Agata Cibulska was counting the days until she could return home. “People think that in America, gold and money are on the street. But this is not a land of plenty and you are exploited just like the Pharaohs exploited the Jews. This is not a land of gold, but a new land where you have to work 12 hours a day for a meagre wage.”
Agata, a Polish immigrant, was not dazzled by the glittering lights of the big cities, but distracted by the noise, the stinking air of New York and the tall chimneys that smoked day and night. There were no nightingales and starlings to usher her into a new day. She had long since ceased to dream of riches, and she no longer sent any money home, even though her parents had written to her every time asking for it. Together, she and her husband earned just enough to pay the bills and live very modestly. “I had suffered and given up enough. Now I want to eat bread spread with butter every morning. Those who send money home live like animals.”
Agata was one of the participants in the biggest wave of emigrants in human history. Between 1846 and 1940, between 55 and 58 million Europeans migrated to the Americas. The peak of this exodus was in the first decade of the 20th century, when most people left Austria-Hungary. Within a few years, as many as two million inhabitants of the Dual Monarchy left for America. The migratory wave also spread to other countries, with almost 50 million people moving from India and southern China to south-east Asia and the Pacific islands.
The emigration of so many people from Eastern Europe has in some places almost completely emptied villages. When Agatha emigrated, migration across the ocean was something new. Before steamships started crossing it, the journey to America took almost a month and a half and was very dangerous. Agatha left home in 1890, when steamships were already crossing the floodplain and the railways were working well. At the turn of the century, it was possible to get from Hamburg to New York by boat in just seven days, and at a reasonable price, so the insatiable need for cheap labour in America almost decimated transatlantic transport in a short space of time.
Europe has been hit hard by population loss. Landlords struggled to find seasonal labour, recruiting offices were deserted, and family members who remained were despairing that they would never see their relatives again. The negative consequences of mass migration meant that in some places the authorities wanted to prevent it through police action and the prosecution of agencies that organised the departures. Newspapers were eager to publish any negative news from America, such as the story of Adam Loboda, who left his native Galicia with fourteen other boys from his village at the age of sixteen. In Massachusetts, he found work in a mill, but there he worked for USD 2.77 a week and a 64-hour day. When asked in an interview in 1938 if he regretted leaving, he explained that he did not, but that he knew many people who regretted going into the unknown.
Many who came to America had a plan to work themselves into a frenzy for three or four years, earn some money, then return home, pay off their debts and live a peaceful life. If they had succeeded, they would have gone back to America and worked there for a few more years. And indeed, many people returned to America four or five times before they died somewhere.
After World War I and the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, the new states hoped to “filter” their populations and retain only their own nationals. Emigration policy thus became a tool of state nationalism. By sending out “surplus” populations, states sought to address national, religious and racial issues. The biggest victims of this were European Jews. In the winter of 1889, journalists from Austria-Hungary rushed to the sleepy Galician town of Wadowice, 50 kilometres from Kraków, to cover the criminal trial of 65 travel agents from the nearby town of Auschwitz. Here was the crossroads of the Prussian, Russian and Austrian railways, and from here thousands of Eastern Europeans continued their journey to Hamburg or Bremen, where ships for America awaited them. The accused were accused of misleading citizens into leaving their homes and emigrating with untrue promises of America as an Eldorado, and then doing hard labour in factories, mines and brothels in America. The trial was in fact supposed to be a referendum on the country’s emigration policy.
Emigration was becoming a real problem for Austria-Hungary, with 7% to 8% of the population leaving the country between 1876 and 1910. Most people left the impoverished provinces of Galicia, Bukovina and eastern Hungary. In addition, around 300,000 inhabitants of the monarchy worked seasonally in the fields of Prussia and Saxony each year, while others worked for French farmers or in British factories.
The mass evictions were so sudden and unexpected that it was as if a “fever” had swept through whole villages. Towns became ghost towns, and only old people lived in the villages. Everyone believed that America was the promised land, paradise on earth. The authorities were worried because the loss of a million working hands was a sad admission of underdevelopment, poverty and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Wadowice trial was one of the most sensational, and the authorities wanted to stem the tide of emigration, but it was not the only one. In 1905 and 1906, as many as 2 000 agents involved in emigration were convicted or fined in Hungary.
