The great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe

In 1899 a young Jewish woman published a harrowing account of her journey through Germany in 1894, based on Yiddish letters she had written during the journey. Maryashe (Mary) Antin’s travelogue From Plotzk to Boston stands out as one of the few detailed contemporary descriptions of a migrant journey from the Russian Empire to America.

In the spring of 1894, when she was thirteen years old, Maryashe, together with her mother and sisters, left her hometown of Polotzk in northern Russia to join her father, who had moved to Boston in 1891. The family’s journey resembled that of thousands of other Jews. Usually, a young father would follow an acquaintance or relative, find employment, save sufficient funds, secure housing, and send prepaid tickets to his family. After the tickets arrived in early 1894, Maryashe, her sisters, and her mother embarked on the journey.

At the German border they were denied passage because they did not carry enough cash. But a member of a Jewish aid association managed to get them across the border. They boarded an overcrowded train specifically designed for transmigrants. The train was sealed and did not stop at regular stations. After passing through Berlin the train came to a halt in a deserted area a few miles west of the city. The conductors rushed the tired and confused passengers off the train. A group of Germans in white overalls, screaming orders, separated men from women and children, throwing the luggage on a big pile. Antin describes a scene of utter chaos as the terrified travelers were driven into a small building.

“Here we had been taken to a lonely place. . . . Our things were taken away, our friends separated from us; a man came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value; strange-looking people driving us about like dumb animals, helpless and unresisting; children we could not see crying in a way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a little room.”

The migrants had to strip naked, were washed with soap, and showered with warm water. The German officials urged the migrants to hurry.

“They persist, ‘Quick! Quick!—or you’ll miss the train!’—Oh, so we really won’t be murdered! They are only making us ready for the continuing of our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous germs. Thank God!”

Antin’s harrowing account appears to eerily foreshadow the experiences of Jews who were deported by the Nazi regime to concentration and extermination camps between 1941 and 1945. But can we draw a line from the disinfection of Jewish (and other) migrants from the Russian Empire traversing Germany in the 1890s to the Holocaust?

The procedures for Russian transmigrants in Germany were implemented in part because the United States demanded it. Disinfections of migrants and travelers became common towards the end of the 19^th century in different parts of the world, for pilgrims heading to Mecca, Russian settlers moving to Siberia, and during the First World War on the U.S. Mexico border. The growing importance of public health regulations was one facet of unprecedented mass mobility and migration around the globe during the second half of the 19^th century. A cholera epidemic in Hamburg, a major port for Jewish and other migrants from the Russian Empire traveling to the United States, claimed thousands of victims in the summer and fall months of 1892. In 1893 the United States imposed a quarantine requirement for all Russian migrants. And in 1893/94 disinfection procedures were implemented by the German authorities and the steamship lines along the main transit routes and at major transit points along the Russian border.

_{Featured image: Immigrants at Ellis Island undergoing a medical inspection by The New York Public Library via Unsplash.}