Out of the Depths: Responding to the Boat People
Weiner, Jon
OUT OF THE DEPTHS RESPONDING TO THE BOAT PEOPLE All boats descend from the Ark, and all hopes. And sometimes, tragedies prevent tragedies. In this twentieth century, once— but no longer—a...
...Some were afraid that a conspicuous display of power, such as a boycott, would only serve to confirm the Nazi idee fixe, the international Jewish conspiracy...
...And there are 160,000, less conspicuous, camped inland...
...They say the Chinese are an alien element in the society, an element responsible for black marketeering, racketeering, prostitution...
...Let us build rooms into our souls, as refuge for the fears and hopes of men, women and children...
...Once again the countries of the world turn to the United Nations...
...We hope this will encourage the Malay government to provide the refugees with temporary asylum...
...A sponsor provides temporary housing for the refugee and his family on their arrival: one puts them up in one's , home, or locates an apartment with I simple furnishings...
...The People's Republic of China alone has resettled more than 250,000...
...Individuals, havurot, congregations, organizations—all can sponsor refugee families...
...Thailand and Malaysia know that no one in the world supports them in brutality against the helpless...
...The monthly ration is now down to 13 kilos of rice per person—which is pathetically small...
...Hong Kong, on the Asian mainland, is the first target for the Vietnamese refugees...
...If we had agreed to take some, at least, then we could perhaps have pressured other countries into taking some too...
...The refugees there are mostly "land people," whose mass flight through the jungle attracted little attention outside the limits of their own frightened world...
...This time we cannot say that we were not forewarned, or that we could not dream such savagery could be released by sovereign states...
...Only connect—and see what miracles follow...
...Estimates vary wildly, and there is really no way to peg precise numbers, but there may be as many as half a million refugees in Southeast Asia today—in areas ill-equipped, after decades of war, famine and turbulence, to feed and shelter their own...
...The South China Sea lies between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific...
...Let us not re-enact their error...
...I'm ashamed to say that one half of the Roman Catholic Church is m Latin America, but only one nation has come forward with a pledge, Argentina, for 4,500...
...the Malays, for the most part, control the government while the Chinese are influential in the economy...
...We are preparing to welcome another 168,000 refugees in the coming year...
...And yet no nation in the international community offered to take in those Jews...
...The freedom to emigrate is a fundamental human right...
...But Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Philadelphia federations have'all responded strongly to the challenge of the new refugees, and HIAS is placing other Indochinese in many smaller communities, through individuals who want to sponsor families, or through relatives who are already settled and want to bring in more...
...History will not forget us if we succeed...
...In July, 6,000 boat people were headed off as they approached Malay soil, and were towed back out to sea...
...From those who preferred to flee, the government or its agents extorted $2,000 in gold or solid cash—per person...
...A poor man's alternative to the gas chambers is the open sea...
...In Malaysia, they are 37% of the population, and they get along fine...
...Let me ask what is perhaps a Jewish question, a Jewish concern...
...So I'm not ready to excuse humanity yet...
...According to an official in Washington's Refugee Program Office, administered by former Iowa Senator Dick Clark, Vietnam applied the brakes immediately when word of the Geneva Conference reached Hanoi...
...Today, the evidence is overwhelming: the conference was convened merely to create the illusion of dealing with the refugee question (when you don't want to act, call a conference...
...One of the better holding centers, Ubon, 600 miles northeast of Bangkok, had once been a U.S...
...Instead, we speak the inaudible dialect of the human heart...
...Two nations said they had reached the saturation point for Jewish refugees...
...But no one really knows who is in charge of the government of Hanoi, or how much control it has over events in the streets, events in the hills...
...When national interests conflict and collide, no institution convenes us with greater moral authority...
...For the first time in history," says Gaynor Jacobson, executive vice president of HIAS, "we have the opportunity to be tangibly helpful to a people in trouble like ours...
...We now have 220,000 Vietnamese in this country...
...And anti-Semitism was strong in America during that decade—very strong...
...But the common ground it provides us deserves our thanks and our praise...
...Sixty thousand boat people are squatting on the beaches of Malaysia...
...One could conclude from the world response that the world really has learned something in the last 40 years...
...It really is time for the Congress to reexamine the quota system that we have...
...There had been 200 physicians, and they went out to various countries...
...Through the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the Jewish community in Los Angeles has pledged to resettle 300 refugee families this year, and hopes to go higher...