Crossing the Big Puddle
But going to America required perseverance, especially to leave Russia legally, because you had to pay 17 000 roubles for a passport. The special “emigrant” passport, while free, no longer allowed return to the homeland. Many people therefore chose to cross the border illegally. But there were other obstacles to leaving. The German authorities set up sanitary stations along the Russo-German border to disinfect would-be emigrants and remove lice infestations. Those who were weak and sick were simply sent back to Russia.
Hapag and NDL (North German Lloyd), the main German shipping companies to America, were in charge of overseeing these stations, where the masses of emigrants were not treated with any tenderness. “They took away our belongings, separated us from our friends and children, smeared our bodies with some slippery stuff and ran hot water on us from the showers without warning. We had to pick our own clothes from a big pile and they kept shouting at us to hurry up.”
In 1901, Hapag even built a camp near Hamburg, where emigrants, mainly Russians, Austrians and Hungarians, waited to be transported to America, in order to isolate the Eastern European emigrants from the German population. But even if emigrants passed a medical examination in Europe, they could still be turned away in America.
On Ellis Island, off New York, there was a reception centre that could turn away anyone who was sick, suspicious, unsuitable, immoral or, in the opinion of officials, unable to support themselves, which was, of course, a very stretchable category. Any unmarried or pregnant woman could fall into it. Anyone who was healthy but did not weigh enough was also rejected. The figures say that 1.7 per cent of emigrants were turned away at Ellis Island, which is low, but these examinations were often very embarrassing for all emigrants.
The failed emigrant stories were quite similar and typical for those times. Thus, Josef Krochmal was persuaded by his friends to go to America. The agent convinced him that he did not need a passport and that he should just postpone his military service for two years and leave for a brighter future. When he did so, he was arrested by the police on a train in Krakow and sent home. The agent advised him to try again, and so the police arrested him a second time. The agent then sold him a forged Russian passport and told him to pass himself off as a Pole from Tsarist Russia. He managed to get to Germany and then to America, but the American authorities rejected him on medical grounds and sent him back home, where the police arrested him a third time.
For the people of Austria-Hungary, therefore, going to America was not easy. Before 1867, few were allowed to emigrate, but afterwards there were no formal restrictions, except for those who still had to do military service. But the reality was different. Each district had its own rules restricting emigration. Gendarmes roamed the trains looking for men fit for military service. They also did not allow single women to continue their journey, suspecting them of prostitution or of being victims of trafficking. The shipping companies were not allowed to employ emigration agents or to take on board passengers with ‘prepaid’ tickets sent to them by relatives in America.
In 1907, Emperor Franz Joseph issued a decree allowing all those who had evaded their military obligation by leaving America to return without penalty, but almost no one returned. The Hungarian government, however, passed even stricter legislation, which did not allow men who had already reached the age of 17 to emigrate at all, without written permission from the Ministry of the Interior. Violators faced two months’ imprisonment and a hefty fine.
But even if the emigrants arrived happily in America, they did not have their milk and honey. Among other things, they were without health and accident insurance. New immigrants were surprised by the poor health of those who had been in America for a long time when they arrived. Morris Kavitzky, who had emigrated from Russia in 1914, was frightened on arrival to see the poor physical condition of the Jews on the East Side of New York. “I have never seen so many people with false teeth and glasses. People work hard here, twice as hard as they do at home. I was very surprised by that. Where is the prosperity we were told about?”
But in 1939, the same Kavitzky said he had never regretted leaving his homeland. “I came to America to settle here and I brought my family. No matter what, I never deviated from my plan and I am proud of it.”
In 1913, the Austrian government wanted to introduce a new emigration law to guarantee the labour rights of its citizens abroad, while at the same time restricting emigration. It was prevented from being implemented by the World War, but later formed the basis for bilateral agreements between countries.
Another important social institution that emerged with the emigration reform was the emigrant boarding houses in major cities. They were sponsored by Austria in order to have direct control over its own citizens. The Austro-Hungarian Society of New York established the first such boarding house for Austrian citizens on Greenwich Street as early as 1897, and it quickly became the first home for thousands of new emigrants. In 1911, it housed 2,164 people and distributed 16,342 free lunches. But despite its noble intentions, the boarding house came to disrepute due to corruption, quarrels and scandals, untidy sanitation and poor food.
Similar, but private, boarding houses existed before the state took over. They were run by long-time expatriates and became a centre for socialising. Louis Adamič recalled his stay in one of them as follows: “Here it was possible to forget one’s own sadness and fatigue from long hours, to meet friends, to buy a boat ticket and send money home, to play poker, to eat, to dance, to write letters, to find a woman.”
