Suzanne Krauthamer Gurwitz remembers little about the 18 months she spent at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Center in Oswego. She was five when she, her parents and two older brothers arrived at the former military post near Lake Ontario.
“Like other children, I played,” said Gurwitz, 80, of Plainview, New York. “I don’t remember being unhappy.”
Gurwitz was among 982 refugees at Fort Ontario, the only US shelter for Europeans fleeing World War II. Of the 30 surviving refugees, 19 attended a 75th anniversary reunion on 5th August. The event commemorated the 1944 arrival of refugees in the small upstate New York city.
Survivors and their families crowded Safe Haven Holocaust Refugee Shelter Museum, once the shelter’s administration building, and wandered the Fort Ontario State Historic Site. More than 200 people attended a memorial under heightened security. Some guests expressed concern for their safety, an official said, citing the weekend’s mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
Several former refugees and Oswego residents didn’t want to talk about those worries or about the Trump administration’s policies barring asylum-seekers. Instead, the former refugees, surrounded by descendants and greeting old friends, were eager to talk about how they came to live at the shelter.
Gurwitz, born in Paris to Polish Jews, remembers crossing the Alps and hiding in the woods before her family ended up living with nuns and priests in Rome in 1943. In June 1944, her father learned a ship would soon leave Naples, Italy, for a shelter in the United States.
By then, the Nazis had killed about five million European Jews.
Read the article by Renee K Gadua in Sight Magazine.