...Many in government—and some Jews— feared that the adoption of a mass of Jews from Germany would encourage other nations—Poland, Roumania—to declare their Jews surplus citizens and boot them off to America...
...But everyone sat together that Friday night, and everyone sang together...
...Somehow they're getting some food...
...And we did after all promise them reparations and economic development to the tune of $3.2 billion (that was Richard Nixon back in 1973...
...No one knows what Peking is going to do...
...The governors and the members of Congress in our delegation—as well as outstanding religious and civic leaders throughout America—are a symbol of the enduring commitment of President Carter and the American people...
...The civilized world hid in the cloak of legalisms...
...j Sponsorship is a human relationship, not a legal commitment...
...And if they are not moved by autumn the monsoons will come and drown them...
...It wasn't a book, it was a piece of paper...
...But though many . have waited in the Thai camps on the Mekong River for four years now, only about one in ten has been resettled in this country...
...We're caught in a geopolitical puzzle...
...The Vietnamese today have no real constituent group in this country to lobby for them...
...In virtually all the world's languages, desperate new expressions have been born...
...Now, at last, at least, many Jewish leaders are saying, we have a chance to do something...
...According to the State Department, there are perhaps 170,000 Vietnamese refugees—the ethnic Chinese, the boat people—squatting on beaches and rocky islands...
...Who else would have taken in vast numbers of refugees but the United States...
...And there's some trading...
...When problems touch the whole human community, no other forum provides a vision more encompassing...
...Is the reaction to the overseas Chinese likely to become an epidemic throughout Southeast Asia...
...After these acute problems, we have to agonize over our long-range options, and they're all bad...
...That includes the funds for the 130,000 that we took out under the Saigon collapse, and the financing of their resettlement here...
...HIAS' expertise at resettlement is known and respected throughout the world—lamentably, it has had some practice in the century of its existence, a century of refugees...
...I read the bio of each...
...Instead, we gasp for metaphors...
...Later, the Danu-bian steamer Struma, as leaky and dangerous a ship as any in the South China Sea, was towed out of the harbor at Istanbul...
...Very suave, speaks excellent English, says that everything is going to be all right, but his promises haven't checked out...
...We woke up because we saw people falling off of boats...
...And the agency is prepared to go higher...
...But let's not overpraise ourselves...
...If each nation at Evian had agreed on that day to take in 17,000 Jews at once, every Jew in the Reich could have been saved...
...And HIAS, responding to the request of the State Department, has doubled its resettlement efforts for this year...
...First of all, start with a liaison office in Vietnam—that's a baby step—and take out all of the people who are legally entitled to come to the U.S...
...One observer at those proceedings—moved by the contrast between the setting and the task—said this: "This poor people and these great principles seem so far away...
...They were a tribal people, calling themselves the Hmongs, and they lived and farmed in the highlands of Laos...
...These people have minimum safety now...
...Well, except this, though: These people had to put themselves in fear of death, they had to have 250,000 people drown, before we woke up...
...But that can't be the whole story...
...And if we, or the other world powers, give massive loans and grants to the Vietnamese government, for fertilizer factories, for power plants, for industry, will it not seem that we are rewarding them for their brutality...
...The United States is committed, doing its share, just as we have done for generations...
...The Big Bear has a million troops on the Manchurian border and troops along the coast, along the border of Thailand and Cambodia, and a growing presence in Vietnam...
...Let us have a breathing spell during which all of us—governments, voluntary agencies, and private individuals alike— mobilize our generosity and relieve the human misery...
...Only connect...
...Reading the black book of this history, reading the story of the St...
...the U.S...
...That afternoon," says Rabbi Jacobs, "I sat, and my hands trembled as I read about the five families we would take in...
...Let us not be the heirs to their shame...
...At least 75,000 Cambodians have fled war and famine by jungle routes across the long border into Thailand...
...History will not forgive us if we fail...
...Unless this conference gives birth to new commitments, and not simply new metaphors, we will inherit the scorn of Evian...
...Often, in recent years, the rabbi of Tarzana had found himself on the other side of the fence from half his congregation, and the fence between them a high one...
...On a fact-finding tour of Southeast Asia, Father Robert Drinan, Congressman from Massachusetts (see box) met with a Mr...
...all of the middle management of the mines were Chinese, and they left, so that the one thing Hanoi had to export became unex-portable...
