that would replay itself over and over again with the Caribbean refugees.

The Jews who settled on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago have a very different story from the Jews who settled in Jamaica, and Sosua. In many ways the community of Jews in Trinidad mirror the Japanese in Hawaii and California. Many of the Jews in Trinidad came before the mass evacuations from Europe. A great deal came between 1936 and 1939, but even more were the descendants of people who had immigrated in the late 1800s, or during the Spanish Inquisition. Many of these people were citizens of Trinidad, and they had built up a flourishing local culture, however, when the war started, many of the Jews from Europe were detained in an internment camp, much like the Japanese-Americans.

And if internment wasn't bad enough, the Jews were interned with many of the same people who wanted them dead. The Trinidadian government had decided that all 'enemy aliens' were to be interned, which was not just the Jews, but also German sailors and U boat crews.

Thankfully, the Jewish internees were released after a few months. However, they were still kept under strict rules. They couldn't leave their homes between 8:00 pm and 6:00 am, they couldn't own motor vehicles or bicycles, and they had to report to the police station at least once a day. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the Jews left.

However, following the end of the war Trinidad retained a much larger percentage of their Jewish Emigres than other islands. Admittedly, there was already a sizable population of Jews on the island when the immigrants started to come, but many Europeans stayed as well. At it's peak, the Jewish population in Trinidad and Tobago numbered around 700. Today there's less than 50 Jews on the islands. Most of the Jews who left the islands left because of a lack of educational and career opportunities, not because of culture shock, making the Trinidadian Jews unique among all the Jews that came to the Caribbean.

*There actually weren't that many refugees from Malta. The Maltese government had sent a representative over to see if they liked Jamaica, and they didn't. The Maltese weren't too impressed with the climate, and they were even less impressed with the idea of letting people of color have authority over them. This unfortunate bit of racism kept a majority of Maltese out of Jamaica.

**Sources disagree on the exact number of Jews who took refuge in Jamaica. Miriam Stanton, who lived at the camp, reported 3,000 Dutch Jews, but other sources place the number as being much lower.

***The Jews who were already in Jamaica were Sephardic Jews, and the newcomers were Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews originate from Spain and the Mediterranean area, while Ashkenazi Jews come from Northern Europe. Many of the Sephardic Jews in Jamaica took refugee there following the Spanish Inquisition (I realize that that may be a bit unexpected). 

This article brought in part to you by my very best friend M. Kellogg. She's a genius in all things having to do with Judaism, and this article would not have been possible without her.

Sources

Lost Caribbean Refuge

Lost Caribbean Paradise

Refuge in the Virgin Islands
The Sosua Project
The Jews of Sosua Saved By Reverse Discrimination
Sosua Virtual Museum (this is a really cool source, and it's managed by people who actually live in Sosua, take a little time to click around!)
Dominican Republic as a Haven for Jewish Refugees
Jamaica's Role in Sheltering Jewish Refugees
The Exodus From Jamaica
Gibraltar Camp
Polish Jewish Refugees in Jamaica Seek Permanent Haven Elsewhere
Trinidad and Tobago--The Jewish Community
Exiled to Paradise
Stecher Dies--Last Escapee from WWII Nazis

General Frost vs. Europe

When making a 'Top Ten Places Not to Invade In The Winter' list, Russia inevitably comes in number one (with Greenland and Canada following close after.). There were multiple occasions in history, when European leaders thought it might be a good idea to poke the Russian Bear with a stick. Some, like the Mongols, were successful, most, like pretty much everyone else, were not.

St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow.

Russia's pretty big, which makes it difficult to defend and control. Russia's long history of internal conflicts (more recently in Georgia and Chechnya) prove this. However, Russia has a secret weapon-General Frost.

You've probably guessed this, but General Frost is a poetic name for winter. Russia is far north, and has some pretty gnarly cold spells. We're talking spit freezing before it hits the sidewalk cold. The winter snows cover everything, and the country more or less goes into hibernation. Nothing grows, and game isn't always plentiful. If you haven't prepared, you're dead. 

So, despite its size, Russia is pretty well defended. They have reasonable armies (and more recently nuclear weapons) to help the in the summer, and unlivable conditions in the winter. However, that hasn't stopped some people from trying to invade Russia in the winter.

Charles XII

The Swedes were the first (as far as I can dig up) to try invading Russia in the winter. They were the first, so they get a bit of a pass. Sweden itself is northerly, and it's not like they had someone else's mistakes to learn from.

