Half of my grandfather’s family made it out of Poland before World War II. The other half didn’t and were killed. My grandfather’s brother was one who did leave Poland. He was known as Shmulke (Shmuel or Sam) Wierzbowicz, and in this post I explore his journey from Poland to America. As with most Eastern European Jews trying to get to America in the late 1920s and 1930s, his path to the United States was not an easy one. That path, like my grandfather’s, was dictated by the restrictive American immigration laws.

My grandfather landed on American shores on March 30, 1927. He got to America from his native town of Zambrow, Poland, by escaping from the Polish Army, entering illegally into Germany, making his way to Palestine, and then receiving permission from the British authorities to come to the United States. (Here is the story of his road to American citizenship.) He was the first of his immediate family to come to the United States. His presence in America made it easier for siblings to dream of joining him here.

How, however, could he immigrate to the United States? In the 1920s, the rising tide of nativism led to increasingly restrictive immigration laws aimed specifically at Asians and persons from Southern and Eastern Europe (mainly Italians, Slavs and Jews). In 1921, Congress limited immigration by instituting quotas based on national origin. (Immigration of Asians had been, and continued to be, banned completely.) Under the Emergency Act of 1921, only 3% of the number of specific nationalities living in the U.S., as counted by the 1910 census, were allowed to immigrate annually. Three years later, the Emergency Act was replaced by an even more restrictive law, the Johnson-Reed Act–a law that would govern U.S. immigration for the next 40 years.

The Johnson-Reed Act reduced the quota from 3% to 2%. But instead of basing its quotas on the 1920 census, Congress changed the reference census to 1890. There were many more people from Southern and Eastern Europe in the U.S. in 1920 than in 1890, so changing the reference census had the effect of further reducing immigration from these areas. Had, for example, the 1920 census data been used, the annual quota for Polish nationals would have been about 31,000; by using the 1890 census, that number was reduced to about 6,000 a year. (Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 51-52).

Indeed, the Johnson-Reed Act was so restrictive that, in 1924, more people from Southern and Eastern Europe left the United States than arrived as immigrants. In 1929, the quotas were adjusted to one-sixth of 1% of the 1920 census figures, and the overall immigration limit reduced to 150,000. The following table demonstrates how the law favored immigrants from Western Europe, from which few people wanted to immigrate to the U.S., over those from every other area of the globe:

The 1924 law not only changed the quantity of immigration, but also how a person could immigrate. It established a “consular control system” of immigration, mandating that no person could legally enter the United States without an immigration visa issued by an American consular officer abroad. Consular officers were authorized to issue visas to eligible applicants, but the number of visas that could annually be issued by each consulate was limited, and no more than 10% of the quota could be given out in any one month. Thus, for the first time, people were not permitted to board a ship bound for the U.S. without possessing a valid visa.

Shmulke, born on April 26, 1906, was 18 years old at the time of the 1924 law. I have only one photograph of him, as a young boy in Zambrow, around 10 years old, with his older sister Chanche and his younger sister Chaya Sara.

From the little I know about Shmulke, gathered from oral histories of my aunt and great aunt, he was an independent soul, never deeply attached to the family unit. I’m sure his father expected him to go into the family business, which involved extracting and selling oil from seeds. After his brother, my grandfather, left Poland in 1921, Shmulke was his father’s only son remaining in Zambrow.

Shmulke, however, had no intention of remaining in Poland. He was 13 when Poland, after World War I, became an independent country. He was too young, fortunately, to be drafted into the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920-1921 as was his older brother, but he must have heard about his ill-treatment and subsequent escape. As Shmulke entered his late teens, with the expectation of beginning a profession, he saw a Poland that offered little prospect of a productive and rewarding life. As a new nation, Poland was economically unstable. After the Polish-Soviet war ended in 1921, Poland entered a period of hyperinflation owing to the cost of the war. The rollout of a new currency in 1925, the Zloty, led to economic depression, a collapse in the currency’s value, a new round of inflation as well as a banking crisis.

Moreover, Polish nationalism led to increasing anti-Semitism. There were pogroms in some Polish cities in the early 1920s, though none in Zambrow itself. Zambrow, however, located in Eastern Poland, was not far away from the Ukraine, where, following the end of World War I, up to 2,000 pogroms took place with casualties as high as 150,000. Despite the fact that many Jews fought in the Polish army, Jews were accused of identifying with communism and of having collaborated with the Soviets during the war. Catholicism, with its long history of anti-Semitic beliefs, was Poland’s dominant religion. Polish nationalists tended to believe that, given its history with its powerful neighbors, Germany and Russia, Poland had to be “strong, united, and ethnically pure. . . . Nationalists also tended to agree that Jews actively opposed the Polish national project due, in part, to their religion, deemed as inherently hostile to Christian Poles.”