...If they had gone away quietly, with a few lost, we wouldn't be this alarmed...
...As one American observer wrote, "It is heartbreaking to think of the...
...In effect, they see themselves victimized for their generosity...
...Yes, all boats descend from the Ark...
...The meeting should have been diplomatically fruitful, but it was shrouded with questions and doubts...
...The refugee himself is already provided with a non-interest loan to cover these expenses...
...The camps are rife with malaria, and could be swept away by an epidemic of typhoid or cholera...
...And let us urge the government of Vietnam to honor the inalienable human rights at the core of every civilized society...
...At stake at Evian were both human lives—and the decency and self-respect of the civilized world...
...No one knew," Father Drinan told moment, "what kind of authority he has with the higher-ups, or what kind of control over the lower-downs...
...Most important, of course, the j sponsor provides a source of per...
...And people don't know that this year there will be more immigrants totally than in any year since 1921: 480,000...
...ammunition depot...
...Other water is brought in on little boats, and food, too...
...I don't think we should sit in judgment about who's to blame...
...The Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) is cooperating to the hilt with HIAS— especially on the West Coast...
...Secretary-General, some tragedies defy the imagination...
...On October 2, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police, and a staunch Nazi, rounded up thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany...
...the foreign minister of Singapore said last summer...
...But there is another secret war, a war now forty years old, which has come with each passing year ever closer to our consciousness, trespassing in our dreams...
...If it comes to that, we have to take them all, because we are the richest country, and too deeply implicated not to help...
...And these people had to dramatize their cause by doing that...
...In those years, our immigration policy remained highly restrictive...
...And the world pledged to contribute $127 million to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, of which the U.S...
...China is telling us, "Please, don't try to help Vietnam, because the Big Bear will siphon it off...
...Last July, the U.S...
...and the rabbi knew that Tarzana had come with him, that this one issue had crossed all partisan lines...
...Can we register in our minds such an appalling defeat...
...is moving, but it's a big, cumbersome organization...
...One of them was named Grynszpan, and he happened to have a son in Paris, a 17 year old boy...
...The "new economic zones" were little better than rural labor camps, camps in isolated jungle, in areas previously considered uninhabitable, and furnished by the government with inadequate resources...
...The boat people fleeing Vietnam have scattered throughout the Sea, and clustered, notably, in Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia...
...But the crisis is still so vast, so dangerous and complex, that it dwarfs our efforts at rescue and resettlement...
...Yet if no one helps, Vietnam may just limp along, disastrously poor, near starvation, with millions malnourished...
...Conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva...
...In June of '79 the Thais forced 40,000 Khmer refugees back into Cambodia at gunpoint...
...It is worth taking a moment to recall those years...
...Each one of us who pledges sponsorship, who pledges to help one family, gives hope to countless ! others...
...These Chinese immigrants have increased Hong Kong's population four percent in the last one and a half years...
...As a new country struggling for a place in the commonwealth of nations, Vietnam is anxious about world opinion...
...The countries bordering on Germany were forced to be aware early of Berlin's paranoid racial policies...
...There had been 200,000 land people, refugees, for four years, and we didn't do anything about it...
...In the summer of '39, exactly 40 years before the events of this past summer, several boatloads of Jews went from port to port, and were denied entry everywhere: the S.S...
...Just after the fall of Saigon, thousands of the Hmong tribesmen began fleeing Laos to camps on the Mekong River, and 4,000 more continue to arrive in the camps each month...
...British authorities there, says Henry Feingold, refused to grant Palestinian entrance certificates to the passengers "on the grounds that there were spies among them...
...Drinan is one of many in the U.S...
...was the preeminent receiver of refugees...
...Most of the dock workers of Haiphong harbor left, leaving the harbor in bankruptcy...
...World opinion and reproach forced Thailand to halt these expulsions and to build (and enlarge) temporary camps...
...Days later, the "final solution to the Jewish problem" was conceived, and soon the night closed in...
...Temple Judea of Tarzana has taken in 11 Vietnamese families since that Friday night, and sparked action throughout the temples of Southern California...
...The eery silence which the Americans and the British maintained through all those years, within sight of the death camps, may have furthered the Nazi extermination more than we guess...
...But even among Jews, opinion was divided, the various organizations quarrelled, little good was effected...
...but the world rescue efforts continue to focus elsewhere—on Malaysia, for example, where the situation is less stable...
