Some 75,000 Jews fled war‐torn Galicia for Vienna, the capital of the Austro‐Hungarian monarchy. Another 25,000 sought shelter in Budapest, the empire’s other capital. There they received the charity of imperial officials and private Jewish groups, who tried to provide the refugees with a minimum of care and shelter.
However, most of the people in both cities had little sympathy or understanding for the refugees and recoiled from their unwelcome presence. Soon Galician Jews were linked to worsening social tensions. In Vienna they were blamed for wartime food shortages; in Budapest, for the acute and growing lack of housing. In both places, the Jewish refugee came to symbolize profiteering, criminality, and black marketeering in the pages of the right‐wing press and in the speeches of rabble‐rousing politicians.
The furor over the “flood” of refugees even provoked a debate in Hungary’s most prominent sociological journal about whether or not Jews could truly assimilate into Hungarian society. The editors invited responses from leading intellectuals and tried to maintain a dispassionate tone, but the episode fueled ever more toxic anti‐Jewish language. By 1918, doubts about the willingness of Jews to fight were being voiced in Hungarian newspapers.
In Évian‐les‐Baines, France, in July 1938, an early international effort was made, or at least feigned, to alleviate something more common in recent decades: a refugee crisis. The crisis was the [Fascist] treatment of Jews. The representatives of 32 nations and 63 organizations, plus some 200 journalists covering the event, were well aware of the [Fascist] desire to expel all Jews from Germany and Austria, and somewhat aware that the fate that awaited them if not expelled was likely going to be death.
The decision of the conference was essentially to leave the Jews to their fate. (Only Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic increased their immigration quotas.) The decision to abandon the Jews was driven primarily by antisemitism, which was widespread among the diplomats in attendance and among the publics they represented. Video footage from the conference is available on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.²¹
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