Lesson Plan: Fort Ontario and the Jewish Refugees of World War II

A lesson from the National Park Service's (H)our History Lesson series, part of its series on religion on the World War II home front. Written by Alison Russell.

Refugees registering at the Fort Ontario refugee camp, August 1944. Photo by Hikaru Iwasaki, U.S. Department of the Interior; National Archives and Records Administration.

Overview

In 1944, 982 Jewish refugees from southern and eastern Europe arrived at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York — the one group the United States admitted as refugees, outside its immigration quotas, during World War II. They lived in the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter until, after the war, President Harry Truman allowed them to stay. Their story helps students understand religion, foreign policy, refugee policy and the home front. The lesson fits within a larger unit on World War II or the Holocaust, and draws on the NPS's article on Fort Ontario.

• Level: high school; easily adapted for any age.
• Objectives. Students will be able to:
• • describe U.S. policy towards Jewish refugees during the war;
  • compare U.S. immigration and refugee policy across the 20th century;
  • close-read a policy document and analyse how context shapes its wording;
  • compare several perspectives on one event to build a more complex picture.
• Essential questions. What is the U.S. government's responsibility to refugees from abroad? How should the United States and other countries respond to humanitarian crises?

Vocabulary (adapted from the UN Refugee Agency and the International Rescue Committee):

• Refugee — someone forced to flee their country by persecution, war or violence because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular group.
• Immigrant — someone who chooses to leave home and settle permanently in another country, often through an official process.

Background: the United States and the Holocaust

When the war began, Nazi Germany was already deporting Jewish people to enforced ghettos and passing antisemitic laws. In 1941 its policy became more extreme: the planned mass murder of Europe's Jews, the so-called "Final Solution". Some Jewish people got out of German-controlled territory, but others were trapped as more of central and southern Europe came under Nazi control or alliance.

The U.S. government did not start helping Jews fleeing the genocide until 1944. Possible reasons include disbelief at reports of the scale of the killing, complex immigration law, and antisemitism in the United States. As ever more horrifying reports came from Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board (WRB) to organise resources and help Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied countries.

Activity 1: reading a primary source

On January 22, 1944, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9417, establishing the War Refugee Board. Students read an excerpt, alone or in groups. Its preamble declares it the government's policy "to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death"; its second section charges the Board with "the rescue, transportation, maintenance, and relief of the victims of enemy oppression" and "the establishment of havens of temporary refuge for such victims", and with enlisting the cooperation of foreign governments.

Questions

• What is the document for, and how can you tell from its content?
• Whom does Roosevelt mean by "victims of enemy oppression"? Why might he not say who they were?
• What will the Board do for victims? What might that look like for Jews and other victims of the Nazis?
• The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 set quotas on immigration from central and southern Europe, where most Jewish refugees came from. How does an immigrant differ from a refugee, and how does the order reflect that difference?

Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter, May 1945. Photo by Gretchen Van Tassel, U.S. Department of the Interior; National Archives and Records Administration.

Background: Fort Ontario

In summer 1944 Roosevelt went further. Besides supporting efforts in Europe and sending food and supplies, the WRB would temporarily shelter 1,000 Jewish refugees from southern and eastern Europe, brought through Italy. The plan was politically risky because it got around the immigration quotas: the refugees could enter only if they promised to return home after the war.

The 982 who made the journey were settled at Fort Ontario, an 18th- and 19th-century fort that had served as a hospital and training centre. In some ways it resembled the camps holding German prisoners of war on U.S. soil — barbed-wire fences, military patrols, curfews. In others it gave the refugees safety and a community. After the war they lobbied to stay; Truman granted them visas, and many applied for citizenship.

Activity 2: oral histories of life at Fort Ontario

In 1984, researchers recorded interviews with former refugees, many of them children when they arrived. The recordings and transcripts are held by Special Collections, Penfield Library, SUNY Oswego ("Oral Histories: Emergency Refugee Shelter at Fort Ontario (Safe Haven)"). Split the class into groups; each group listens to and reads one excerpt about first impressions of the camp, answers the questions below, and reports back. In summary:

• Walter Greenberg was shocked to find a fence round the camp, and argued for years afterwards — including before a 1981 reunion in Syracuse — over whether it was barbed wire; it was chicken wire topped with barbed wire. To him it meant confinement. After war-torn Italy he had food, clothes, doctors and, for the first time, school — yet he felt strange and deceived without understanding why. He felt, he said, both wonderful and terrible.
• Maurice Kahmi remembered Oswego as a fairy tale. The fence meant nothing; local girls came to it to flirt, which led to daily scuffles with American boys. Starved throughout the war, he ate so much of his mother's cooking from the camp kitchen that he grew fat. School and everything else were wonderful.
• Adam Munz had not expected the limits on movement — the quarantine, the gate, the passes — and struggled then to see why a country so proud of its freedom restricted harmless people, though he understood it better later. Some likened the fence and barracks to concentration camps, but he said the likeness ended there. The schools went out of their way to help pupils who spoke little or no English; some townspeople were friendly, while others saw the refugees as strange intruders — 982 newcomers must have been a shock to a small town.
• Manya Hartmeyer Breuer, who arrived with Ernest and Lisa Breuer, described being brought back to life: towels and soap on the first day, seven eggs for her first breakfast, all the bananas she could find, and the freedom to look up without fear of being killed. In the line on the first day, a man with a camera photographed her; she took him for a tourist, but he was Alfred Eisenstaedt, photographing the refugees for Life magazine. It was another camp, she said, but she was starting to live again.

Questions for each group

• What do you know about the speaker, and how does their background affect how you weigh them as a source?
• Describe their experience of Fort Ontario, and their feelings about it.
• What do you already know about the war, refugees and the United States that might shape how you hear the tape?

Questions for the whole class

• The fence recurs. What did your speaker say about it, how does that compare with the others, and what do you think?
• So does Oswego as a "fairy tale". Why, and how does it fit with what people said about the fence?
• How did your speaker's emotions and framing differ from your classmates'? What does that say about how people felt then and how they remember Fort Ontario now?

Wrap-up

• How was the refugees' experience at Fort Ontario like and unlike that of immigrants, then or in earlier eras?
• How far did Fort Ontario fulfil the War Refugee Board's mandate under Executive Order 9417?
• How should the United States act towards refugees, and towards immigrants? Would you distinguish between them?

Further resources

• Haven from the Holocaust, a one-hour radio documentary by North Country Public Radio; the oral histories above were collected partly for it.
• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's bibliography and article, "Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter".
• The War Refugee Board executive director's Final Summary Report of September 15, 1945, which assesses the Board's successes and failures; pages 64–69 cover Fort Ontario.

Sources

• National Park Service, "(H)our History Lesson: Fort Ontario, NY and Jewish Refugees in WWII America," by Alison Russell. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/-h-our-history-lesson-fort-ontario-ny-and-jewish-refugees-in-wwii-america.htm
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9417, "Establishing a War Refugee Board," January 22, 1944, via The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/210920
• "Oral Histories: Emergency Refugee Shelter at Fort Ontario (Safe Haven)," Special Collections, Penfield Library, SUNY Oswego. https://www.oswego.edu/library/safe-haven
• The original says these were the only refugees the United States took in during the war; others reached the country through the ordinary immigration quotas, so this page calls them the one group admitted as refugees outside the quotas.
• The original says the refugees stayed at the shelter for a year before Truman granted them resident status at the end of the war, and elsewhere that he granted them visas in 1946; this page gives neither timing.
• The original's class question refers to "Fort Oswego"; the fort is Fort Ontario, in Oswego.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.