Waiting for a Future: Jewish Refugees and Cafe Culture
- Jan Burzlaff
- 5 hours ago
- 6 min read
Jan Burzlaff on Marion Kaplan's Hitler’s Jewish Refugees
In Lisbon cafés, the refugees waited. They sipped coffee not out of habit, but as if it might anchor them to a future still half-concealed across the Atlantic. They exchanged fragments—rumors of a ship, a visa, a cousin’s telegram—speaking in a grammar of dread and improvisation. Some, like twenty-five-year-old Miriam Stanton, came with a plan: a two-week stay before reuniting with her fiancé in England. Instead, she spent months adrift above the Café Palladium, living on three rolls a day, waiting for papers that never arrived. “Everyone sooner or later seemed to come to our café,” she recalled. It became her world. She wrote letters, deciphered gossip, shared news she received from home. When her long-delayed visa finally came through, her café friends joined her at the harbor to say goodbye. But the ship refused her. The British consul denied her entry. So she walked back, not to a home, but to Café Palladium.
In Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale University Press, 2020), Marion Kaplan offers an extraordinary account of what it means to survive in the in-between. Her focus is not on final destinations but on thresholds—what it costs to live in a place that is neither safe nor openly hostile, where each morning begins with hope and ends in rumor. Kaplan, long one of the most incisive historians of German-Jewish life, resists the temptation to narrate this history from the outside in. There are no diplomatic agreements, nor sweeping maps, no tally of quotas or treaties. Instead, she constructs what we might call an emotional topography of exile. Drawing on hundreds of letters, memoirs, case files, and a remarkable cache of 207 unopened letters and 76 postcards—sent from 29 countries and never read by their intended recipients—Kaplan writes about people trying to stay human in inhuman conditions, of the psychic architecture required to withstand endless deferral.
In a field that has long focused on structures, perpetrators, and bureaucracies, Kaplan asks us to sit with uncertainty, longing, and shame. It’s striking how rarely Holocaust studies has undertaken what she calls an “emotional history of fleeing.” This is not a story about rescue, but something far more urgent: a chronicle of feelings, endurance, and identity under siege. Fleeing Germany, Austria, France, or the Netherlands, Jews who washed up in Lisbon in 1940 and 1941 had outrun armies, bartered for visas, crossed mountains by foot. But as her elegant, devastating book shows, hope was complicated.
For tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, Portugal became not a sanctuary but a liminal zone: a port city radiant with sunlight and danger, where people lived out their days in consulate lines and overcrowded pensões, clutching their documents like talismans, measuring time in ship schedules and soup rations. Lisbon, in Kaplan’s rendering, is less a place than a state of suspension, a waiting room where the exits kept vanishing. Hitler’s Jewish Refugees lingers in the quieter spaces: the overbooked ships, the crowded boarding houses, the sweaty wait outside a consulate, in the hum of gossip over a chipped café table, in the silence after a letter fails to arrive. Kaplan reminds us that survival itself is not always a climax. Waiting can leave marks no less profound than violence: it leaves people altered, not just by what they endured, but by what they imagined and feared while enduring it.
Marion Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees. Yale University Press, 2020. 376 pp. $45 (hardcover)
In recent years, scholars have turned with greater seriousness to spaces of exile and suspended survival: the Soviet interior, Shanghai, Casablanca, the Caribbean, or the colonies of Vichy France. Lisbon joins this expanding map, but sharpens its emotional dimensions. What emerges is a richly layered portrait of this group, comprising up to 100,000 estimated to have passed through Portugal between 1940 and 1942, neither fully hunted nor fully free. They were lawyers from Leipzig, violinists from Vienna, housewives from Antwerp, students from Kraków. Some fled with suitcases of affidavits; others with nothing but a name memorized for the border. Kaplan’s great gift is to show how displacement was not only geographic but existential: the trip came heavy, with an invisible baggage of self-loss. Her subjects did not just lose homes or passports, they lost the self only known in and through another. “Nobody here knows who I am,” one man lamented, surrounded by strangers in a Lisbon boarding house. As she notes, these were often members of the assimilated German Jewish bourgeoisie, people for whom Heimat was not just a place but an emotional edifice built over generations. Leaving it, watching it collapse behind them, meant not only losing citizenship but becoming unrecognizable to themselves.
