| Review of: | Dear Dr Janzow: Australia's Lutheran Churches and Refugees from Hitler's Germany edited by Peter Monteath |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Julia Pitman |
| Reviewed in: | Australian Journal of Politics and History |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 53, Issue 03, Pages 465-504 |
Book Reviews
This publication was prepared to accompany an exhibition of correspondence held at the South Australian Migration Museum in 2006, which has been repeated at the Sydney Jewish Museum. The collection contains over seventy letters from German, Swiss and Austrian Jews and
The volume is an example of Lutheran concern for scholarship, from the preservation of records within family and church, to enlisting a qualified academic to set the records in context. Dr Lois Zweck, President of the Friends of the Lutheran Archives, alerted Monteath to the material. Monteath then began to trace the fates of the correspondents. With assistance from Yad Vashem, Israel, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, he identified the destinies of about half of them. The publication combines extensive knowledge of the Holocaust, a revision of the South Australian Lutheran response to Hitler and the text of letters where the correspondent's fate could be determined. While Janzow had read the letters, no reply or forwarded correspondence survived.
The origins of the Janzow correspondence lay in the joint action of his church and the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia, to assist the migration of non-Aryan Christians. Those who arrived in Australia from 1934 then sought to assist further migrants trying to escape Hitler. Monteath shows how Australia's limited refugee policy, bureaucratic processes among governments both in Europe and Australia, and the outbreak of the Second World War thwarted the attempts of many Jews and non-Aryan Christians to come to Australia. Only the dependent relatives of those who were already in Australia had much hope of emigrating. Few of Janzow's correspondents eventually arrived in Australia. Some managed to escape to other countries and many
Janzow sought to help Jews through fundraising and loans to assist their passage to Australia and find employment. Motivated by revulsion at the "pagan" pogrom, he appealed to a Lutheran consciousness that "would never forget" how, in the nineteenth century, the British had helped their Prussian forebears migrate to South Australia, a colony of religious and civic freedom. Monteath could have drawn out the theological significance of these sentiments, which were a Protestant variation on a Levitical commandment that required Israelites to treat aliens as citizens. Why this command? "for you were aliens in the land of Egypt" (Lev 19: 34). Despite the fact that there were anti-semitic views among Australian Christians and Lutherans were often concerned for their co-religionists before others, it may also be worthwhile to assess the response of Australian Christians to the Holocaust through the perspective of their dependence on Jewish thought.
Publication of the Janzow correspondence is already greatly appreciated by Holocaust survivors, their descendants and the wider scholarly community. Monteath's commentary on the letters has further enhanced their "capacity to reach us across the decades and to [...] remind us of the importance of preserving our common humanity and of the costs of losing it" (p. 3).