...On December 13, 1942, Josef Goebbels could write in his diary, "At bottom, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff...
...As the delegates left Evian, Hitler again goaded "the other world" for "oozing sympathy for the poor, tormented people, but remaining hard and obdurate when it comes to helping them...
...This is not the Evian response at all...
...If America did not consider changing its quotas, could one expect the French, or the British, or the Belgians...
...Though the Hong Kong government continues to maintain the boat people, the expense is unpopular— increasingly unpopular—with the people of the island...
...Often Jewish proposals for an open door to immigrants moved Congress to pass still more restrictive immigration policies...
...HIAS agents cope with transportation, family reunions, medical care, for this wave as they have for a hundred others: they don't have to reinvent the wheel...
...That was brave of Israel...
...We should lift that embargo, and allow Exxon and Gulf to go in there exploring for possible oil off the coast of Saigon...
...And Poland, on the eve of the announcement, had declared that all Poles who had lived outside the country a certain number of years were no longer Polish citizens...
...cash assistance and medical assistance are available in most states through State Welfare Departments...
...And the following Monday, the banker—from the other side of the fence—called Rabbi Jacobs and pledged $1,000 for the Vietnamese, and committed himself to help, to be deeply involved...
...government who now favor establishing diplomatic ties and trade ties with Vietnam, to give us desperately needed information, and a chance to make a difference in the government's treatment of its people...
...Oh, yes, they're very industrious people, and in the first wave of Vietnamese, they were like the Cuban refugees, they were the educated...
...We have each heard similar arguments about the plight of the refugees in Indochina...
...In the first two weeks of August alone, 39,000 ethnic Chinese were expelled from Vietnam...
...I saw them in Hong Kong, in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia...
...There are 15 million overseas Chinese in Indochina, and they are all more suspect than ever before, because of the Peking government...
...waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian...
...Civilization does seem to have learned something in the last few years—learned from its failures— learned not everything, but something...
...But I don't foresee any further migrations...
...And the sooner the better: the more assurance we can give Hong Kong, | Thailand and Malaysia that we will j take in the refugees, the more refugees these overcrowded nations will be willing to shelter, to grant some i minimal protection and temporary j asylum...
...Of the 12 million in that country, 47 percent are Malays and 37 percent are ethnic Chinese...
...Can our imaginations cope with such numbers...
...Thirty-two "nations of asylum" convened at Evian to save the doomed Jews of Nazi Germany and Austria...
...He speaks like a man possessed— possessed, fortunately, by a good cause A good cause...
...The base is 250,000...
...This evening...
...It is precisely noon...
...When we read about the Khmer, expelled from Cambodia and refused entry by the Thais, we should remember October 2 of'38...
...Warmth and light, light and warmth: the accompaniment of any mitzvah...
...for the refugees, the British Crown Colony is the least awful destination...
...Rallies across the country urged the American government to act, and a mass demonstration at Madison Square Garden adopted a resolution to the President...
...Ninety-five percent favorable...
...But today, the governments of Vietnam, moment: The Vietnamese claim, at least, to have a good reason for the expulsion of the ethnic Chinese...
...A special four-man delegation, brought to Geneva by Mon-dale, included Edwin Shapiro, President of HIAS...
...Sponsorship means pikuach nefesh, saving human life, the highest mitzvah, and it is a fairly simple matter (much simpler than it was in '42...
...with it— leaving the Hmong hillsmen to the revenge of the Pathet Lao...
...True, if the shooting hadn't happened, the Germans would have found some other reason for the riot—still, that was their excuse...
...And these are the fortunate ones, the ones who survived—some say 200,000 of the refugees may have been lost at sea...
...departed and the C.I.A...
...Four nations said they would accept experienced agricultural workers only...
...The more militant protesters began organizing a worldwide boycott of German goods...
...One would only accept immigrants who had been baptized...
...Though already packed with people (five million on an island of 404 square miles) Hong Kong never refuses ! entry to the boat people...
...And it brought me back a few years, to other people, holding pages of names, and throwing them into fires, not giving a damn...
...Thus, Roosevelt—deferring to the restrictionists at home—guaranteed from the start that nothing much would be done at Evian, since no laws or quotas could be changed, no money spent...
...The European Jews did have constituents...
...Poland or Germany...
...Our children will deal harshly with us if we fail...