And so, sometime in his early 20s, Shmulke decided to join his brother in America. But how was Shmulke going to obtain a visa? He could have gone to the American consulate in Warsaw and filled out an application, but obtaining one was no certainty given that only some 6,000 slots existed for the tens or hundreds of thousands of Poles who wanted to immigrate to the United States. Obtaining a visa, assuming he could ever get one, would likely have taken years.

Shmulke was not alone among his generation of Polish Jews who dreamed of making their lives elsewhere. Sefer Zambrow, the Zambrow Yizkor book, reports on any number of people who left Zambrow during the mid-1920s. Shmulke undoubtedly discussed various immigration strategies with his fellow Zambrow Jews and heard stories of compatriots who had managed to make it to the United States. (Unlike my grandfather, Shmulke apparently had no Zionist aspirations to live in Palestine.)

There were various immigration strategies available to Shmulke, involving either violating U.S. immigration law or somehow getting around the quotas. The strictness of America’s immigration laws, combined with the desperation felt by many Eastern European Jews, led to a variety of schemes to evade its provisions. As Libby Garland explains in her recent work, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1965, “the Jewish migration experience in Europe had long been characterized by such illicit practices [such as forgeries and smuggling] to the extent that illegal border crossings had become the norm. . . . Buying and selling on the black market, smuggling, assuming fake identities, and obtaining forged papers were, particularly in the chaos that followed World War I, facts of life” (Garland, pp. 130-131).

Moreover, while the quota system was based on national origin, Shmulke, like many Polish Jews, did not identify as a Pole. He grew up in Zambrow, which was under Russian rule until 1915 and then German occupation until the end of World War I. As Garland notes, “National identities were not always clear to people from a region in which borders and sovereign control had long been violently contested” (Garland, 132). Why would Shmulke have felt bound by the quota of persons from Poland when he himself did not identify with the Polish state and when his own brother had fled the Polish army? Given their long history of oppression by various governments, Jews had learned to maintain an arms-length relationship to the state and had developed various strategies to avoid officialdom.

Other than resorting to outright forgery and smuggling, the key to post-1924 Jewish immigration to the U.S. was to evade the effect of the quota laws by entering the country as a “non quota” immigrant. There were certain exemptions to the quotas, such as specialized employment categories and marriage to an American citizen. But there also was a loophole to the 1924 immigration law, one that Shmulke aimed to exploit. The quotas did not apply to immigrants coming from the Western Hemisphere.

The reason for this exemption had nothing to do with offering Europeans a circuitous route to American citizenship. Rather, it had to do with the need for cheap agricultural labor in the Southwestern United States. The expansion of the U.S. and the development of agriculture in California’s Central Valley greatly increased the need for cheap labor, which was filled mainly by Mexicans. When the 1924 law was debated in Congress, the restrictionists wanted to extend the quota to New World immigration, but were blocked by agricultural interests. They did succeed, however, in raising  the number of years a person had to live in a New World country in order to immigrate from one year under the 1921 Act to five years. (Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, p. 52).

And so Jews in Shmulke’s shoes could try to immigrate to the U.S. by going to Canada, Mexico or a Central or South American country and then using that country as a stepping stone to enter the United States. That is exactly what Shmulke decided to do. One day, Shmulke, according to my great aunt, left home. He didn’t say goodbye to his parents or sisters. Perhaps that is when he gave a postcard to a friend, the only writing I have from Shmulke. In it, he wrote: “I give you this picture in everlasting memory to my dear friend Shimon, from Shmuel Wierzbowicz, Zambrow, the 18th day of Sivan.”

We don’t know for certain where Shmulke went when he left home, but it was probably to Warsaw, where he was able to obtain some immigration papers, and then to one of the Polish port cities, Gdansk or Gdynia. From there he boarded a ship bound for the Americas. His destination: Cuba.

Why Cuba? First, of course, was its proximity to the United States, lying only 90 miles south of Florida. Second, Cuba and the U.S. were intertwined politically and economically. The U.S. had occupied Cuba several times from 1898-1924, and while Cuba was nominally independent, the U.S. maintained enormous influence over the island. Most Cuban exports were sold in the United States. Third, Cuba was a well-known destination for immigration to the United States. Both the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) as well as the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) had offices in Havana to assist Cuban Jews with loans and travel documents. Lastly, Cuba had a relatively tolerant attitude toward its Jewish population. Havana’s mayor even participated in the 1935 celebration of the 800th anniversary of the birth of Maimonides. As one historian concludes, “Cuba represented a safe haven for religious tolerance and presented opportunities for economic mobility. Within a relatively short time period, Jews were able to assimilate into Cuban culture and establish themselves as an integral part of the community.”