The owners of these guesthouses would meet the newcomers at the port, call them, speak in their language and grab their luggage, and since the newcomers did not speak English, they would follow them blindly. The Austrian and American authorities wanted to prevent such client-hunting, so they allowed charitable organisations to set up their own emigrant boarding houses on Ellis Island, where the emigrants were given first-aid, legal advice and employment. However, these boarding houses had to comply with US law, which was not always easy.
Anti-immigration measures
After the end of the First World War, the new countries of Eastern Europe, which had emerged after the collapse of the old ones, were convinced that emigration was a sign of the backwardness and indifference of the people towards the Habsburg monarchy. Therefore, no one in the newly created countries would be forced to go across the pond to ensure their survival. In 1923, Leopold Caro declared: “We should not allow emigration from our country, especially not permanent emigration. Before the Great War, masses of peasants were forced to emigrate to other countries of the world and offer their labour to foreign countries. This is a great shame for our nation.”
The civilising status of Eastern European immigrants became a greater concern after World War I, when the American Quota Act of 1924 drastically restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in order to protect America’s “racial health”. As a result, only 3,078 Czechoslovaks were allowed to immigrate to America that year, which was only one tenth of the applications for resettlement. The Polish quota was slightly higher, but still only 25,800. The situation was similar with other countries. Even family reunification was difficult.
In 1927, Esther Reisfeld applied for an entry visa for herself and her two daughters at the American Consulate in Warsaw. Her husband had been in America for several years and was also an American citizen. She was informed that, in order to obtain a visa, she would have to pass an intelligence test, during which she was asked such stupid questions as this: What do we need more: a fly or a butterfly? She was refused a visa and the reason given was that she was ‘mentally retarded’.
Other Polish women, mostly of Jewish descent, had to answer similar questions: ‘How many feathers does a goose have? How many legs does an American cat have? How many stars are in the sky?” Such obstacles diverted the flow of emigration from Eastern Europe to France, which had lost a large population in the First World War and was in urgent need of new immigrants.
Despite such US restrictions, some Eastern European countries have themselves restricted emigration. For example, if a Czech wanted to work in France, he or she had to provide the authorities with a baptismal and birth certificate, a certificate of residence, a certificate of good moral character, a certificate of no tax debt, a certificate of military service, a marriage certificate and an application for a passport. However, if he worked in one of Czechoslovakia’s important export industries, his application could be refused.
This has made illegal emigration all the more flourishing, but often with bad results. Juraj Marcin from the newly-formed Yugoslavia paid a lot of dinars for a passport in the name of Jan Stajer through a local innkeeper. He boarded a ship in Hamburg to sail to New York. When it arrived at its destination, he realised that he was in Rio de Janeiro.
The Great Depression further increased xenophobia in America, with Americans accusing immigrants of taking their jobs. This meant even more barriers to immigration, and slowly some emigrants began to return home to their own countries. “If I’m poor and jobless, it’s better to be that way in my home country than in America.” Many emigrants who had worked for years in America were among the first to be fired.
“Sometimes I think my life is worth nothing. I’m not educated and I’ve done simple jobs. There is little money, just enough to pay the rent and eat. I can’t say that I live a normal life. Look at my wife and children. They are malnourished and thin. Do you mind if I ever turn to alcohol for that? Of course, I often do not have money for that either. Sometimes my friends buy it for me, and only then do I forget how unhappy I am.”
For many emigrants during the Great Depression, the American dream was an illusion. So they had no choice but to return to Europe. This is what Jožef Kmet’s father did, and he took his son home with him. “It was during the Depression and my father was afraid that he would no longer be able to support his family in America. He thought it would be easier for him at home. Here we have a small farm, a garden where we can grow vegetables and fields where we can catch some rabbits.”
In November 1938, Count Jerzy Potocki, Polish Ambassador to America, visited the US State Department. The subject of the conversation was the “Jewish question”. The situation of the Jews in Germany and Austria was becoming more and more acute, and it was necessary to agree with the Nazis how to facilitate their emigration to America.
The Polish government wondered why the Nazis were being rewarded for their brutal persecution policies, when it itself wanted to get rid of “surplus” Jews. The emigration of Jews from Poland seemed necessary and could not be ignored. The Americans tried to reassure Potocki: “The solution of the Jewish question is very important for all of us. It will have to be solved by our generation, because future generations will not be as tolerant, objective and liberal as we are.” The line between emigration and emigration, between humanity and ethnic cleansing, was very blurred in 1938 and 1939.