...The historian Henry Feingold tells that other shameful story in his book The Politics of Rescue, and the parallels are startling...
...With eight other congressmen he visited refugee camps in Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia...
...Of course, the Vietnamese Chinese too go back a century, and it really is a sad ending for half of the Chinese in Vietnam to go out in this inglorious way, after they have contributed so much...
...The conference at Evian forty-one years ago took place amidst the same comfort and beauty we enjoy at our own deliberations today...
...They've been there for at least a century, three or four or five generations...
...We don't know how things stand for the ethnic Chinese still in Vietnam, and without an embassy or a liaison with the Hanoi government, diplomatic communication is cumbersome and information is iffy...
...We're going to bring them here, and resettle them, and they're going to be able to live: we know who they are, we know something about them...
...By precedent and by philosophy, the U.S...
...The refugees are housed in camps and holding centers funded by the Hong j Kong government, which spends | about two dollars per person per day (in Thailand, by contrast, the camps get by on 20 cents per day...
...many Jewish organizations were afraid at first to make themselves conspicuous by raising their voices...
...Father Robert Drinan, Congressman from Massachusetts, went recently on a fact-finding tour in Southeast Asia...
...Furthermore, there are 12 to 15 million refugees around the world, in Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh—we're not even concerned about them...
...The American people have already welcomed over 200,000 Indochi-nese...
...On the eve of the conference, Hitler flung the challenge in the world's face...
...We also hope to relieve the strain on barren islands like Bidong, where 32,000 live—or try to—on one square mile...
...Their talent and their energies immeasurably enrich our nation...
...will take 168,000...
...This is not the best time (though when is ever the best time...
...Neither is the sponsor liable for the refugee's activities in the civil or criminal areas...
...This time it is taking place before the eyes of television cameras...
...And I'm certain that Peking is saying regularly to us, behind the scenes, If you want our continued good faith and good wishes, you do nothing with Hanoi...
...The ship sank outside Istanbul with the loss of 767 lives...
...It has never been inhabited in history...
...Forster, at the start of his Passage to India...
...The phrases are new, but unfortunately their precedent in the annals of shame is not...
...Peking is very frightened at being encircled by Russia...
...But there are no roads out to them...
...With several others, among them Albert Vorspan, Irwin Herman, and Alexander Schindler, the temple's rabbi, Steven Jacobs, has toured Reform congregations across the country in an airplane caravan, campaigning for more action...
...Make yourself an ark,' God said to us...
...Not even a good place to visit...
...At first HIAS had accepted, in the name of the Jewish community, 3,000 Indochinese, most of them boat people...
...Germany had announced the expulsion of all its Polish Jews...
...And by 1939, American Jews had realized, at least in part, the threat of Nazi policy...
...was taking out only about 750 refugees a month, and other countries another 750...
...Ordina, the S.S...
...Germany said, 'Look, we're getting rid of the Jews, and the other countries don't want them either.'" Meanwhile, Europe witnessed mass movements much like those this year in Southeast Asia...
...This is our task, your task and mine: to turn our curse into a blessing, and our agony into a song...
...Now there's another $300 million in the works...
...But the immediate thing is to do something drastic, something of an emergency nature, about the 412,000 refugees who are in camps all over Southeast Asia...
...To alleviate the tragedy in Southeast Asia, we all have a part to play...
...But this, of course, is not a happy option for America...
...They just happened to drift there...
...This country is so vast that very few people know that 50,000 Soviet Jews have come over in the last two years, and that many again are arriving this year...
...And they say, "Look, you people will either have to be reeducated, in a new economic zone, or get out—and if you leave, we're not going to let you take your money, because that money was ill-gotten...
...In fact, sponsorship entails only limited responsibilities...
...One hears wonderful reports about the 100 Israel took and how well they are doing...
...Forty-one years ago this very week, another international conference on Lake Geneva concluded its deliberations...
...What kind of mail do you get on this issue...
...The Big Bear is all he talks about...
...And the sponsor is not liable for debts or bills which the refugee may incur...
...Observers all over the world have noted the parallels between the events of 1979, and of 1938, 1942, 1945...
...Let us honor the moral principles we inherit...
...And halfway around the world, in Tarzana, California, where it is eight o'clock at night, one thousand people—Jews who have never been here in summer, and Christians who have never been here at all—one thousand people pack into Temple Judea of Tarzana...
...then, when disaster struck in July, HIAS doubled that figure to 6,000...
