The Kaumheimers were about to make it out of Italy alive. It was 1939, and the family of six had already left their German hometown of Stuttgart three years earlier when conditions for Jews worsened there. Now Julius and Selma were seeking to escape to the United States with their children Hans, Fritz, Ruth and Margaret.
“My mother didn’t want to leave,” Margaret Kaplan recalled in a 1990 interview with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project. “But my father convinced her.”
So leave they did, but not without a price. Italy’s Hitler-aligned fascist government would let them out only in exchange for their collection of roughly 69 porcelain figurines from 18th-century Europe. They had almost made it with their treasures, but the movers who came to pack up their possessions tipped off the Italian authorities.
Song of Democracy, Rogue Valley virtual events: April 30
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The Anti-Democratic Origins of the Jewish Establishment
WHEN THE FBI RAIDED Anti-Defamation League offices in 1993, the civil rights establishment was shocked. The ADL, a prominent anti-hate organization, was known for surveilling white supremacist groups and sharing intelligence with the FBI. But the raid revealed that it was also spying on organizations like the ACLU, the anti-Klan Center for Democratic Renewal, and local Jewish peace groups, which worked against racism and for human rights. The revelation that the ADL viewed these groups as threats “caused confusion for some liberals,” as
The New York Times put it; the organization had gone so far as to infiltrate small South African anti-Apartheid committees and Arab American community groups.