For Isaiah Bowman, a close associate of US President Roosevelt, the global crisis was too good an opportunity not to seize. He saw in the mass movements of people before and during the war an opportunity to strategically rebalance the world’s population and redesign national demographics. International and local humanitarian organisations dealing with refugees were to be the right instruments to put such ideas into practice.
For Bowman and Roosevelt, the solution to the “Jewish problem” was clear. Organised emigration of Eastern European Jews, preferably to Africa or South America, offered an alternative to chaotic deportations and flight. These scenarios were not invented by Western diplomats and imposed on Eastern Europe, but gradually emerged in the field of Eastern Europe, which wanted to solve its social, political and demographic problems in this way.
The Jewish question?
Jews, socialists and other “enemies” of the Third Reich were desperate for ways to escape Hitler’s rule. After Kristallnacht, 33,000 Jews fled Germany and Austria in 1938 alone, and 77,000 more the following year. After the annexation of Austria, 6,000 people waited outside the American consulate in Vienna every day to go to America. Consular officials worked from morning till night to determine which applicants would be admitted to the permitted emigration quota of 1,413.
With the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the conquest of Poland in 1939, millions of Jews fell into Nazi clutches. They had minimal chance of escaping abroad. But even before that, some had suffered tragic fates. Otto Eisler, an engineer born in Opava, Silesia, worked in Austria and, after the German annexation, sought asylum in Czechoslovakia. His application was refused on the grounds that he “did not speak the language of the country and his behaviour and appearance made it doubtful that he would be a welcome guest in our country”. The Czech consul in Vienna added: “He is a typical characterless Jewish merchant.”
Many refugees are trapped at borders between countries. When the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland in November 1938, Josef Metzger and his family were pushed across the border into what remained of Czechoslovakia. They were all Czech citizens and could prove it, but because their 13-year-old daughter did not yet have a passport, the border authorities forced them back into the Sudetenland. After a few hours, the Germans sent them back across the border to the Czechoslovak side. This happened several more times until they were imprisoned in a room at the border station and the German and Czechoslovak border authorities began to argue about whose family the Metzger family actually belonged to.
Those Jews who did manage to get to Czechoslovakia were met with an unfriendly reception. The Prague police suggested that they should be interned because “public security” required it. Similar things happened on the Hungarian-Slovak border. Slovakia deported 2 000 Jews to Hungary, but Hungary refused to accept them, so they lived for weeks in makeshift tents along the border, where the temperature dropped well below zero.
But the authorities in Eastern European countries were not the only ones to treat unwanted refugees harshly. The cruise ship St. Louis, carrying 937 refugees from occupied Europe, wandered for weeks at sea, refused permission to disembark in either Cuban or American ports. In the end, she had to return to Europe, and special security patrols prevented refugees from jumping into the sea and trying to swim ashore during the voyage.
Europe has tried to solve the “Jewish question” in its own way. Western governments, Jewish organisations and the Nazis were unanimous in their view that large numbers of Jews should be forced to emigrate from Europe. But they also wanted to leave Europe during the inter-war period. By the end of the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews expressed their desire to emigrate from Europe because of the discrimination they had experienced at home.
Where to go was more a pragmatic question than a political one. Some wanted to go to America, others to Palestine, in the belief that it would be easier for those who stayed if they left Europe. But America, France and England had already imposed emigration quotas by then. Although President Roosevelt publicly expressed sympathy for the unfortunate refugees, he did nothing to increase emigration quotas. A 1938 Gallup poll showed that as many as 77% of Americans opposed allowing more refugees to settle in America. Nevertheless, between 1933 and 1944, almost a quarter of a million Jewish refugees managed to come to America, thanks largely to the efforts of a number of NGOs.
In France, it all depended on who was in power. In 1938, Edouard Daladier’s government cracked down on immigration, arguing that Jewish refugees were mainly communists. The British were more practical and made decisions based on whether the refugee was useful to the British economy. In 1938, at the initiative of President Roosevelt, an international refugee conference was convened in Evian, France. They set up the IGCR, the International Refugee Committee, which was given a mandate to negotiate directly with the Nazis on the terms of ‘orderly emigration’. Later, a plan to resettle Jewish refugees in Madagascar collapsed, and their settlement in British Guiana was also floated.