...for HIAS and the Federations to cope with a wave of refugees...
...These thousands were simply dumped on the Polish border, in no man's land, and there they remained, denied entry to either WAITER E MONMIE Vice President Walter F. Mondale delivered the following speech to the U.N...
...actually sustained a net loss of immigrants...
...They may be incapable of running the government or unifying the country...
...The fences had fallen...
...to save lives...
...But they failed the test of civilization...
...At the time, it seemed a horrible episode...
...Nguyen Co Thach, Hanoi's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs...
...To one who has attended other conferences on Lake Geneva, the most striking thing on the eve of this one is that the atmosphere is so much like the others...
...In December of '78 there were 21,000 people, men, women and children...
...The temple has not been so crowded since Yom Kippur, the Day of Awe, when the prayer is hit yickyeh u'miyamut: Who shall live, and who shall die...
...For American Jews, as for most Americans, Vietnam—despite the undeclared war and the secret bombings and the newstime horror shows—remains far away...
...The United Nations is often criticized, and sometimes even maligned...
...Until November of '78, the U.S...
...We are part of a life-saving effort, a massive effort, of the kind which didn't take place when we were in trouble so recently...
...Though Geneva is only 14 miles from Evian, the intent of the Geneva conference in July of 1979 was worlds away from Evian in 1938...
...They have lost their farms, their highlands, their pulture and their world because they helped the United States...
...Potential sponsors should contact j HIAS—either directly, or through ; their local synagogue or federation...
...At Evian, they began with high hopes...
...Louis were all eventually forced to return to Europe...
...They're very, very distressed, they've seen the boat people on the television, and want us to help...
...For years, Tarzana had been split by the busing question, with the rabbi a leader on behalf of integration, and a banker—a conservative gentleman—leading the anti-busing movement...
...The latest estimate is 43,000...
...They had no vast open spaces: the U.S...
...The well-to-do, to get away, often paid 12 taels of gold (about $3,600) in bribes, as well...
...but the U.S., across the ocean, could safely ignore the Reich, and the refugees...
...I took a helicopter with three other Congressmen one day, and saw 30,000 people living on rocks...
...During the peak of the expulsion, 50,000 a month fled...
...Let us renounce that legacy of shame...
...The boat people...
...And one delegate said this: "As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one...
...inadequate tools, inadequate management...
...Labor camps...
...But after all, it's we, in large part, who brought this condition on their small country...
...In this twentieth century, once— but no longer—a century of hope, in mid-July, fifty families huddle on a waterlogged raft, sheltered from the sun beneath blankets strung on ropes, attended only by the sea birds, alone on the South China Sea...
...But the question they underline is not simply humanitarian...
...They're doing very well, aren't they...
...Everyone always considered it uninhabitable...
...I do agree with you that the Geneva Conference on July 15 was extraordinary...
...After protests from the French, the Americans, and 65 other countries in Geneva, Vietnam stopped the expulsions, or tried to...
...Earlier this year, one high government official suggested that the refugees be shot if they tried to land...
...During the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency organized these farmers into a secret army and led them on raids against the Laotian communists, the Pathet Lao...
...Thailand, too, has been virtually ignored, until recently, by rescue teams and by the press...
...Only make that simple link, that heart's link, between another's fate and your own, another people's fate and your own...
...The stench of Auschwitz is yet in our nostrils...
...The refugees, aware of the open door, continue to pour in, and the camps are nearing the saturation point...
...At Temple Judea, the night of that ; crowded service, the congregation listening to Rabbi Steven Jacobs was a highly politicized group, a mixed group...
...For much of the 30's, the U.S...
...And I said, in my hands rest these people's lives...
...It would give them respectability in the world community—and it would give us a way of communicating with them...
...Lord, I am afraid," says the rabbi from the pulpit...
...The U.N...
...Paula Reimer, who runs the temple resettlement program^ says Bidong is one of the worst of the refugee camps, "a little island about 31 miles off the coast of Malaysia, a rock in the middle of the ocean...
...Their trek, through jungles filled with Pathet Lao and Vietnamese ambushes, is so harrowing and treacherous that one-third die on the trail, and the survivors arrive at the camps sick, exhausted and starving...
...Besides the boat people, just in the last year Hong Kong has taken in 203,000 Chinese citizens, who escape from the People's Republic of China and settle on the island—half of them legally, half illegally...
