The Gate Was Never Really Opened |
I have been reading Susanne Heim’s Die Abschottung der Welt. Als Juden vor verschlossenen Grenzen standen 1933–1945, and what stays with me is not merely the horror of the past. It is the structure that repeats.
Heim does not paint a simple world of killers and rescuers. She reveals a world that perfected the art of refusal without raised voices: visas, quotas, financial guarantees, consular discretion, endless administrative delay, and the elegant language of “sovereign responsibility.” Jews were first driven out and robbed of everything. Then they were rejected because they arrived with too little. First plunder, then discomfort at the sight of the plundered. That was not chaos. It was policy.
The Évian Conference of 1938 remains the clearest emblem. Thirty-two nations expressed sympathy for Jewish refugees. Almost none opened their gates. Democratic states, no less than authoritarian ones, chose restriction and national interest when rescue threatened to become costly or unpopular. International refugee policy functioned less as a system of salvation than as an architecture of distance: keep the unwanted far from one’s own borders, one’s own electorate, one’s own conscience.
That is why Yom Ha’atzmaut cannot be read only as a celebration of statehood. It must also stand as a verdict on the world that left Jews dependent on other people’s........