The Dominican Republic was the only country at the Évian Conference of July 1938 to offer to take a substantial number of Jewish refugees from Europe. The country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, undertook to admit up to 100,000 Jewish settlers. In the event, only around 800 reached the country, but the Dominican offer remains the singular bright spot in the otherwise complete failure of the international community at Évian. The story is more complicated than it first appears, and Trujillo’s motives were not those of a man who wanted to save Jewish lives. But around 800 people who would otherwise have died in Europe lived because the Dominican Republic let them in.
The offer at Évian
The Évian Conference is covered in detail on its own page. Roosevelt’s call for an international response to the Jewish refugee crisis produced, from 32 attending countries, almost no concrete commitment. The Dominican delegate, Virgilio Trujillo Molina, brother of the dictator, announced that the Dominican Republic would accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees. The offer was unique. Every other country at the conference had already explained why they could not.
Trujillo’s motives
Rafael Trujillo had a particular reason to want to be seen acting humanely on the international stage. In October 1937 his regime had carried out the Parsley Massacre, in which Dominican soldiers killed around 20,000 Haitians along the Dominican-Haitian border, distinguishing Haitians from Dominicans by their pronunciation of the Spanish word for parsley (perejil). The international reaction had damaged Trujillo’s standing significantly. The offer at Évian was, in part, a public relations exercise to recover his reputation.
It was also a racial calculation. Trujillo, like several Latin American dictators of the period, considered his country to be insufficiently European and insufficiently white. He saw the admission of Jewish refugees as a chance to whiten the population, on the assumption that European Jews were racially European. The thinking is uncomfortable, but it is on the documentary record.
Sosúa
The settlement that resulted was at Sosúa, on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic Settlement Association, an American Jewish philanthropic body, was set up to organise the immigration. The first refugees arrived in 1940. They were screened in advance: only single men of working age in good health were admitted, on the grounds that they would establish the settlement and that other refugees could follow once the agricultural project was viable. The expectation was that 100,000 refugees would eventually live and work at Sosúa.
It did not happen. The war made transatlantic travel difficult after 1940, and most of the European Jews who would have come had been overtaken by the deportations before they could leave. The total number of refugees who reached Sosúa over the course of the war was around 800. They formed a small farming community on land granted by Trujillo. The settlement produced butter and cheese for the Dominican market and developed into a moderately successful dairy farming operation.
The Sosúa refugees
The 800 Sosuanos, as they came to call themselves, were mostly German and Austrian Jews who had escaped Europe through Switzerland or Spain in 1939 and 1940. They were intellectuals and professionals reinventing themselves as dairy farmers in the Caribbean. Most spoke no Spanish. They built houses, set up schools, and managed an enterprise that none of them had been trained for. Some of them stayed at Sosúa for decades. Many emigrated to the United States, Argentina or Israel after the war. By the 1960s the original community at Sosúa was much reduced. The few survivors and their descendants still hold annual reunions.
The synagogue and the museum
The synagogue built at Sosúa in the 1940s still stands. The Sosúa Jewish Museum, in a small building next to it, tells the story of the settlement. Sosúa is now a tourist resort town and the Jewish heritage is largely a curiosity to the visitors who pass through. The 800 lives the settlement saved are, in absolute terms, a small number. They are 800 more than the offer was expected to produce by the cynics at Évian. They are also, when set against the figures of those denied admission elsewhere, a small reminder that the international community as a whole could have done more.
Why the Dominican story matters
The Dominican Republic is the only country in the modern Holocaust narrative that consistently appears in a positive light from a Latin American context, in counterpoint to Argentina and Brazil, which became the main destinations for Nazi war criminals after 1945. The Dominican offer at Évian is also the case that disproves the convenient claim, sometimes made afterwards, that no country was willing to take in significant numbers of Jewish refugees. One country was. The reasons it offered were not entirely disinterested. The lives that resulted, however, are not less real for that.
See also
Sources
- Marion Kaplan, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa 1940-1945, Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008
- Allen Wells, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa, Duke University Press, 2009
- USHMM: The Dominican Republic