Jared Kushner’s grandmother on life as a refugee: ‘Nobody wanted us’
As the Trump administration faces continued blowback over the executive order barring citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country, an interview with the late Rae Kushner, a Holocaust survivor and the grandmother of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has resurfaced.
The interview, given in 1982 to the Kean College of New Jersey Holocaust Resource Center, is now part of the archives at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In it, Kushner describes atrocities in Nazi-occupied Novogrudok, Poland, and laments America’s refusal to admit Jewish refugees. Her experiences echo those of refugees from Syria and the six other nations seeking safety in the United States.
“We felt the anti-Semitism,” Kushner recalled. “We felt something was coming, but we couldn’t help ourselves. The doors of the world were closed to us.”
Of her parents and three siblings, only Kushner, her father, and one sister survived. They escaped the ghetto through an underground tunnel and lived in the woods for nine months. Eventually Kushner boarded a train to Czechoslovakia by concealing her Jewish identity and walked through Austria and Hungary to Italy, where she lived with her husband for 3 1/2 years in a camp for displaced persons before being allowed into the United States.
Kushner said the Italian camp was “like being in the ghetto again” and described her desperation to leave Europe.
“We wanted to go to Africa, to Australia, to Israel,” she said. “We would go anywhere where we could live in freedom but nobody wanted us.” (What is now Israel was at that time part of the Palestine Mandate, under the control of Great Britain, which excluded most Jewish refugees.)
“Nobody opened their doors to us. Nobody wanted to take us in. So for three and a half years, we waited until we finally got a visa to come to the United States.”
Kushner also specifically invoked the St. Louis, a ship of German Jewish refugees that was turned away by Cuba and the United States in 1939. The day Trump signed the travel ban (also Holocaust Remembrance Day), a Twitter account under the handle @Stl_Manifest started posting the names of those passengers who were later killed in the Holocaust.
“For the Jews, the doors were closed,” Kushner said. “We never understood that.”
“Even President Roosevelt kept the doors closed. Why? The boat, St. Louis, was turned back. What was the world afraid of? I don’t understand.”
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website explains that ‘Public opinion in the United States, although ostensibly sympathetic to the plight of refugees and critical of Hitler’s policies, continued to favor immigration restrictions.’
Jared Kushner wrote about his grandparents’ experiences last summer in a letter defending his father-in-law against allegations of anti-Semitism. He warned that their story would be trivialized if “accusations like ‘racist’ and ‘anti-Semite’ are being thrown around with a carelessness that risks rendering these words meaningless.”
“I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points,” Kushner wrote in the New York Observer, the newspaper he owns.
Rae Kushner, who died in 2004, closes her interview marveling at the “miracle” that she and her husband were able to survive the Holocaust and prosper in the U.S.
“Our life is a miracle,” she said. “We survived the camps, the ghettos, and the woods.”
“It is a miracle that we lived to become normal people. Our lives are miracles, our children and grandchildren are miracles. We never dreamed that out of the ashes and rubble, we would survive to lead normal lives and see and build the next generation.”
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