Event History
On June 12, 1944, President Roosevelt sent a message to Congress announcing that he was establishing an Emergency Refugee Shelter at Fort Ontario, a US Army camp in Oswego, NY. Relief and rescue organizations, as well as interested members of the public, had been suggesting bringing refugees under the threat of Nazi persecution to the United States for a number of months. At the beginning of March 1944, the War Refugee Board prepared a memo proposing the opening of safe havens (also called free ports) in the United States for refugees, where they would be admitted outside of American immigration quotas and repatriated to Europe at the end of the war. The project was presented to Roosevelt in May 1944. He was supportive of it, but feared his critics in Congress would attack the idea. So, the President asked the WRB to find an emergency situation which the removal of refugees would ameliorate. At the time, the WRB was receiving reports that refugee camps in Italy were almost full and the American military had issued a directive discouraging refugees fleeing to Italy from Yugoslavia. The WRB’s director, John Pehle, presented the situation to President Roosevelt, who issued instructions that the movement of refugees to Italy should not be discouraged, and used the situation to formally approve the establishment of a refugee shelter. In early June 1944, the camp of Fort Ontario was selected to house the refugees. WRB representative Leonard Ackermann traveled to Italy and interviewed interested refugees. In total, 982 refugees were selected for the Fort Ontario project. Seventy-five per cent of the group came from transit camps in southern Italy, including Bari, Ferramonti, Santa Maria di Bagni and Compagna, and twenty-five per cent from Rome, where most had been living in hiding until the recent withdrawal of the Germans. Approximately 165 of the refugees were children below the age of seventeen. In order to avoid complaints, officials recruited non-Jews as well as Jews. Still, Jewish refugees constituted 918 of the 982 members of the group, representing fourteen nationalities. The group was assembled in Aversa, Italy and set sail aboard the Henry Gibbins, a US Army transport vessel. The ship arrived in New York on August 5, and the refugees were taken to Fort Ontario near the town of Oswego in upstate New York. Their eighteen month sojourn at the shelter was a frustrating experience for the refugees. At first their freedom was severely restricted. They were not permitted to work or serve in the army. Their contact with the outside world was extremely limited. Requests to live with or visit relatives in the US were denied. Though rudimentary cultural, political and social organizations eventually came into being, they were plagued by divisiveness among their members. Following V-E Day, pressure from Jewish groups, relief agencies, Congressmen and members of Truman's cabinet, led to the Truman Directive of December 1945, which permitted the immigration to the United States of displaced persons in America's zones of occupation and removed restrictions on war refugees already in the US.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-war-refugee-board.
Biography
Simon Krauthamer (born Zigmund Krauthamer) is the son of Naftali and Rosa Krauthamer, who had moved to Germany from Galicia in the interwar period. Zigmund was born in Hanover, Germany in 1932. He had two siblings, Julius (b. 1933) and Suzanne (b. 1939). The family left Germany for France in 1935 and settled in Paris. After the fall of France, Zigmund and his brother went to live with a French family in Deols, while his parents and baby sister hid elsewhere. Later the family was reunited in the town of Saint-Martin Vesubie in southern France, which in November 1942 became part of the Italian occupied zone. In September l943 after the Germans occupied the Italian zone, the Krauthamers escaped on foot with a large group of refugees over the Alps into Italy. However, upon crossing the border they discovered that that area too had come under Nazi occupation. Zigmund and his brother found shelter in the San Leone Maggio Fratelli Maristi boarding school in Rome, while his mother and sister went into hiding in an Italian convent. In July 1944 the family was reunited after being selected for the War Refugee Board's Free Ports program, which brought 983 European refugees to the Fort Ontario refugee camp in Oswego, New York. The Krauthamers remained at Fort Ontario for the duration of the war.