Even the Dominican dictator Trujillo was prepared to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees, because he wanted to replace the 15 000 Haitians he had massacred the year before with white settlers.
The kinship network played an important role in the emigrants’ stories. Seymore Zryga’s father emigrated from Poland and moved to America in 1927, and the family joined him in 1935. Seymore was 10 years old at the time. He never knew exactly why his father emigrated from Poland, but he knew it saved his life. It later came to light that his father had a sister who lived in Brooklyn and she talked him into coming to America. Those who did not have such family ties often looked in the New York telephone directory for names similar to their own and asked for help when they arrived. They were looking for someone – who had to be an American citizen, of course – to provide financial support.
For example, Isidor Poper, an importer of surgical instruments, issued 32 such certificates to Jews from Czechoslovakia and Austria, who were complete strangers to him. Without such a certificate, it was difficult to come to America, since the immigration quota for Czechoslovak citizens was already a little higher at that time, but still only 2700 persons per year. The queue was therefore as long as three or four years. Those who did not get in the queue probably ended up in Auschwitz. “What is a man without this paper?” wrote Joseph Roth in 1937, “I tell you, it is less than paper without a man.”
To understand why those in charge did so little to save Jewish refugees, even when they faced imminent death, we need to know what the resettlement logic of countries was in the 1930s. Long before the Nazis occupied large parts of Eastern Europe, many officials in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, as well as part of the population, had hoped and expected the Jews to be expelled from their countries. It was therefore no surprise that there was so little organised protest when Hitler fulfilled these wishes.
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Displaced persons
In April 1945, when the Red Army had already tightened its ring around Berlin, the Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle in Lorraine had other things to worry about. The Nazi occupation of Alsace and Lorraine had left human traces. Thousands of Polish forced labourers were brought here to work the land of the dispossessed French. To his disappointment, the Poles refused to work any more after the Germans had left. Polish women preferred to house American soldiers from the nearby army base, because they were paid much better for less work. The prefect threatened to put the Poles in camps if they refused to work, but this did not help. What is more, the Poles were in no hurry to go home and he had the impression that they wanted to stay in France.
After the end of World War II, millions of displaced people, mostly from Eastern Europe, wandered the roads. In the immediate aftermath of the war, thousands of Jewish refugees also returned to their homes, looking for surviving relatives and demanding their property back. They were not always well received. Neighbours who took their apartments, houses, furniture and business premises often had no intention of returning them to their former owners.
In June 1946, 40 Jews were killed and many wounded by Poles in Kielce, triggering a new exodus of Jews. Other Western Europeans refused to return home for personal or political reasons. Some collaborated with the Nazis and feared the consequences. If a Soviet soldier was captured by the Germans, this was already considered treason in his home country. Others feared the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and still others simply wanted to move somewhere else and start a new life. Millions of ethnic Germans from East Prussia and Silesia also fled to Germany before the arrival of the Red Army, three million Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia and seven million from Poland, and many from Yugoslavia and Hungary.
While the Potsdam Agreement between the Great Powers stipulated that these expulsions should be carried out properly and humanely, in practice, of course, things looked different. Ethnic Germans were rounded up in camps, stripped of everything of value and forced to wear a ribbon on their sleeve to prove that they were German.
The desire to rebuild the ruined lands was the first priority in both Western and Eastern Europe. The Western Allies began to address this issue as early as 1943, when they set up UNRA to provide immediate assistance to refugees and to send them home as soon as possible. In 1947, it was replaced by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), which focused on the resettlement of refugees who were unable or unwilling to return to their home countries.
Many aid workers, as well as government officials, were convinced that former forced labourers and camp inmates were permanently disabled by the trauma they had suffered during the war and therefore refused to work and do the bidding of the new authorities.
In 1948, social workers accompanied a group of displaced people to their new homeland of Canada. They tactlessly asked the traumatised passengers to work on the ship to pay for their transport. Out of a hundred passengers, only twelve volunteered to work. In the British zone of occupied Germany, work had been compulsory for displaced persons since the beginning of 1947, and those who refused to work lost all benefits. However, since forced labour has been discredited as a Nazi invention, humanitarian organisations have now tried to portray it as a therapeutic measure. Only the French government, especially its military commander in the German occupation zone, Pierre Koenig, saw the Eastern European displaced persons as a labour resource that could be used to build France.