...The sponsor does not pay any ; travel expenses for the refugee...
...The quotas were fixed way back in 1921, and they're very arbitrary, very unscientific: They haven't been raised even though the population of the country has more than doubled since that time...
...A thousand congregants sing the prayers of Shabbat, and fumble through the words of folk songs, and fill out pledges, sign checks...
...We welcome this particular Shabbat with a purpose...
...There were many, because turmoil in Poland in the preceding years had caused them to flee...
...Today the rate of emigration from Vietnam has tapered off...
...We haven't fulfilled that pledge...
...The land people...
...Having lost the war, the U.S...
...The expectation is ; that sponsors will befriend the j Vietnamese people coming in...
...And this country really is doing something...
...while slowly, on the other side of the globe, the sun arcs across the South China Sea...
...We are horrified and don't know what to do with our horror...
...Only connect," wrote E.M...
...The land people.' The phrases are new, but unfortunately their precedent in the annals of shame is not," said Vice President Mondale in Geneva...
...They say Bravo...
...And we should lift the economic embargo which we've had on Vietnam since the fall of Saigon...
...Flanders and the notorious S.S...
...Let us reach beyond metaphor...
...Today we confront such a tragedy...
...Louis, of the conference at Evian, of the second conference in Bermuda (at which the inaction and prevarication were even more shameful— convened, as it was, in 1942, when the general outlines of the War Against the Jews, of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen and Treblinka, were already known), reading these dark chapters, we have never quite become accustomed to their darkness...
...One nation feared that an influx of Jews would arouse anti-Semitic feelings...
...Yes, a good cause...
...As Feingold makes clear in The Politics of Rescue, the participating nations, 32 in all, were invited "for the purpose of facilitating the emigration from Germany and presumably Austria of political refugees," but "no country would be expected to receive greater numbers of emigres than is permitted by its existing legislation...
...In this camp in Bidong, there were 55 physicians...
...The Grynszpan boy, "crazed with grief," shot an official in the German embassy in Paris, and it was that shooting which Goebbels used as the excuse for Kristallnacht...
...As of June of this year, France had taken in 50,637, Australia had accepted 22,759 and Canada 15,076...
...They are occupied with the resettlement of an unprecedented 50,000 Soviet Jews this year...
...If anyone feels close to this effort, it is the Jewish people—or should be...
...The 65 nations at Geneva pledged to take in 291,540 Indochi-nese refugees this year, of which the U.S...
...If anything, Evian gave the Nazis an excuse for additional propaganda...
...We must work together, or the suffering will mount...
...Half the refugees in Thailand are from landlocked Laos, and the story of the Laotian refugees is one of the most pathetic in this pathetic history...
...Some misery so surpasses the grasp of reason that language itself breaks beneath the strain...
...Some say let's normalize relations immediately and send an ambassador...
...Drinan: Yes, it's more complicated than that...
...Exotic...
...We have now spent well over one billion dollars bringing out Vietnamese since April of '75...
...Three declared intellectuals and merchants to be undesirable new citizens...
...Neither would the governments have to spend any money: any new programs were to be paid for by private agencies...
...He said, "I can only hope that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals, will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid...
...Two hundred thousand ethnic Chinese fled the North...
...It is a test of civilization...
...There are at least five or ten thousand who have immediate relatives here, and who by American law are entitled to rejoin their families...
...It is a kidney shape, a cashew, ! bounded on one side by the curving southeast tip of Asia, on the other by an assortment of islands: Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia...
...People don't know that—they just sort of disappear...
...Likewise in the Philippines...
...in retrospect, it seems less so because we know the sequel was so much more terrible...
...Which is why we end up taking Joan Baez's position...
...Many nations represented here have risen to history's test, accepting substantial numbers of refugees...
...This is a much more generous opening of the world, and of the West to the East—one would have expected racism to surface here, isolationism, the works...
...But no nation is blind to the difference between free emigration and forced exodus...
...And in Indonesia, there are almost 3 million ethnic Chinese, and they are quite influential and powerful—there's no way to exterminate them or to get rid of them...
...The stigma of its censure forced Vietnam to curtail expulsions of ethnic Chinese...
...Let us do something meaningful—something profound—to stem this misery...
...will put up $105 million...
...There's plenty of blame to go around...
