BELGIUM: New museum tells tale of millions of U.S.-bound migrants, including Albert Einstein

Record ID: 574424

  • Title: BELGIUM: New museum tells tale of millions of U.S.-bound migrants, including Albert Einstein
  • Date: 25th September 2013
  • Summary: STILL PHOTO INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION SHOWING PASSENGERS WAITING AT A CONTROL ONCE IN THE UNITED STATES
  • Embargoed: 10th October 2013 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Belgium
  • Country: Belgium
  • Topics: History,People
  • Reuters ID: LVAB2S7VJZW1L7Q3S6D7KHW0X8G0
  • Story Text: Albert Einstein, composer Irving Berlin and two million others took Red Star Line steam ships to a new life in North America, a stream of emigration commemorated by a museum opening in the Belgian port city of Antwerp.
    Together with the Canadian Pacific and Cunard Lines, some 2.5 million people boarded ships in Antwerp bound for the United States and Canada.
    Only about 200,000 of them were Belgians. The vast majority arrived by train from central and eastern Europe. Many were escaping hardship, pogroms and military service that could stretch to 20 years in the Russian empire. In the final years to 1934, many were fleeing the Nazis.
    Housed in the administration and medical control centre for third class passengers, the museum opening this Saturday (September 28) shows the often harsh conditions voyagers endured from 1873-1934 bound first for Philadelphia, later for New York's Ellis Island.
    Antwerp city tourism described the Red Star Line Museum as "Ellis Island on the Schelde River", referring to the city's river from which the liners left.
    In a further link, architects Beyer Blinder Belle led renovations at Ellis Island and in Antwerp, topping the Red Star Line's red brick building with an observation tower like a ship's funnel.
    About a quarter of all the emigrants that travelled on the Red Star Line ships were Jewish.
    Among them was Sonia Pressman Fuentes, one of the few passengers still alive. She was just five when she boarded the SS Westernland in 1934 with her Polish-born parents and 19-year-old brother, leaving behind a men's clothing store in Berlin.
    Stuck in Antwerp for nine months, trying to find a new home and struggling to stay in Belgium, they chose the promise of America with Red Star Line tickets. She explained how her family's voyage saved their lives.
    "Well that wasn't so easy, first we came to Antwerp and my father spent nine months trying to find a way to make a living in Belgium and he went to other countries to try to make a living, France and wherever and nothing worked out. And then my father read in the newspaper that ships were leaving for the United States, in the Jewish newspaper, and he said to my mother 'why don't we go?'. So we were able to get visas and come to the United States and we came on the Westerland and when we were on the ship I learnt from Andy that the federal police came to our apartment in Antwerp to deport us to Poland. But we were already on the ship," she told Reuters television on a visit to the museum this week.
    The museum shows the point where third class passengers dropped off their bags to be sterilised in steam chambers and the area they took showers, of up to 40 minutes each, with vinegar and benzene to clean and remove lice.
    Up a flight of stairs, doctors awaited to check if the passengers were healthy enough for entry into the United States, which would turn away those with infectious disorders, such as eye disease trachoma.
    Red Star had to bring back those turned away at Ellis Island. Overall some 2 percent of migrants were rejected.
    Nine-year-old Ita Moel was one of those sent back from Ellis Island in 1922, due to trachoma. Her brother Morris recounts in a video, how their mother made the painful choice of letting her return alone. She tried and failed again a year later. Finally, in 1927, at her third attempt, she was reunited with her family.
    Six-year-old Ethel Belfer failed to gain entry into America in 1923 because she was mentally disabled. She returned with an aunt to Romania, then Russia, dying of starvation in 1929.
    Notable passengers included composer Irving Berlin, then known as Israel Baline, the father of Fred Astaire and Golda Meir, who became Israel's fourth prime minister, as Antwerp city culture senator Philip Heylen highlighted.
    "These buildings here were just constructed for third class passengers -no first or second class passengers ever passed here, it was only third class, but among them Golda Meir, among them Irving Berlin, and then of course also Einstein or Admiral Rickover, who made the nuclear sub[marines] the way we know them know and there was the father of Fred Astaire and there was Arthur Murray and Douglas Fairbanks and all the others, they all travelled to America with Red Star Line," he said.
    Albert Einstein travelled to and from the United States on Red Star liners, finally heading out on the SS Westernland in 1933 after learning the Nazis had confiscated his possessions.
    The museum includes a letter written on Red Star Line stationary tendering his resignation from the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
    Heylen, whose great uncle took the Red Star Line in the 1890s and a driving force behind the museum, says some 40 million people now in North America could trace ancestors back to Antwerp.
    "This is the story of millions of people with one common same dream: hope, hope of a new life. And that hope for a new life is exactly what is in here. And we tell the story of Red Star Line of what happened between 1873 and 1925 in a very contemporary way, because it's a very contemporary story, but we do it with respect and in memory of all the people that somehow stood in these old buildings and, what I always say is that if you would put your hand or your ear on the walls you'll probably hear somewhere their thoughts, their feelings and their emotions," Heylen said.
    Fictional character Vito Corleone also wears a Red Star Lines identification card on arrival at Ellis Island in the Godfather Part II.
    Between 1815 and 1930, some 60 million people left Europe to settle in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.
    Hamburg, the departure point for some five million migrants, opened emigration museum, BallinStadt, in 2007.
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