But over time, refugees in refugee camps began to fight each other for visas, jobs and new homes. This competition was particularly fierce in post-war Austria, which was in fact the heart of the emerging Cold War.
In 1951, the Bremen newspaper Ost-West-Kurier described the humiliating treatment of what it called “post-war prisoners of war”. These were not former prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps or forced labourers, but ethnic Germans, beneficiaries of the benefits of the thousand-year Reich, i.e. Volksdeutsche.
In 1945, Austria defended itself by offering shelter to 1,432,000 refugees, both displaced persons and German Volksdeutsche expelled from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. While the Allies recognised Austria’s status as “the first victim of Hitler’s aggression”, they also stressed that Austria could not escape responsibility for its collaboration on the side of Hitler’s Germany. The former claim, however, only freed Austria from the legal and financial obligations towards the Volksdeutsche, which the Allies subsequently burdened Germany with.
Many Volksdeutsche rejected this title and called themselves “Old Austrians”, trying to emphasise the continuity between the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the Second Austrian Republic. Austria was therefore obliged to take care of them. At the same time, 300,000 Volksdeutsche from the former Austrian Empire settled in Austria. With the consolidation of the communist regimes in the Eastern European countries, many more refugees from Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia came to Austria; thus, since January 1948, 164 000 refugees, awkwardly called “non-German-speaking foreigners”, have been accommodated in Austria under the protection of the IRO. These were the ones Austria wanted to get rid of at all costs, because “they do not work and are only a burden for Austria”.
In 1947, the IRO also introduced a sharp distinction between refugees, who enjoyed its protection, and economic emigrants. Even genuine refugees found it increasingly difficult to get asylum in Austria and were usually forced to do low-paid work. The Yugoslav Committee in Salzburg complained that Yugoslav refugees arriving in the British occupation zone were first thrown into prison for two to three months before they were even questioned. They were then assigned to Austrian peasants, where they had to work for miserable wages for up to eighteen hours a day. According to the Yugoslav Committee, this was a continuation of the Nazi practice of forced labour.
No refugees were returned to Yugoslavia until 1955, when the British still held power in Austria. That year, however, Austria was granted independence and, after a short procedure, the new authorities changed this practice and started sending refugees back to Yugoslavia. “There are enough skilled workers in Austria for this work,” the Interior Ministry said in a circular. Between August and December this year, 169 out of 325 refugees were returned to Yugoslavia.
In 1956, refugees in Austria again became a major political issue, as 180 000 Hungarians fled to the country after a failed revolt against the Hungarian communist regime. Austria initially welcomed them with open arms, but slowly they began to be treated with the same stereotypes as other refugees from Eastern Europe. The Austrian authorities soon made it clear that their hospitality was time-limited.
Closed borders
On 11 September 1951, 100 passengers travelled by regional train from the Czech town of Cheb to the border town of Aš, 25 kilometres away. Many of them were railway workers and students. As the train approached the border town, everyone expected it to start braking. But to their general astonishment, it just accelerated, skidded past the heavily fortified border dividing Czechoslovakia from West Germany and stopped in the American occupation zone of Germany. It was clear to all that this was not the fault of a technical fault or brake failure, but a deliberate act.
The Czechoslovak newspapers, of course, wrote that the train had been hijacked by terrorists equipped with money and weapons by the Americans, and that the passengers had been bribed to stay in West Germany with promises of good jobs and housing and money. Twenty-seven Czechoslovak passengers immediately decided not to return home, and the rest were taken back to Czechoslovakia by train two days later.
But the ban on emigration from Czechoslovakia was not an invention of the Communist government. This decision was taken by a democratically elected government as early as 1945, three years before the Communists took power in the country, because of a shortage of labour in the country, and was quickly followed by other Eastern European governments.
The only exception was East Germany. Its border with West Germany was impossible to control, although it was heavily defended in 1952. But East Berlin still allowed almost unimpeded passage into the western part of the city. Between 1945 and August 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built, 3.5 million East Germans moved to the West. In doing so, the Eastern Bloc countries faithfully followed Soviet practice, where restrictions on travel abroad can be traced back to the time of Peter the Great, when emigration was technically illegal. After a brief liberalisation during the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, the Soviet regime closed its borders tightly in 1922.
However, Eastern European countries strongly supported the repatriation of former emigrants, as it gave legitimacy to the new regimes. They have had little success in doing so. This was particularly the case in Poland, which lost 16% of its population during the war, and millions of Germans left or had to leave.
