I must admit not having a whole lot of sympathy for Jewish people who IN 1939... “felt an irresistible yearning to return for a visit to her home town in Poland to see her family there,” taking her whole family along...
Hitler and the Nazis had already made it abundantly clear they planned to eliminate the Jews in Europe....for anyone who cared to listen, and his military aggressiveness was abundantly clear.
I know 20/20 hindsight is clear, but still, even given the limited information available to them then, going anywhere near Germany in the late ‘30s, seems incredibly, and even willingly, naive and foolish.
That seems to be a pretty harsh statement to me.Yes,in hindsight it was a very unfortunate and unwise decision.But at the time what reasonable person could have foretold,with any certainty,what Hitler was going to do? Think back to that scene in Schindler's List where the women are in their bunks in the concentration camp talking about the rumors of gas chambers.Several of them noted that it was beyond illogical for the Nazis to kill their "workforce".And that was *while* they were *in* the camp.Remember....nothing even remotely resembling what Hitler did from the late 30's until his death was ever widely reported to the general public.It was truly unprecedented in the minds of the typical Westerner.