WORLD CLOSED IT'S DOORSL:One family's Struggle to Escape the Holocause

Book Description
Max Schohl was a Renaissance man. German first, Jewish second, he was classically educated, spoke several languages, and played the violin. He became a decorate officer during the First World War, and later a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist and community leader. When the Nazis came to power he believed that his record would spare him and that the townsfolk, many of whom had eaten at his charitable soup kitchen and knew his largesse as an employer, would defend him. Yet on Kristallnacht his own neighbors and employees ransacked his home. Schohl, robbed of his factory, turned his full energies to saving himself and his family through emigration, but no country would take them.

David Clay Large tells the story of how the Schohls were caught in a tightening noose, unable to escape although all odds seemed to be in their favor. In the United States, relatives petitioned tirelessly on their behalf and Max was offered a teaching position at an American college, but the U.S. was determined to keep its quota of Jewish immigrants low throughout the period of anti-Semitic persecutions in Germany and Europe. In the pre-war years, America did not fill even its restrictive quota for German immigrants, for which most of the applicants were Jewish. Subsequent efforts to emigrate to Britain, then Chile and Brazil, also failed, despite money raised by American relatives, because by that time, 1939-40, doors around the world were slamming shut to the desperate Jewish refugees from Europe. The Schohls found brief sanctuary in Yugoslavia, but after the Nazi occupation Max was sent to Auchwitz and his wife and daughters were sent to hard labor, spared the camp that soon claimed Max because his wife was a convert to Judaism and his daughters were only of half Jewish blood.

Much has been written about the West's unwillingness to rescue European Jews from the hands of the Nazis; Large gives a graphic personal dimension to the restrictionist immigration policies and indifferent consuls that denied so many Jews a safe haven during the Holocaust. Max's youngest daughter, Kathe Schohl-Wells, today a widow living in Charleston, West Virginia, has given Large access to her family's records, a unique collection of letters and other documents chronicling the experiences of the Schohls and those who tried to bring them to England and America.

From Booklist
Max Schohl's family, including his wife and two teenage daughters, fled Germany for Yugoslavia in 1940. As a Jew, Max was no longer permitted to live and work in his own country. In 1942, Schohl was deported to Auschwitz, where he died the following year. His wife and daughters were sent back to Germany to work as slave laborers. They survived and finally were able to emigrate to the U.S. after World War II. Schohl's youngest daughter, Kathe, now 79 and living in Charleston, West Virginia, provided Large with letters and other documents chronicling the family's efforts to escape. Much of the book is in the form of letters, many of them between Max Schohl and Rudolf Hess. Large describes Germany in the 1920s and 1930s by saying "What I try to do in this narrative is to attach a specific human face and voice to the otherwise bloodless record of political calculations and bureaucratic regulations." More clearly than many other books, Large's account depicts the tragic abandonment of the Jews by Western nations.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　George Cohen
From Book News Annotation
Large (history, Montana State U.) recounts how Dr. Max Schohl tried to immigrate to the US and then to England in the late 1930s when ordered by Nazis to leave Germany. In desperation he moved his family to Yugoslavia, where he was later arrested, and deported to Auschwitz where he died.

Book Dimension
Height (mm) 243 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Width (mm) 163