The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center presents the exhibition "Trapped in the Boundaries. Diplomatic history, 1938 – 1943" on to the migration crisis in Europe on the eve of the Second World War. By 1938, hundreds of thousands of Jews wanted to leave Hitler’s Germany and annexed Austria; however, the world’s major powers refused to accept the refugees.
In the summer of 1938, delegates from 32 countries met at the French resort Évian-les-Bains, upon an initiative of Franklin D. Roosevelt, to discuss options to solve the migration crisis that had erupted in Europe by the time. In the late 1930s, the Jewish people of Germany and Austria tried to escape from the Third Reich. However, the borders of countries free from Nazism were closed to refugees. During the nine-day conference, delegate after delegate rose to express sympathy for the refugees. But most countries, including the United States and Britain, declared that they will no longer let in more refugees.
5 years later, at the height of the war, the United States initiated an international conference again – in Hamilton, Bermuda, away from the indignant population and reporters to calm the public reaction. But this time no resolution to these questions was found: immigration quotas were never increased. These two conferences are a clear illustration of Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the ‘Banality of Evil’: the crime is blind obedience to thoughtless legislation; crimes are committed by ordinary people who are unable to tell between those cases where it is about right and those where it is about convenient.
The exhibition will present multi-page records of The Évian and Bermuda conferences in contrast to living memories, film and photo documents illustrating the situation of the refugees on the eve and during the war. The sad story about the passengers of the St. Louis liner is told: having traveled from Hamburg to Cuba, they couldn’t disembark and were compelled to return to Europe occupied by the Nazis. Visitors of the exhibition will also learn about personal stories of righteous diplomats, who ran counter to the decisions of their governments and helped the refugees to avoid Nazi persecution.
Among the showpieces of the exhibition "Closed borders. Essays on diplomatic history, 1938 – 1943" there are documents, photographs and video testimonies provided by the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, the Wiener Library in London, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in the National Park, New York, the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.