It was my father who wrote this:
"I am indeed sorry for the inconvenience
caused in this instance, but due to my
wife's health, which is being greatly
impaired by the absence of our children,
I am forced to cause you this
inconvenience." Each file tells a story.
It's not every day that we get to make
breakthrough connections for people, but
for a collection like this, which has more
than 20,000 stories of
individuals and families, making this
available to people like Susan and her
family, it's been deeply gratifying to be
able to fill in gaps in individuals' and
family stories that they may not have
known. An enormous collection of case
files that the Museum has that were from
the American Friends Service Committee,
which is a Quaker relief organization. They
have traditionally tried to help
individuals as humans in need, regardless
of race, regardless of religion,
regardless of ethnic background. For
example, the Quakers were among the very
early abolitionist leaders in the
anti-slavery movement in the United States. During
World War I, in 1917, to respond to the
enormous need of especially children and
other vulnerable populations away from
the front lines of the war, the American
Quakers founded a group called the
American Friends Service Committee or
AFSC. That work continued up into the
1930s. After Kristallnacht, with the
sudden flood of people needing
assistance in fleeing Nazi Germany, the
AFSC created a Refugee Division. That's
the division that was tasked with
helping individuals and families. The
case files that we have are the files
created by that division. A few years ago,
I came across a file for the Hilsenrath
children in France. They had been in a
children's home in France after having
been separated from their parents.
Their parents had made it to the United
States separate from their children, and
they were desperate to try to reunite.
When I entered the names into Google, I
was surprised to see that little Susi
Hilsenrath is actually Susan
Warsinger, who is one of the volunteers here
at the Museum. I get this envelope in the
mail and I'm so excited because I
started to read some of these papers and
things that I just didn't even remember,
letters my father wrote that I never
knew that existed. I was born in Bad
Kreuznach, Germany, in 1929. As soon as Hitler
came into power, my father lost his store,
I couldn't go to public school, and then
it was Kristallnacht. So that's when my
parents decided we needed to get out, so
then my father found a lady who was
smuggling children into France, and we
went to a little town called Broût-Vernet,
and then I found out that my parents had
come to the United States and that they
had gotten in touch with whoever they
could possibly get in touch with to try
and find us. For me as an individual, I
had this vague idea of how I got over
here, but here I had individual records
exactly how I got to come to the United
States.
Taken together this collection sheds
light on the refugee experience and on
the experiences of those trying to help
refugees in ways that no other
collection that we have can quite do.
I think it's going to be a record for
my children and grandchildren, and
not only for mine, but for all kinds of
generations. Untill fairly recently we've
never had even a list of the names, and
so now that we have that list and it's
being made available through our website,
I'm hoping to be able to make many more
connections with people like Susan, that
other people can help to answer
questions that they may have wondered
about for many years