Research Catalog

Title

And the world closed its doors : the story of one family abandoned to the Holocaust / David Clay Large.

Author

Large, David Clay.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Large, David Clay.

Description

xxiii, 278 p., [8] p. of plates : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

• "David Clay Large tells the story of how the Schohls were caught in a tightening noose, unable to escape although all odds seemed to be in their favor. In the United States, relatives petitioned tirelessly on their behalf and Max was offered a teaching position at an American college, but the U.S. was determined to keep its quota of Jewish immigrants low throughout the period of anti-Semitic persecutions in Germany and Europe.
• "Max Schohl was a Renaissance man. German first, Jewish second, he was classically educated, spoke several languages, and played the violin. He became a decorate officer during the First World War, and later a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist and community leader. When the Nazis came to power he believed that his record would spare him and that the townsfolk, many of whom had eaten at his charitable soup kitchen and knew his largesse as an employer, would defend him.
• "Much has been written about the West's unwillingness to rescue European Jews from the hands of the Nazis; Large gives a graphic personal dimension to the restrictionist immigration policies and indifferent consuls that denied so many Jews a safe haven during the Holocaust.
• In the pre-war years, America did not fill even its restrictive quota for German immigrants, for which most of the applicants were Jewish. Subsequent efforts to emigrate to Britain, then Chile and Brazil, also failed, despite money raised by American relatives, because by that time, 1939-40, doors around the world were slamming shut to the desperate Jewish refugees from Europe.
• Max's youngest daughter, Kathe Schohl-Wells, today a widow living in Charleston, West Virginia, has given Large access to her family's records, a unique collection of letters and other documents chronicling the experiences of the Schohls and those who tried to bring them to England and America."--BOOK JACKET.
• The Schohls found brief sanctuary in Yugoslavia, but after the Nazi occupation Max was sent to Auchwitz and his wife and daughters were sent to hard labor, spared the camp that soon claimed Max because his wife was a convert to Judaism and his daughters were only of half Jewish blood.".
• Yet on Kristallnacht his own neighbors and employees ransacked his home. Schohl, robbed of his factory, turned his full energies to saving himself and his family through emigration, but no country would take them.".

Subjects

• Flörsheim (Germany) > Biography
• Schohl family
• Jews > Germany > Flörsheim > Biography
• Schohl, Max, 1884-1943 > Correspondence
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) > Germany > Flörsheim

ISBN

0465038085

LCCN

2002153720

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries