I knew the facts about Jews desperate to leave Europe in 1941, but only recently did I pull together a powerful strand of stories about four people—a world-famous artist, a Chabad rabbi, a future journalist and a teen from Dresden—and their families escaping through Lisbon, Portugal in June of 1941. Did any of their paths cross on the way to the ships that would take them west to freedom, what degrees of separation connected them? I don’t know but their intersecting paths—routing through Lisbon on the way to New York and points beyond—show how fate (or, if you will, the hand of God) can tumble together the famous and the unknown in one time and place.

The book Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal by Marion Kaplan ably gives institutional and individual details on the Portugal experience. Inspired by the story of my partner Naomi’s father Eric Leiseroff, who left Dresden with his mother Valesca Schulman Leiseroff in June 1941 to sail from Lisbon to New York, I found other memoirs and articles about people who left in June, three in the period between June 10 and June 20. I wondered if they encountered one another, or brushed shoulders on the streets with a nod of Jewish recognition, in their preparation for voyages to a new world.

Marc Chagall, departed June 10

U.S. journalist Varian Fry became involved with the Emergency Rescue Committee in the late 1930s and in 1940 connected with Hiram “Harry” Bingham IV, the U.S. vice consul in Nice, France, who was hiding refugees in a rented villa in the area. In December 1940, Fry and Bingham met with Marc Chagall, the Russian-Jewish artist then living with his wife Bella in Gordes, France. Bingham helped Chagall with the paperwork to immigrate to the United States. The Chagalls first moved to Marseille. Arrested and then released by the Vichy police (released with Bingham’s intercession), Marc and Bella Chagall reached Lisbon on June 10-11. They left Lisbon on June 12 on the Mouzinho, with 700 other passengers, including 130 children from QSE homes and internment camps in France, and arrived in New York on June 21. (Sources primarily from the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, PDF at this link).

According to a June 12 story from Jewish Telegraph Agency, notable passengers included:

Prof. Maximilian Weinberger, former head of the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, who is supervising the care of the children aboard the ship; the painter, Marc Chagall, who has arranged to give them drawing lessons; Erwald Schindler, Prague stage director, with his wife, who is the daughter of Arthur Nikisch, former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Chief Rabbi Robert Serebrenik of Luxemburg and Martin Aufhauser, banker.

Peter Schrag, departure date unspecified

Peter Schrag’s family moved from Germany to Luxembourg to Belgium between 1935 to 1939. His father Otto was interred in the French internment camp at Saint-Cyprien. He wrote about his family’s harrowing experiences in his book When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs 1940-1941. After leaving the camp and separated from his wife and son Peter, Otto got the required paperwork in Marseille. As in so many of the escape stories, he took a train through France to the Spanish border, then on to Barcelona and Madrid and finally Lisbon in May 1941. There he waited for his wife and son to join him from France. Peter Schrag’s book sets the scene about Lisbon’s impact on harried, exhausted people on the run:

Anyone who came to Lisbon from fascist prisons—or from Europe’s pillaged, hungry, occupied countries—was struck by so many powerful impressions that it became impossible to take them all in at once. Many little things were so striking that they immobilized those who saw them: the appetizing displays in the richly stocked food shop windows, the........

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