Gerhard Sonnert

What happened to the children who fled Nazi persecution

Introduction PARTI: EXODUS Who Left and Why? Through the Eyes of Children Destinations PART II: ADVENT Situation in the United States and Official Policy Organizations and Individuals Who Helped Arriving in America PART III: SETTLING IN From Refugees to Americans The Childrens Experience PART IV: SOCIOECONOMIC ACHIEVEMENTS The Success of Former Refugees: An Analysis Using Whos Who The Big Picture: Representative Data about our Immigrant Cohort from the United States Census Refugees from Central Europe and American-born Jews: A National Jewish Population Survey Analysis Socioeconomic Status: Our Sample PART V: PARTIAL ASSIMILATION: COMPLEX IDENTITIES Language Acquisition Elements of Distinctiveness Collective Identities: Ethnic Option vs. Universalism PART VI: INGREDIENTS OF SUCCESS General Conditions Distinctiveness Advantage and Cultural Capital Career Choice and Career Success Transmission of Social Status Other Effects: Family and Community Circumstances, Age at Arrival, Gender, and Identity Success out of Adversity PART VII: ANGUISH - PRIVATIZEDCOST: SOCIALIZED BENEFITS Enduring Trauma Anguish and Achievement Individual Trajectories PART VIII: EPILOGUE: LESSONS FOR CURRENT REFUGEES

Ingredients of Success

Having provided ample documentation for the socioeconomic success of the young refugees, as a group, we now turn to examining some of its possible causes. In particular, we are going to explore the idea that their cultural heritage (as well as their austere experiences during their youth) might have actually helped the former refugees thrive in the United States, in short, that they might have enjoyed a distinctiveness advantage.

Successful Young Refugees from Central Europe—Potential Lessons for Today

In the 1930s, the German government committed what amounts to the cultural, intellectual, and scientific self-decapitation of a nation by persecuting and driving away a large fraction of the luminaries of Central European Kultur—often to the benefit of the countries receiving these refugees. One probably has to go back several centuries, to the learned refugees who after the fall of Byzantium came to Italy and there provided a major trigger for the European Renaissance, for a historical parallel. Among the immigrants and refugees from Germany and Austria who escaped the National Socialist turmoil and came to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s were Hannah Arendt, Hans Bethe, Felix and Helene Deutsch, Albert Einstein, Erik Erikson, Kurt Godel, Walter Gropius, Friedrich von Hayek, Paul Hindemith, Paul Lazarsfeld, Thomas Mann, Herbert Marcuse, Erwin Panofsky, Erwin Piscator, Leo Szilard, Kurt Weill, Victor Weisskopf, and Billy Wilder—to name a few. These highly talented persons arrived as adults, in many cases already recognized and acclaimed. They brought with them powerful new ideas and ways of thinking that were of tremendous benefit and often transformed their fields in their newly adopted country. It is little wonder that a large volume of scholarly research has recognized and documented their seminal achievements and contributions.1

Anguish—Privatized Costs, Socialized Benefits

Some of the former refugees told us that they were keeping their pantries stocked with several months’ worth of supplies, always carrying their passports and important papers with them, and generally were living in preparation for a major emergency. They appeared to have never been able to regain the basic trust and confidence, prevalent among most people, that things will, by and large, turn out all right and that disasters will never occur, or at least very infrequently.

Epilogue: Lessons for Current Refugees

One of our interviewees pointed out that extreme situations polarize. They bring “into stark relief the positive and negative features of humankind. It’s like … our normal lives are in sepia. And … there is lots of evil in people which we don’t see mostly in this environment. It sometimes bursts out. And there’s also a great goodness in people, which we tend not to sec. And then an extreme period, like the period … leading up to the Second World War, and the Second World War, brings out the bad … the evil and the good and accentuates those things.”

Partial Assimilation—Complex Identities

In his classic conceptualization of the stage sequence of assimilation of immigrants, Milton Gordon (1964) maintained that acculturation usually preceded structural assimilation (that entails entrance into the social structures and institutions of the host society). Gordon’s model in a sense formalizes the stereotypical American Dream: Immigrants would start at the bottom rung of society while acquiring language skills and culturally becoming Americans. Once this was accomplished, they, and especially their offspring, would be able to enter fully into the civic and social life of America and to obtain elevated socioeconomic positions.