Waiting, in Kaplan’s telling, becomes less an interval than an existential condition. Even those with papers found themselves in a paper maze: a valid Portuguese entry visa meant nothing without a Spanish transit visa, which meant nothing without proof of ship passage, which itself depended on a destination visa from the Americas—or somewhere, anywhere, willing to take them. One failure, an expired stamp, a missing signature, could collapse everything. Walter Benjamin’s suicide on the Franco-Spanish border looms as emblematic: not just of despair, but of the fragile mechanics of survival. As Kaplan shows, the threshold between safety and catastrophe could be no wider than a margin on a visa form.
The book is at its most evocative when tracing the emotional aftershocks of that waiting in cafés, and Kaplan’s gendered lens brings much clarity to these provisional architectures of survival. Displacement did not flatten experience; it refracted it. Young refugees, thrust into a new language and culture, often discovered adventure and new freedoms; adults, stripped of their professions and parental authority, confronted shame, dislocation, and emotional collapse. Men, many of whom had built their identities through careers, public standing, and professional authority, often found themselves unmoored. Without a job, a title, or a clear role, they became, as one aid worker noted, “ashamed in front of their children.” Women, though equally dispossessed, had often been the ones pushing hardest for flight. Their domestic experience navigating uncertainty and improvisation made them, paradoxically, more adept at enduring the slow violence of exile. With success, Kaplan resists any neat moralization here. Instead, we see nuance: a portrait of emotional life in transit, where loss often forced individuals out of traditional roles, and adaptation looked different depending on what one had been asked to relinquish.
Portugal itself mirrored this unease. Officially neutral, the country operated on a knife’s edge balancing Allied pressure, Gestapo scrutiny, and Salazar’s own authoritarian instincts. While many ordinary Portuguese citizens extended genuine warmth, the state often responded with indifference or suspicion. Visas expired overnight. Police arrested refugees on technicalities. Borders closed, then reopened, then closed again. And through it all, a low drumbeat of anxiety persisted. Some feared a German invasion; others feared betrayal by informants. Refugees who had fled across continents now found themselves trapped again, not by tanks, but by paperwork. And even those who managed to reach Lisbon lived with the gnawing knowledge that they might yet be forced to flee again, or worse, returned.
Kaplan frames each chapter with a quote from today’s refugee crises, drawing parallels between the bureaucratic and societal challenges faced by Jewish refugees in the 1930s–1940s and those confronting modern refugees. The effect is subtle but insistent: the architecture of displacement—the suspicion, the bureaucracy, the hollowing-out of time—has not vanished. The epigraphs don’t collapse the 1940s into the present; they stretch a thread across decades, binding Lisbon’s waiting rooms to the border camps and holding pens of our own moment. It’s an urgent reminder that the emotional weight of visas, the fear of being turned back at a border, or the fragile hope that a single document might change your life. Kaplan highlights how restrictive immigration policies, xenophobia, and global inaction exacerbated suffering then and continue to do so now. For example, the “paper walls” of visas and quotas she describes mirror current barriers for asylum seekers. In 2025, as nations grapple with migration policies, the book offers a historical lens to inform debates on compassion, responsibility, and international cooperation.
In 2025, the global rise in antisemitism make Kaplan’s exploration of Jewish refugees urgent, and the book serves as a reminder of the consequences of unchecked hatred and the importance of sanctuary for Jewish people in particular. If there is a quibble to be made, it concerns the title. As others have noted before, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees risks reinscribing the very logic it aims to dismantle—defining these individuals by the man who tried to annihilate them. Of course, titles are often outside the purview of the authors, and the book refuses that framing at every turn. These refugees are not Hitler’s, but their own: café-occupants, letter-writers, improvisers, mourners, and innovators. What Kaplan gives us is not a study in victimhood, but a study in presence—the fragile, furious persistence of being.
Jan Burzlaff is a Postdoctoral Associate in Jewish Studies at Cornell University. He teaches and writes on the Holocaust, modern European and Jewish history, mass violence, and the role of AI in the humanities. His current book project explores how civilians responded to Nazi persecution between 1939 and 1945.
