History > WW2 > 1939-1945

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Antisemitism, Adolf Hitler, Nazi era,

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Fort Ontario refugee camp, USA    1944-1946

Yugoslavian partisan and art student Edith Semjen,

one of 1,000 Jewish refugees

rescued from wartime Nazi-occupied Europe

now living at Fort Ontario,

former army camp converted to a safe haven

by Pres. Roosevelt.

Location: Oswego, NY, US

Date taken: 1944

Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt

Life Images

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/9cd098b62104c4c8.html

Fort Ontario Refugee Camp,

Oswego, New York

After the Nazis came to power

in Germany in 1933,

German and Austrian Jews

tried in growing numbers

to flee persecution.

While about 250,000

would eventually come to the U.S.

between 1933 and 1945,

immigration officials applied

regulations so rigidly,

especially after the outbreak

of World War II in 1939,

that quotas for Germany and Austria

were rarely filled.

One of the few European Jews

who managed to escape the Holocaust

and come to the United States

during the war was Richard Arvay.
 

An Austrian,

Arvay was a writer and filmmaker

in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Having already suffered

persecution by the Nazis,

he fled to Paris

when Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

After Germany

occupied France in 1940,

Arvay was sent to a concentration camp

for a year.

He then lived in Southern France,

and in 1943, he escaped to Italy

when he was threatened

with deportation  to Poland.

In 1944, he was one

of about 1,000 refugees picked

to come to America to live

in the newly established

Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter

in Oswego, New York.

The camp had been established

by President Roosevelt

to respond to political pressures

to do more to help Jews in Europe

and to sidestep immigration regulations.

Initially,

refugees had to promise

to return to Europe

when the war was over,

but President Truman permitted

the refugees to stay

in the United States.

Richard Arvay

lived at Fort Ontario

for about 18 months.

Part of his file consists

of his completed form

stating that he did not want

to return to Europe.

To his typed answers,

Avray added a handwritten explanation:

“I would also find it impossible

to live in a country

where all my family have been killed.”

Arvay brought his wife to America,

settled in New York City,

and worked as a writer.

In 1951

he became a U.S. citizen.

He died in 1970.

http://docsteach.org/documents/6341035/detail

https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/
refugees-registering-fort-ontario

https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography?content=fort_ontario

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/
nyregion/oswego-jewish-refugees-world-war-two.html

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20th century > WW2 (1939-1945)

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Antisemitism, Adolf Hitler, Nazi era,

Holocaust / Shoah,

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