The Lifeboat is Full

Fülszöveg

The
Lifeboat Is Full
ALFRED A, HASLER
Translated from the German by Charles Lam Markmann
During the turbulent years of World War II, Switzerland—oiRcially neutral, officially at peace-was in reality a moral battlefield. The representatives of her honored tradition as a place of asylum for the persecuted found themselves fighting the inhumane official refugee policy—the product of deeply entrenched but hitherto unrecognized forces of prejudice and self-interest—that shocked Switzerland into re-examining its moral right even to exist.
The Lifeboat Is Full is a documentary account of the response of the Swiss people and the Swiss bureaucracy to the plight of the refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany. It is the story of Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, of the Federal Justice and Police Department, who took it upon himself to preserve Switzerland's purity from "foreign-thinking elements" by turning back twenty-six hundred men, women, and children to certain death in the land they had fled. It... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The
Lifeboat Is Full
ALFRED A, HASLER
Translated from the German by Charles Lam Markmann
During the turbulent years of World War II, Switzerland—oiRcially neutral, officially at peace-was in reality a moral battlefield. The representatives of her honored tradition as a place of asylum for the persecuted found themselves fighting the inhumane official refugee policy—the product of deeply entrenched but hitherto unrecognized forces of prejudice and self-interest—that shocked Switzerland into re-examining its moral right even to exist.
The Lifeboat Is Full is a documentary account of the response of the Swiss people and the Swiss bureaucracy to the plight of the refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany. It is the story of Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, of the Federal Justice and Police Department, who took it upon himself to preserve Switzerland's purity from "foreign-thinking elements" by turning back twenty-six hundred men, women, and children to certain death in the land they had fled. It is the story of Councilor Albert Oeri, who pleaded "Must we be inhuman in the present for the sake of an uncertain future danger? . . . Must we stockpile inhumanity in advance? Must we fling fellow men out into misery and death when they flee to us for mercy, simply because there is a possibility that later things will go badly for us as well?" It is also the story of the journalists,
(continued on l)eick /lop) Vissza