Shmulke wasn’t the only Jew to hatch this plan. By the time Shmulke arrived in Cuba, most likely sometime in the late 1920s, it had a population of at least 10,000 Jews or, by some estimates, up to 24,000 Jews.  Jews from Turkey and Syria had begun immigrating to Cuba as early as 1902. For these Sephardic Jews, Cuba was a logical destination since their native tongue, Ladino, was similar to Spanish. More Jews continued to arrive after World War I, both from Eastern Europe and the former Ottoman Empire. So many Jews immigrated to Cuba, using it as a jumping off point to immigrate to the U.S., that it became known as “akhsanie Kuba” (hotel Cuba). Of the twenty-five thousand Jews who entered Cuba from 1918-1947, nearly half of them left, mostly to the United States.

Many of Cuba’s Jews went into commerce, making a living in the garment industry, especially in the manufacturing and sales of shoes. In the early 1930s, “Jews began opening up their own shops, producing cheap and functional shoes. Within a few years, there were 150 shoe factories owned by Jews in Cuba that employed 6000 to 8000 workers” (Steinberg, p. 6).

Shmulke must have met landsmen, fellow Polish Jews, with whom he discussed various options for immigrating to the United States. “Many European Jews learned about their options somewhere along their journey from fellow migrants to whom they might turn for financial assistance or local advice. In port cities and transit hubs, there was a lively culture of talk about the best means, both legal and illegal, of getting to the United States” (Garland, p. 129).

Sometime in the 1930s, Shmulke immigrated to the United States. How did he get to the U.S. from Cuba? I have located no records of his immigration. (Records of migration to and from Cuba are scanty and no records of his travels apparently exist.) There are a number of possibilities.

Perhaps he resided in Cuba for five years and then was able to obtain a valid U.S. visa. But not necessarily. Cuba was a notorious location for smuggling operations into the United States. In 1932, the American counsel in Havana estimated that “something on the order of thirty-one thousand Europeans, about eighteen thousand of them Jews, may have been smuggled in through Cuba alone in the years since the quotas” (Garland, p. 94). One common route for smugglers from Havana was to travel first to Canada from where the immigrants snuck into the U.S. on the lightly secured border. (Garland, p. 104). Some entered the United States by stowing away on an American steamer. (Garland, p. 139). Another possibility is that Shmulke obtained a fake document that attested to his residence in Cuba for five years, documents readily available in Cuba for the right price. At least one person who worked for the U.S. consul in Havana was known to have sold fraudulent visas. (Garland, p. 114).

To the extent Shmulke employed any of these illegal methods, it is likely that my grandfather was in on the scheme. Shmulke would have undoubtedly been in touch with his brother and informed him of his ongoing plans to enter the United States. Perhaps my grandfather sent him money or guaranteed his support. “Family members in the United States . . . were often intimately involved with their relatives’ illegal immigration, even if they themselves had entered the country legally. They put up capital for the trip, corroborated fraudulent stories when necessary, and provided homes and other means of support for immigrants once they entered the United States” (Garland, p. 146).

After Shmulke arrived in U.S., he moved in with my grandfather’s family. By then he had changed his last name, as had my grandfather, from Wierzbowicz to Waxman. He lived with them for a few years until he married. I know little of his life afterwards, other than that my grandparents did not like his wife (they thought she was too much of a commoner). There is one detail, however, I was able to locate through genealogical research. In 1940, at the age of 34, Shmulke, then going by the name Sam Waxman, lived in Brooklyn. He had to fill out a draft registration card for the U.S. Army. On the card, he listed his birthplace of Zambrow and his Brooklyn address. He had not yet obtained his American citizenship, for he wrote “Russia” as his “country of citizenship.” He also listed his occupation. He had apparently used his experience in Cuba to find employment, not surprisingly, at a shoe store, Wear Best Footwear.

If my research revealed anything about Shmulke, it is that he possessed one particular character trait: resourcefulness. As a young man in the 1920, growing up in the small town of Zambrow, he correctly concluded that he had no viable future for himself in the new Polish state. He was determined to make a life for himself in America, just as his older brother was attempting to do. He knew that getting to America would not be easy, but he assessed his options and came up with a clever plan to evade the quota laws. In doing so, he secured his own as well as his descendents’ survival. The remainder of his family he left behind in Zambrow, with the exception of his father and his younger sister, would not be so fortunate.