Tropical Zion

The drama that unfolds before us in these two volumes opens at Evian Les Bains, France, in July 1938, at the international conference convened by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to find havens of refuge for the multitude of victims of Nazi persecution in the enlarged Third Reich. There, in the presence of representatives of 31 other nations, who each declared why they could not do anything on behalf of the refugees, Virgilio Trujillo Molina, the brother of the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Leonid Trujillo, announced that the Dominican Republic would open its doors to many persecuted Jews and non-Jews. The following month, at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee created by the Evian Conference, Trujillo’s representative mentioned one hundred thousand as the number of refugees that his country was willing to accept. Trujillo immediately gained the applause of all the governments, first and foremost that of President Roosevelt, who had convened the conference without any intention of announcing a change in the United States’ extremely restrictive immigration policy or of using U.S. influence with the Latin American or other nations. Since then, the Dominican Republic and the settlement there of Jewish refugees has been an outstanding chapter in the history of rescue attempts during the Holocaust.In the first part of Tropical Zion, Allen Wells puts all the actors on the stage: Tru-jillo, FDR, and his President’s Advisory Committee for Political Refugees, as well as James Rosenberg and Dr. Joseph Rosen, who, on behalf of the American Joint Distribution Committee and with its funds, established the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) in December 1939. On January 30, 1940, at Ciudad Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s capital (known until 1938 as Santo Domingo), in a ceremony most lavishly organized by Trujillo, the formal agreement between the Dominican Republic and DORSA was signed. Trujillo donated 26,000 acres of his recently acquired property at Sosúa, on the northern shore of the republic, to establish the agricultural colony. DORSA’s emissaries in Europe started to select the pioneers who were to set the foundations for the large project. Its initial phase was planned to include two hundred families.But the war did not wait. When the founding ceremony at Ciudad Trujillo took place, the war in Western Europe was still the “Phony War”; one hundred days later, on May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg and soon broke into France. Wells analyzes in detail the U.S. State Department’s change of attitudes regarding the immigration of refugees into the western hemisphere, and particularly to the Dominican Republic. The suspicion that German spies had infiltrated the refugees brought about the prohibition against selecting candidates for Sosúa from among those who needed it most — the persecuted Jews in the Third Reich and in the occupied countries. Selection was thus limited to refugees who had found asylum in Switzerland, in Italy (until June 1940 when it entered the war), and in Great Britain. Only a few candidates were selected in France during or soon after the debacle.Some 750 Jews arrived at the Dominican Republic throughout the years of the war; fewer than half of them were settlers. The others lived at Sosúa as supported temporary residents. Wells’s father was one of the first settlers. The Dominican Republic saved his life, and his grateful son now provides us with this thorough, serious, and extremely well-documented and well-researched study. It describes in detail the many efforts to establish partly collective “homesteads,” the initial difficulties and later success of developing a dairy farming industry, the vicissitudes of the administration of the colony and its conflicts with the settlers, and so on. The author does not stop at the end of the war. He traces the development of the colony throughout the two generations that followed, down to the time when it ceased to exist and became the private property of some of the descendants of the old-timers.Wells also researched the relationship between DORSA’s leaders and Trujillo many years after the war, when the dictator, still in power, had lost his importance and fallen out of grace with the American administration. A few months before his assassination in May 1961, they still felt indebted to Trujillo and were ready to help him, as they had actually done 20 years earlier. Or, with Sosúa even then under his grip, were they, as in the beginning, hostages in his hands? The author does not ponder this possibility.Two shortcomings should be mentioned. Wells does not draw the reader’s attention sufficiently to the coincidences in time between Sosúa’s story and the history of the Holocaust and of the Joint Distribution Committee’s rescue efforts. He thus fails to question the investment of some three million dollars in colonizing so few people at a time when that money was so much needed in Europe. He also overemphasizes the alleged opposition of the “Zionists” to Sosúa, without showing any original Zionist documents to sustain this claim.Nevertheless, the author fulfills the claim of the subtitle of his book: he provides us the story of Trujillo, the United States, and the Jews in America and at Sosúa. His research reads very well and is an important contribution to the history of American Jewry, the history of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, and the history of the Dominican Republic.Marion Kaplan’s book is also the product of thorough academic study. Its publisher, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, produced a comprehensive exhibition on Sosúa, DORSA, and the Dominican Republic, with Kaplan as its researcher. Her purpose was “to write a history of the settlers from the grassroots, observing their expectations upon arrival and their adjustment to a new country . . . their achievements and their problems,” and “to trace how and why the Sosúa settlement came together and grew, and then, how and why most of its Jewish population eventually left” (p. 4). The period covered in this volume is limited to the years of War World II. It is based, like Allen Wells’s book, on the Joint Distribution Committee’s and Hias-Hicem’s archives in New York, as well as on the remnants of the documentation that could be still found at Sosúa in the possession of the local Museo Judio. Kaplan also benefited from the testimony of the surviving ex-settlers. The numerous illustrations taken from many and various collections provide the reader with important insights to the written material. The book is printed on paper of an extremely high quality, as befits a volume that accompanied the exhibition and serves as the enduring evidence of its creation.The establishment of DORSA and Sosúa were intended to accomplish the rescue of many persecuted refugees, but this main aim was achieved for only a handful of people who were selected for the settlement during May and early June 1940 in France and in Italy. The other settlers were brought to the Dominican Republic from their safe havens in Switzerland and in Great Britain. As far as the Germans were concerned, the possibility of rescue through emigration from the Third Reich and from the occupied countries in Western Europe existed until October 1941. But both studies indicate that due to the U.S. State Department’s attitudes, these opportunities were not taken. The two volumes contain, as a result, the story of the failure of the Intergovernmental Committee and its American sponsor to save the persecuted Jews, while using DORSA and Trujillo’s Dominican Republic as a facade for their inaction. The two studies also provide us the full story of a group of middle-class German and Austrian Jews who were challenged to become farmers in an underdeveloped Caribbean nation ruled by a dictator

Archaeology · Immigration · Judaism · Nazism · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Settlement (finance) · The Holocaust · Cuban History and Society · History · Law