Rejected Refugees’ Emotional Scars
In 1934, when she was 15, my mother, Liesel Weil, was finally forced to leave the excellent Gymnasium (high school) in Frankfurt where she was an assiduous and popular student. This compulsory end to her education had been in sight for a while, as the school officials chose to ignore Nazi decrees forbidding Jews to attend school for as long as they dared. She took a job in a factory—mind-deadening work that she dreaded and that did not leave her enough energy to keep studying on her own. After some six months of this miserable work, she was able to take a break and journey to England to visit her Aunt Daisy.
Tired and chilled after a long journey on a ferry, she found herself facing a British customs official who took one look at her passport and declared: “Your visa is for two weeks. If you stay here a second longer, we’ll put you in a deportation camp and ship you right back where you came from.”