Although, quite frankly, even if there had been someone else's failed attempts to learn from, it is doubtful that that would have stopped Charles XII, the young, brash, and ridiculously successful King of Sweden. Charles was a genius military commander, and dangerous risk taker. He frequently dove into battles with forces that vastly outnumbered his own, and usually came out victorious. Charles was That Kid. You know, that kid in school who claimed to never study for a test, and then got full marks. Charles was the monarchy equivalent of that kid, and, quite frankly, the rest of Europe was a little sick of it.


See, Sweden at the time was something of a world power. They'd taken most of the land around the Baltic sea. The only things they didn't own was Denmark and Norway (Norway belonged to Denmark). This worried the Danes, as well as the newly minted Czar of Russia, Peter the Great. So, to combat the Swedish, the Danes, Russians, Poles and Saxons (part of modern Germany) all decided to gang up on Charles. They were banking on his youth and inexperience (Charles was only 18 at the time). Bad decision. Charles was not only something of a genius, but he had good advisers, ad he listened to them. When the Danes came for Sweden, Charles snck into Denmark, and took them down. Then he turned his eyes to Poland, and successfully installed a King favorable to Sweden. Done with Poland, he turned his eyes to Russia.

Charles had had great success with small armies that attacked quickly and unexpected. He adopted the same strategy in Russia. In 1700 he attacked Narva, a town in Modern Estonia. He was outnumbered about 3 to 1, and it was the middle of a blizzard. Remarkably, but also unsurprisingly, Charles won.

Peter the Great, czar of Russia at the time
of Charles XII's invasion.

The Swedes continued across Russia like this, but the Russians, as per the usual, implemented a scorched earth policy, leaving nothing for the Swedes to eat. The Russians then cut off the Swede's supply lines. Despite all this, the war wasn't going too badly for the Swedes, until General Frost stepped in.

1709 was one of the coldest winters of that era. 2,000 Swedish soldiers died from cold in a single night. Northern Russia wasn't a good place to hang out, so, against the council of his advisers, Charles decided to winter with his buddy Mazeppa in the Ukraine.  

Ivan Mazeppa was a former Russian ally who wanted to get the Russians out of Ukraine. He told Charles of his plan to start an Ukranian rebellion, and invited Charles to invade. Never one to pass up new territory, Charles agreed.

Thing was, most of Charles' forces were very ill, and couldn't fight. Charles himself had been wounded. Additionally, the Russians found out about the planned uprising, and moved to quash it before it even began. So when Charles arrived in Ukraine he had much fewer Ukrainian troops than expected, and only the skeleton of an army.

Realizing the fight was already lost, Charles escaped with 2,000 of his sickest men, leaving the rest of the army behind. The Russians caught up with them, thoroughly defeating the 16,000 Swedish forces left behind.

Next up to the plate was the young French protegee, Napoleon. The year was 1812, and Napoleon had had it with Russia. Russia was supposed to be his ally. They were buds. They were part of the continental system, they had no reason to fight each other, and they promised each other that neither of them would trade with England. It was a good arrangement. For France.

What Napoleon failed to realize was that this arrangement wasn't helping out Russia very much. Russia needed trade with the English to bolster its economy, and France had done the unthinkable--they helped Poland.

Napoleon Bonaparte, making sure
his ribs are still there.

Well, Napoleon couldn't handle that sort of betrayal, not from an ally, so he invaded Russia to teach Czar Alexander a lesson. He gathered some 450,000 men (give or take), the largest military force ever assembled in Europe to that point (probably). With his typical modesty, Napoleon named his forces the 'Grande Armee'

Now, I have absolutely zero historical evidence to back this up, but I imagine Czar Alexander's reaction to Napoleon's invasion was something like 'lol wut?', and he slipped on his shades, and watched the French armies confidently walk into his territory, just knowing that they wouldn't last a year in Russia.

As I mentioned, there's no historical evidence, but it's a pretty amusing picture.

What is fact, though, is that the Russians put up very little resistance to the French at first. Instead of standing to fight, they let the French take the towns of Vilna, Vitesbk, and Smolensk, virtually without a fight. Instead of fighting the Russians torched the cities and all surrounding crops, leaving the French to die of starvation, exposure, and sporadic attacks. This worked very well. Tens of thousands of soldiers died of starvation, exhaustion, and dehydration. Many more deserted.

