Families at the Border.
Ruth Balint, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
National Archives of Australia, A12111, 1/1961/5/5.
After the Second World War, a number of Jewish refugees who wanted to go to Australia faced considerable barriers to doing so. Australia had practiced discrimination against Jewish refugees before the war, and a mixture of xenophobia and antisemitism within politics and the press encouraged the government to maintain discriminatory anti-Jewish immigration policies afterwards as well. This meant that Jewish refugees were largely excluded from the mass resettlement program initiated from the Displaced Persons camps after the war. The only other way Jewish refugees could make it to Australia during the postwar years was by the landing permit scheme, which relied on family sponsorship.
At the end of the 1940s, highly secret intelligence reports from Europe reached officials in Australia, detailing suspicious activities concerning illegal landing permits to Australia. According to the intelligence officer at the centre of these reports, the young and ambitious army officer Keith Turbayne, “there has been a great deal of manipulation and falsification of documents in regard to Landing Permit Holders.” The people involved were practically all Jews, he wrote. “They are generally interested in Black Market dealings and are known as Café inhabitants. They are not good types.”1.
In the language of Australian immigration, “good types” meant those who were easily assimilable and useful to the postwar economy.
Australia was embarking on an ambitious immigration program. The country needed workers, and the slogan “populate or perish” captured the sense of urgency surrounding postwar reconstruction. Yet Australia did not simply open its doors to Europe’s refugees. Immigration officials wanted particular kinds of newcomers: young, healthy people capable of manual labour.
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust did not fit comfortably into the vision of the “New Australian” worker, those the government hoped would easily assimilate into a predominantly white, Anglo-Australian society. Jewish refugees were associated with weak and broken bodies, and of being intellectuals, or “café inhabitants”. Australian migration officers stationed in Europe’s Displaced Persons transit centres were quietly instructed to exclude Jews from resettlement. Within a hierarchy of undesirability, “restriction of entry of Jews came first, with Communists in second place and Nazis in third.”2
It was not the first time fears of a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of Australia’s borders were raised in political circles. Inflammatory press reports had also added to a growing anxiety about a sudden influx of Jewish refugees.
Were these reports of a people-smuggling ring true?
Yes, probably. Despite being largely excluded from the mass resettlement scheme for DPs, more than 12,000 Jewish refugees did arrive in Australia between 1946 and 1954. How did they get there?
New research points to the fact that a small number of Jewish immigrants might have used more creative approaches to reaching Australia. Negotiating their way through bureaucratic hoops to survive, including resorting to unconventional methods, was grim reality for many Eastern European Jews, especially in the face of antisemitic persecution. As Libby Garland writes, “buying and selling on the black market, assuming fake identities and obtaining forged papers were … facts of life.”3 Joseph Roth, the Jewish journalist and writer, observed this firsthand. “The struggle for papers, the struggle against papers”, he wrote, “is something the Eastern Jew gets free of only if he uses criminal methods to take on society”.4 Although Roth first wrote his observations in the late 1920s (he died in 1939), these descriptions of Jewish encounters with border officials could be equally applied after the war.
A different road to Australia.
The landing permit scheme had been in existence before the war, and was resurrected in its aftermath to allow survivors to join families already in Australia. To obtain a landing permit, a prospective migrant needed someone already living in Australia to sponsor them. The Australian government expected sponsors to be close relatives. Sponsors were also expected to guarantee accommodation and financial support for the new arrival, usually for at least a year. Once a permit had been approved and sent to Europe, the migrant still faced medical examinations, travel arrangements and the formidable expense of getting to Australia.
Pinchas Bleier and his family had initially settled in Israel before deciding to migrate again. Australia appealed to him partly because he had served in the British Army and met Australian soldiers.
He already felt he knew something about Australians, he recalled—including “clothing, shouting, beer”. The family tried to obtain a permit through a friend in Melbourne, by pretending the friend was a cousin. Immigration officials rejected the application. A “cousin” was not close enough. Eventually Bleier’s brother-in-law made it to Australia, and once inside the country, could sponsor the others. In this case, a genuine family connection opened the door.5
Definitions of family.
