The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot
A memoir/survivors' narrative by Trudi Alexy, chosen for the local Jewish Federation's new-born book club, or I would never have read it. The author survived the Holocaust because her family, assimilated and secular Jews, chose to be baptized and made it out of Prague to France and ultimately to Spain. She discovered her Jewish identity in her late teens; many years later, in her 60s, she felt compelled to return to Spain and learn about that country's treatment of Jews during World War II. On her journey, she comes to identify with the Marranos--the crypto-Jews--who also converted to Catholicism yet transmitted Jewish traditions for 500 years.
She eventually met with King Juan Carlos, the first Spanish monarch to condemn the 1492 expulsion of the Jews of Spain, and published this book in 1993, following the 500th anniversary celebrations of Columbus' voyage--during which there was not much attention paid to the "Alhambra Decree," which had only been repealed in 1968. Alexy died in 2003; she did not live to see the 2014 offer by Spain of dual citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from Jews of the Sephardi diaspora (Sepharad being the Hebrew term for Spain).
A good part of Alexy's work was transcribing interviews with survivors who escaped through Spain, sometimes living there for most of the war. It is ironic that a country that really had been "Judenrein" for over 450 years, in which Jews were not allowed to settle or to live as Jews, engaged in no systematic persecution of Jews. During the first years of the war, though Franco enthusiastically supported Hitler, and accepted aid of all kinds to rebuild after the Spanish Civil War, his dictatorship also accepted Jewish refugees who entered illegally--often without papers of any kind--and treated them no worse than any other such illegal migrants. By 1943, when the tide of the war was turning, Franco backed off from his support of the Axis, and his government sometimes actively helped any remaining Jewish refugees to find permanent homes.
According to Alexy's account, individual Spanish citizens went even further, aiding and sheltering the survivors she interviewed, breaking the law to rent to them and offer them jobs and schooling. Alexy herself had nothing but fond memories of the country--she spent most of the war in Barcelona. Where one would have expected demonization (literally, after all, Jews--and particularly baptized ones-- were officially Satanic, according to the Inquisition), these stories give us hope.
Sorry about the lengthy book review, but I'm sure my readers have figured out the relevance to our present day. Someday, we, too, will be judged by how we treated the strangers among us, such as the Syrian refugees. At the same time, reading the stories of hairbreadth escapes, these survivors who got on the last train out, first from Prague or Vienna, then from Paris, and those who did not make it, I wonder again "Why didn't they leave in 1933? In 1935?" And I shiver. Is that us?