The Russians didn't stand and fight until the French were just 75 miles from Moscow. The French and Russians were fairly evenly matched, and each suffered heavy losses. The Russians, however, decided not to stick around. They set fire to Moscow, all of Moscow's food storage, and left, leaving only a large amount of hard liquor behind.

Czar Alexander I

So, while they French may have been merrily drunk, they were also starving. Napoleon had decided to stay in Moscow for a while, and wait for Czar Alexander to make peace, but Czar Alexander decided to sit back, and let winter take care of things. Eventually, Napoleon threw in the towel, and decided to head back to France, just as winter was approaching.


Now, this went as well as you might expect, which is to say, poorly. The Russians were determined that the French stay out, so they drove the remnants of the Grand Armee along the same route they came in on. If the food options had been picked over before, they were completely nonexistant on the way back. The Russians kept the French from ranging further afield to find further sustenance. Added to that was the cold. Many men froze overnight. Dead bodies were stacked up against walls to provide insulation, and tales were told of men slitting open their horses, and climbing inside them to keep warm. The French died in massive waves, and only 20,000 of them returned home to France.

Then there's Hitler. As I'm sure you well know, nothing good ever starts with Hitler, and this is no different. Stalin was in charge of Russia at the time, and both of these repugnant knaves should have studied their history. Had they done so, many lives would have been saved, because:

1. Hitler would have known better than to invade Russia. 
2. Stalin wouldn't have insisted that no city be surrendered, and instead adopted the scorched earth tactics that has kept Russia independent for so many generations.

Adolf Hitler, looking unfriendly as usual.

Instead, Hitler and the Germans were the ones scorching the earth, and the citizens of the USSR were being attacked by not only the Germans, but their own government. Stalin ordered that deserters and suspected traitors be shot, not to mention his abhorrent policy of relocating ethnic minorities to Siberia.

Having conquered France, Hitler needed to get on with the rest of the world. Conquering the UK would be a difficult, and not entirely worthwhile endeavor, so he decided to go after his land and resource rich neighbor, the USSR. This was the start of 'Operation Barbarossa'. 

Germany and the USSR had signed a non-aggression pact two years before, but Hitler still considered communism a major threat to the German Empire he wanted to build. Because Nazi Germany didn't do anything by halves, Hitler planned to completely wipe out the communist population of the USSR, not just the Jews, Romani, Homosexuals, and political dissenters that he usually went after.  

Hitler started by forming a group of elite troops called the Einsatzgruppen. He sent these soldiers into Russia to murder Jewish males, communist leaders, and anyone who looked like they might start a resistance, en masse. He then gathered a force of more than three million soldiers, and stormed Russia's frontier. While Allied powers had repeatedly warned Stalin about a German invasion, Stalin had refused to listen, and was caught by 'surprise'. 

Unlike his predecessors, Stalin refused to give ground. He ordered that no city surrender or be abandoned. As a result of that three million USSR soldiers were taken captive in Kiev. Instead of evacuating the countryside, and torching all the crops, villagers were ordered to stay put, and anyone suspected of disloyalty or cowardice was shot. Because of this the Germans were able to subsist off the crops of the small Russian villages, and were able to penetrate further into USSR territory.

Josef Stalin, committer of mass genocide
and luxurious mustache model.

Looking through the lens of history, Hitler has done far better than expected. However, according to Hitler and company, the invasion of the USSR was taking far longer than expected. Hitler had expected the invasion of Russia to go like the invasion of France, quick and relatively painless. But the Russians held out far longer than he'd expected. By the time the Germans were ready to head to Moscow, winter wasn't too far away.

And, in a move that will surely have you banging your head against the nearest flat surface, the Germans did not have any winter supplies. They hadn't expected to stay the winter, and so they were completely unprepared. They started to slowly retreat, but before they could get out of Russia entirely, war had flared up again in the west with the invasion of Normandy. 

Unlike previous invasions, the failure of Operation Barbarossa was not a decisive win for the Russians. Had another front not opened up Hitler would have most likely started the invasion up again in the spring. The German soldiers were able to subsist off the food they found in the countryside, all they lacked was warm clothing. Had Stalin stuck to the proven tactics of his forerunners, and set everything on fire, WWII may have gone much differently.

Sources

National Interest

History Net

Encyclopedia Britannica
History.com
BBC History
BBC History-Operation Barbarossa
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
History.com