The system gave enormous power to the bureaucratic definition of a family. Yet refugees and their supporters also learned to stretch these definitions. Susanna Fisher was a child when her family arrived in Sydney. She remembered being met by the man who had arranged their papers, although she could not explain precisely how he knew them. He had sent permits to many people, she wrote, “even before he knew them.”6
Sponsors sometimes barely knew the people whose applications they had signed. A person might know a refugee’s brother, or a distant relative, or simply agree to help because somebody had asked. Often, money changed hands. Eva Lowbeer, who arrived with her family in 1948, described approaching a man in Australia who had “connections”. For a fee, he was often successful in securing permits.7 Susan Varga also recalled that her family’s opportunity came through a chance encounter on a Budapest street with a Hungarian businessman living in Australia. He charged them the exorbitant sum of £500 for arranging their permits.8
Telegrams between Europe and Australia, intercepted by British and Australian Intelligence, describe a similar story.9 Lily E in Paris wrote to Hilde W in Vienna with the address of an Australian, “who can get a permit within 8 weeks for $300 and within 4 weeks for $360.” Ignaz K of France wrote to Salomon G in Vienna: “Many people have earned a nice lot of money with this here for it is not a question of one or two but of twenty to thirty and it is settled in a hundred percent of cases. At the same time I must tell you it is a bit more difficult to do here because there are so many on the job.” A brother wrote to his sibling in Melbourne about two friends in Vienna begging for a permit. “They will pay you a good compensation if you could do that”, he wrote. “I could find more of these people, but I do not know if you want to go into this matter. I think the profit will be more than your present job … perhaps we could manage something while I am still here.”
The rate for one of these illegal landing permits varied, according to another man in Vienna, Dr Artur W. “As you probably know, amateurs asked for £350- 400 and there are several who have provided permits for four-five families, a short time ago even a sixty-two year old man travelled with the permit he got.” But Frank K in Sydney wrote to Paul W. in Vienna that he apparently knew of one man that could do it all for £180, and within 2 weeks.
The archival record therefore shows that the very restrictions imposed on Jewish refugees generated forms of circumvention, improvisation, and illegality that should not be treated as marginal to migration history, but as central to it.
Just the beginning.
Acquiring a landing permit was just the beginning. Travelling to Australia was enormously expensive. Jewish organisations including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society helped arrange passages and advanced money for people who could not pay. But this assistance was generally a loan, not a gift. But this assistance was generally a loan, not a gift. Travel could cost between US$600 and US$800 per person—a huge amount at the time. Expenses included ship fares, railway tickets to the port, luggage, harbour charges and money needed during the journey.
Sponsors in Australia were often expected to contribute an upfront deposit, but many were themselves recent migrants with little money. Others had signed applications as a favour without understanding the responsibility involved. Jewish welfare organisations regularly found themselves assisting families whose sponsors could not—or would not—support them. Once migrants arrived, Jewish welfare organisations often expected them to repay the money advanced for their journeys. Some debts remained outstanding for years, until they were eventually forgiven in the 1960s.
The enormous costs and debts incurred by Jewish families must be understood in the wider context of Australian immigration in this period. Over 170,000 other Displaced Persons who did not have to come with landing permits, because they were young, fit and almost all non-Jewish, arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952. They came on IRO ships, and they came for free.
Families made and remade.
Immigration systems tend to imagine families as stable, clearly defined units. When governments decide who may cross a border, they also exercise enormous power over families: over who belongs to whom, which relationships are recognised and which families are allowed to remain together. War and genocide had destroyed families and scattered survivors across continents. In the face of discrimination and short-sighted bureaucracy, Jewish refugees were sometimes forced to find new routes out of Europe, and to improvise families.
If we continue to write migration history only from the perspective of legal pathways and formally recognised family structures, then these stories remain invisible. Strict laws did not prevent refugees from coming; rather, they incentivised strategies of circumvention. Jewish refugees relied on transnational networks to navigate a hostile migration regime, and those networks could be unstable. Seen from this perspective, Jewish migration to Australia opens onto a larger history in which mobility depended not only on survival or deservingness, but on the capacity to sometimes subvert the categories through which states and communities decide who counts as a legitimate family, and therefore as a legitimate migrant.
- ‘Report from K. Turbayne to Chief Migration Officer, on Landing Permits – Austria, dated 16 February, 1950’, NAA: A9306, 355/3. ↩︎
- Sheila Fitzpatrick and Justine Greenwood, ‘Anti-Communism in Australian Immigration Policies 1947–1954: The Case of Russian/ Soviet Displaced Persons from Europe and White Russians from China’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 50:1 (2019), 61. ↩︎
- Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 131. ↩︎
- Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hoffman, (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 59. ↩︎
- Bleier, Pinchas. Interview 45393. Interview by Reuben Zylberszpic. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, July 02, 1998. ↩︎
- Susanna Fisher, The Seed that was Sown, (Darlinghurst: Sydney Jewish Museum Community Stories, 2013), 48 ↩︎
- Eva Lowbeer, My Pink Glasses: Life’s Journey (Darlinghurst: Sydney Jewish Museum Community Stories, 2004), 64-5. ↩︎
- Susan Varga, Heddy and Me, (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1994), 178. ↩︎
- See, National Archives of Australia: A9036, 355/3. ↩︎