KURT KLEIN: [reading] "We hope you got our postcard of November 12th, and our excitement has subsided somewhat since then. We trust you can do something for us over there in the near future which would serve to calm down Mother especially. We're sure you'll let us hear something about that soon. Regards to all the relatives and many to you straight from the heart. Your Father."
I received this in Buffalo, New York, about a week after it happened, and it was mailed from my little home town, Waldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany. It was the time my parents' home was invaded by former classmates of mine who vandalized the place, smashed everything, terrorized my parents and imprisoned my father. It was Kristallnacht.
NARRATOR: November 9, 1938 - Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the night the campaign against the German Jews turned violent. Across Germany synagogues burned. Jewish businesses, homes destroyed, thousands arrested and sent off to prison camps -- the shattering climax of Nazi policies designed to force Jews out of Germany. As Jewish life crumbled, tens of thousands -- including Kurt Klein's parents, Ludwig and Alice -- would look toward America as a haven of safety, and the question becomes, "What would America do?"
In June of 1937, more than a year before KristalInacht, Kurt Klein at age 17 had his first glimpse of America.
KURT KLEIN: The first thing that I remember seeing when I got close to the American shore was a huge billboard advertising Wrigley's Chewing Gum. Somehow that seemed free and easy and seemed to typify the new country. After that, the Statue of Liberty came into view and I had a sense that I was personally secure. I had done what the Nazis wanted me to do, namely, leave Germany.
NARRATOR: Born in Waldorf, a small village near the Rhine, 13-year-old Kurt Klein celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1933, the year Franklin Roosevelt took office in America and Hitler came to power in Germany, the year the Nazis began their assault to purify German culture.
KURT KLEIN: Each year after Hitler came to power, the situation grew worse for the Jews in Germany. By 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremburg laws which effectively stripped many Jews of their jobs and their positions within schools and universities, and generally restricted our lives.
NARRATOR: The campaign to force Jews out of Germany gathered momentum. Jews were expelled from professions, their property and savings confiscated, Jewishbusinesses boycotted.
KURT KLEIN: My family knew there was no future for us in Germany, and we began to make preparations. We children would leave first for the U.S. and our parents would follow. My sister, who was a nurse, could no longer practice her nursing because she was Jewish and was, in fact, the first one who left in 1936. That made it possible for me also to follow her in 1937 and by 1938 my brother had also arrived in the U.S. We hoped at that point, of course, to establish ourselves to the point of where we could support our parents and also have them come over.
NARRATOR: But the sudden violence of Kristallnacht ignited a new urgency for the Kleins, for all German Jews. In Washington, the response was immediate.
1st NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Reporters rushed the news to the nation and the President's statement is read by Felix Belair of The New York Times.
FELIX BELAIR, "The New York Times": [reading] "The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States.
I myself could scarcely believe such things could occur in a 20th-century civilization."
NARRATOR: Newspapers played up the story and American Jews organized large rallies.
RALLY SPEAKER: We say to the President, "You spoke alone among the world leaders. That was good."
ARRATOR: It was hoped Washington would do more than condemn the Nazis. In Germany, thousands of Jews looked to America to save them.
HERBERT KATZKI, Refugee Relief Worker: Overnight the American consulate and other consulates were inundated by people who felt, "Well, now it's time, really, we ought to do something about making plans for leaving the country."
They didn't expect that they would have to leave the day after tomorrow, but certainly they wanted to have a form of insurance in their pocket so that when the time came to leave that they might be able to do so.
KURT KLEIN: In December of 1938, my father writes, "Unfortunately, things aren't moving that fast, even if you have the best of papers. To obtain an appointment to apply for a visa, you have to receive a waiting number. At present, the American consulate in Stuttgart is being besieged to such an extent that the waiting number for Mother and me indicates there are 22,344 cases ahead of us."
That meant that possibly two and a half years would elapse before it would be my parents' turn, unless the authorities would ease or change the immigration procedures.
NARRATOR: The Kleins and tens of thousands of others were now facing America's formidable system of immigration laws.
2nd NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: The dream of almost every one of Hitler's victims is to emigrate to the United States.
NARRATOR: In 1938 while Americans held dear the traditional image of the nation as a haven for the oppressed, they were also secure knowing the doors would not be too widely opened. U.S. immigration laws reflected blatant bias and prejudice. From 1924 on, yearly quotas allowed four times as many people from Britain and Ireland as from all of eastern and southern Europe. In the midst of the Depression, many Americans called for further restricting immigration, even to extremes.
REP. MARTIN DIES: Our unemployment problem was transferred to the United States from foreign lands, and if we had refused admission to the 16,500,000 foreign-born in our midst, there would be no serious unemployment problem to harass us.
NARRATOR: To gain entry, each newcomer needed an American sponsor willing to sign an affidavit of financial support promising the immigrant would not become a public charge. K
URT KLEIN: It wasn't easy to get affidavits of support for my parents because, of course, in those days we had no money. We were willing to take any jobs, work on several jobs day or night as my sister did, and I worked as a dishwasher aside from my regular job just to be able to make some extra money that would help us with our parents. N
ARRATOR: "Keep refugees out, they'll take American jobs," was the argument, but often the real concerns went deeper than employment.
HARVEY STOEHR, Patriotic Order Sons of America: The main thing that we thought of was not economics. It's a moral responsibility, as we call it, of America to have America for Americans. And anything that disrupts that by having masses of immigration disrupts the whole idea of the nation.
NARRATOR: This was the threat for many Americans -- the growing number of refugees, including tens of thousands of children. From time to time, a handful squeezed through the quota system. In 1939, a bill proposed special sanctuary for 20,000 children outside the quota. The Wagner-Rogers Bill would become a litmus test for how Americans really felt about Jews.
VIOLA BERNARD, M.D., Non-Sectarian Committee for Refugee Children: The need for this kind of legislation was desperately pressing. The children being smuggled out of Austria and Germany were already separated from their parents, which was traumatic enough, and it was essential to get them into individual homes and a sense of wellbeing.
NARRATOR: But there was immediate opposition to the bill.
HARVEY STOEHR: The law that we had from 1924 that we thought was good. Why don't we just support the written law and not seek for ways to circumnavigate around it and-- just to benefit certain large groups of immigrants.
Dr. VIOLA BERNARD: They were afraid, for example, of the argument that Europe was trying to dump all its Jews on the United States and anti-Semitism certainly was a powerful ingredient, frequently covert instead of overt.
NARRATOR: More than 100 patriotic societies insisted, "Charity begins at home." A cousin of the President, Laura Delano, commented, "Twenty thousand charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults." The President was aware that the bill was not politically popular and, pressed for his opinion, he elected to take no action. The bill eventually died in committee. A year later, legislation making it possible to admit children from war-torn England passed with enthusiasm. In Germany, by early 1939, Ludwig and Alice Klein were forced to abandon their home and move to one small room over a stable. The campaign against the 200,000 Jews waiting to exit the Reich was intensifying.