In 942, a 5yearold German Jewish girl and her family vanished from the streets of Amsterdam. For two years, she and her family and four other Jews went into hiding, cramped in an annex, terrified to make a sound. On one fateful day in 944, the group heard footsteps approaching the hidden annex. The doorknob turned, the door swung open, and three members of the German secret police stood at the entrance. The Nazis arrested the group and sent them out on cattle cars to Auschwitz. Eight people went into hiding in that secret annex; only one survived the Holocaust. The 5yearold girls story, from hiding to a death camp, serves as a constant reminder of human apathy and evil. But there could have been a different story, a story in which the U.S. didnt deny the familys visa application, a story in which Anne Frank didnt die in the Holocaust. The narrative of Anne Frank is similar to that of many other Jewish refugees who applied for sanctuary in America during the Holocaust but were ins
tead forsaken. Throughout Hitlers genocide from 933945, 6 million of the 9.3 million Jews that lived in Nazi-occupied Europe were exterminated, and 76,000 of the 270,000 German Jews who applied for refuge in the U.S. were denied asylum. Given the vast amount of Jewish families that were displaced during the Second World War, it is important to examine the circumstances in the United States that led its citizens and government to abandon so many indigent refugees. Ultimately, America rejected a myriad of Jewish immigrants during the Holocaust due to stringent immigration policies, enacted before the start of World War II, which restricted the groups of people that were allowed to enter the country and limited the annual immigrant quota, and exceptions were not made to these policies because the majority of Americans did not want to take in any immigrants, Jewish or not and because prominent antisemites and antisemitic communities deliberately campaigned against U.S. rescue efforts.