Daughter’s Sacrifice Buys Family’s Escape

Conceived in Vienna and carried across the Atlantic on an Italian ship, Leo Spitzer arrived in Bolivia in 1939, a passenger in his mother’s womb. Like many other wandering Jews, his parents fled an Austria that had become unlivable after the double blows of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht. And like many of those lucky Jews who found an escape route, they found themselves truly strangers in a strange land.

While many countries were turning Jewish refugees away from their shores, Latin America was famous for providing sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Nazi infestation of Europe (and equally notorious a few years later for hiding some of the infesters). President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic (about whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said, “He may be a sonofabitch, but at least he’s our sonofabitch”) issued visas to a few thousand Jews and settled them in the small village of Sosua, where they passed several years manufacturing cheese and pork products before emigrating to Miami.

Spitzer’s parents and grandparents owed the choice of Bolivia to his mother’s sister. Ella had fled Austria in the late summer of 1938, crossing illegally into Switzerland (a country that today has more kilometers of paved footpaths than Bolivia has paved roads) on a route that an old Viennese beau had taken a few months earlier. While in Zurich, she found employment and new love with a young Swiss man. She also discovered that her parents had tried to follow but had been detained by the Swiss in an internment camp on the border. Their status wavered from hour to hour, the possibility of their being returned to Austria always in front of them.

Then one day, Ella received a letter from her old boyfriend. Peter wrote from Bolivia saying that “he managed to borrow money from an employer, and to find a way to ‘purchase’ four additional immigrant visas for ‘relatives left behind.’ One of these visas he reserved for his mother. . . . [T]he remaining three he offered Ella and her parents. But the offer, seemingly so generous, carried a very central condition: the visas for Nathan and Bertha could be used only if Ella used hers as well. She would have to emigrate with her parents . . . and join him in Bolivia as his wife.”

Ella made the only decision she could. Once in Bolivia and married to Peter, she arranged for additional visas and rescued her sister, Spitzer’s mother, and Spitzer’s father and paternal grandparents. A year later, she divorced Peter. Within a few more years, she was dead--a suicide according to some reports, the victim of a scandalous botched abortion according to others. No matter. As the family moved on, they treasured her memory as a “dutiful daughter.”

Ella’s tragedy is a wonderful anecdote of ambivalence that captures the slippery choices that the Holocaust forced upon its victims. And Spitzer spends much of his memoir, “Hotel Bolivia,” on the selective memories of other survivors, other temporary residents of the Hotel Bolivia, the vast majority of whom moved into longer-term leases in the United States and Israel.

Yet Spitzer, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, also writes at great length about the theory of memory, and recopies historical accounts of Europe and Bolivia that have been better written elsewhere. Ten years old himself when his parents emigrated to the United States, Spitzer was perhaps too young to come away with more than a vague case of nostalgia.

Bolivia itself comes off as no more than a symbol, as abstract as the Brazil of Terry Gilliam’s brilliant movie. It’s a tremendous disappointment that Spitzer failed to pave that crossroad between memory and history that might have brought this unique period and extraordinary place to life.