“Unlikely Allies: The Shocking Nazi Mission to Rescue a Jewish Leader that Shook History”
“We had to go through various military checkpoints. with one person who was our escort. We marveled at his way of handling things…On the train … if a conductor came over, [Bloch] would handle the conversation. The difficulty was making sure nobody kicked us out of the compartment we were in. I remember one episode when an angry German officer came up to us and said, ‘Why are these Jews sitting in the compartment when the officers are in the corridor?’ Bloch had to do quite a bit of explaining, and he did.”
In Berlin, Schneerson and his entourage were taken to the city’s Jüdische Gemeinde or Jewish Community Centre, where they met with the Latvian ambassador to Germany and received their Latvian visas. The next day Bloch escorted the group to the Latvian border, which they crossed without incident. On December 17, Mordecai Rubin wrote to Rabbi Jacobsen in New York that “Rabbi and family arrived well Riga.”
But while the Rebbe and his followers expected swift passage to the United States, they soon ran into political resistance. Breckenridge Long, head of the Visa Section of the State Department, was a rabid anti-semite and refused to grant the group immigration visas. Once again, however, the American Chabad community intervened, with Max Rhoade invoking a 1921 exception to the quota for European immigrants allowing passage to religious ministers with active congregations in the country. In January 1940, Long reluctantly issued the visas, and Rebbe Schneerson left Riga along with his mother Sarah, his wife Chana, his son Berka, his grandson Shemaryahu, and his followers Chaim Hodakov and Nissan Mindel and their families. They left just in time; in October 1939, under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union forced Latvia to accept the stationing of 30,000 Red Army troops in their territory, who swiftly deposed and murdered many government officials and installed a puppet government headed by Augusts Kirhensteins. In August 1940, the country was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic while in June 1941 it was invaded by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Barbarossa.
Post Comment