...That we got 65 nations to come together, on short notice, and produce 250,000 pledges, and induce Japan to say that though they couldn't take in people, they'd give half the funds that the UN needs in the camps . .. that is wonderful...
...But Hong Kong cannot keep up these camps forever...
...Let us fashion a world solution...
...They live on fish a lot...
...Hanoi would love that...
...sonal comfort, of encouragement, of support...
...It means returning, with all our power and influence, to a part of the world we have already tormented once...
...Mother of exiles" it says on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty at the port of New York...
...The ASEAN states, China, and Hong Kong have offered safety and asylum to over half a million refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea since 1975...
...agreed to resettle 4,000 a month...
...There's no natural fresh water, or at least not enough to support life...
...The government had offered these people, this resented minority, a ho-win choice: leave the country immediately, or else be resettled in one of the "new economic zones...
...HIAS needs people to volunteer to sponsor an Indochinese family in their first steps here in America...
...In Malaysia, Chinese are not welcome immigrants—to say the least...
...Each time we hear these stories we are bewildered, almost like the earliest human beings, the first primitives, who must have been bewildered each time the sun set and the valley filled with shadows...
...desperate human beings...
...Hanoi has certainly been guilty of violations of human rights...
...Fully 75,000 have made their way to Hong Kong since 1975 and the collapse of the governments of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia...
...The slaughter began at once...
...Since 1975, over half a million Indochinese have been resettled throughout the world, disembarking from their precarious ark for new homes, new lands...
...Ethnic relations are tense, and the Malay government does not want Chinese refugees tipping the balance...
...One helps | provide food, clothing, housewares \ and bedding—the basic necessities—to get them started...
...Unless we all do more, the risk of fresh conflict will arise and the stability of Southeast Asia will erode...
...The ethnic Chinese feared they were in a terrible dilemma: If they were loyal to the government now, they would be deemed disloyal if and when the Chinese took over...
...There are 50,000 people who were repulsed by Malaysia, their boats pushed back out to sea, and they drifted over to the northern shore of Indonesia...
...For one thing, China invaded Vietnam in February of this year, and China let it be known that they were going to come and take the whole country...
...Don't forget," says Professor Leon Jick, of Brandeis, "1938 was a year of worldwide depression...
...And Geneva, unlike Evian, had real and immediate success...
...Let us impose a moratorium on that exodus...
...Israel, one is happy to learn, was the first country to take in a boatload of Indochinese refugees...
...Then, usually, a sponsor helps the refugee find work, introduces the ; family into the community, arranges for a language and perhaps a skills training program, helps enroll the children in school...
...What can we do to help—we, who are not policy-makers, or politicians, or social workers, or sailors in the Seventh Fleet, or professional heroes—what can we do...
...I was in Peking at Easter time with a delegation, and we spoke for 90 minutes with Deng Xiaoping, and he is paranoid about Russia...
...But Peking would be very distressed...
...Now it houses 38,000 people...
...Let us not be like the others...
...They are 12 million people...
...But the growing exodus from Indochina still outstrips international efforts...
...The Ho Chi Minh generation, who brought about their revolution after 30 years of war with France and with the U.S., are now old men...
...UAHC has taken over the main responsibility for settling the first 200 in Los Angeles, and is recruiting temples and rabbis throughout the West Coast, Arizona and New Mexico...
...Now there's a well—one well— on the island...
...They were not the traditional embracers of the homeless...
...And others have opened their doors...
...On his return he talked to moment about what he had seen...
...We face a world problem...
...IffllB ROBERT DRMAN We should simply move on our options...
...Quanza, the S.S...
...The boat people...
...Many of the refugees taken in by Temple Judea are from the island of Bidong...
...And other refugee organizations, other nations, turn to HIAS for advice...
...A barbed-wire bondage," "an archipelago of despair," "a flood-tide of human misery": with this new coinage our language is enriched, and our civilization is impoverished...
...In the 30's, even before the war, the Reich was expelling thousands of Jews, much as Vietnam this year expelled ethnic Chinese—both garnering gold and confiscating goods in the process, booty they used for their war machines...
...Not a good place to spend a lot of time...
...In March 1938, Roosevelt, responding in part to American Jewish pressure, announced to reporters a world conference on refugees, to be held at Evian...
...Only, perhaps, by remembering other bitter numbers, other incalculable defeats—only then we get a glimmer of how much here is lost...
Vol. 4 • October 1979 • No. 9