In 1945, the Western Allies allowed 1.6 million Poles to return to Poland, but thousands refused, and those who did were a security risk for the new authorities, who could have been exposed to different ideas while in the West. Nothing was left of the sweet promises of a good life in their old homeland.
Liberalisation of relocations
After Stalin’s death, the borders of the Eastern bloc became more porous in the following years. In principle, it was possible to travel to other socialist countries, sometimes even to Western countries. In 1957, more than 1.5 million Czechs and Slovaks travelled to socialist countries, but only 261 000 to Western countries, although the authorities were aware that some would not return.
The most famous illegal escape route to the west at that time was via Yugoslavia to Austria or Italy, where the borders were crossable with a bit of luck. In 1963, Yugoslavia also legalised and regulated the departure of its citizens to work abroad. In 1971, experts estimated that some 775,000 Yugoslav citizens were working abroad, and holidays abroad became common practice.
Emigration from Eastern European countries to the West was still limited to certain ethnic groups that the authorities wanted to get rid of. Thus, between 1960 and 1980, 50,000 ethnic Germans emigrated legally from Poland to the West. In 1968, during the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia briefly opened its borders and almost 700 000 of its citizens travelled west. Then the borders were hermetically sealed again.
In those years, it was tennis star Martina Navratilova who attracted the most attention. In 1975, although she lost to American Chris Evert in the semi-finals of the US Open, the newspapers only covered her because she walked straight off the tennis court and into the emigration office, declaring that she would not return home. She took this step because the authorities at home warned her that she had become too “Americanised” and threatened to stop her playing in tennis tournaments abroad.
In the same year, the Eastern European countries signed the Helsinki Charter, which allowed for a thaw in relations between the blocs, and included a provision to facilitate travel, tourism and family reunification.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastern European countries introduced some reforms to make travelling abroad easier. In Hungary, over-55s had more such rights than younger people, but it was still only possible to travel to the West once a year. Travel between the socialist countries was also still controlled, and it was not until 1972 that Poles and East Germans could travel between the two countries without visas.
After 1960, the East German authorities began to allow their citizens to emigrate to the West, especially dissidents, if West Germany paid a high enough fee. Romania had also long been involved in this trade, allowing Jews to emigrate to the West in return for large sums of money. A Jewish businessman in London, Henry Jacober, was a middleman there between people in the West and the Romanian secret service, and received between $4,000 and $6,000 for each deal.
When the Israeli secret service found out about it, it decided to get involved. Now, instead of money, Romanians often demanded agricultural products, including livestock and the setting up of chicken farms. The price of such emigrations also rose, with a price of up to $50,000 per person, depending on age, education, family status and political orientation. In the mid-1970s, the Romanian dictator Ceausescu boasted: “Our best exports are Jews, Germans and oil.”
Thus, the Romanians managed to “sell” 235,000 Jews and 200,000 Germans. West Germany paid as much as $54 million for the Germans to leave Romania. Following the example of Romania, Poland also encouraged the departure of Jews and ethnic Germans from their country under the slogan of “family reunification”. Many of these emigrants were Silesian, Masurian and Pomeranian by birth, but after the end of the war they ‘suddenly’ discovered that they had German roots.
Before 1980, emigrants from Eastern Bloc countries were automatically granted refuge in America. But in 1980, the US Congress passed the Refugee Act, which made refugees of those who reasonably suspected that they would be persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality or membership of various organisations. Most migrants from Europe did not qualify for these provisions and were merely economic migrants. And so those who were already in America suddenly became illegal and were forced to live as such. They did not dare to go out, they stayed only at home, they did not speak to their colleagues at work, they used the social security cards of those who were in the country legally, and they did not drive cars. While the Reagan administration did not deport them back to Europe, it did not automatically renew their residence permits.
With Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power and his perestroika, a mass exodus of Eastern Europeans to the West began. Some went just to shop, but many wanted to stay.
In May 1989, the Hungarian government started to remove the electric fence on the border with Austria. Many East Germans took advantage of this and went on a “holiday” to Hungary, camped outside the West German embassy and demanded protection. Finally, the Hungarian government announced that it would not prevent anyone from crossing the Hungarian-Austrian border. Within three days, 22,000 East Germans took advantage of this opportunity.
The last major wave of emigration to the West came with the break-up of Yugoslavia. The tragedies it caused are well known to us.
