Existing comment:
Forced out by "political happenings":
"I was a tailor in Vienna and by the political happenings I was forced to leave Austria."
-- Geza Bata, in a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt
On the morning of March 12, 1938, the German army marched into Austria, beginning the Nazi takeover known as the Anschluss. German dictator Adolf Hitler followed his army into Austria and was greeted by cheering crowds with their arms raised, and with many holding flowers. After a three-day tour, Hitler declared, "the oldest eastern province of the German people shall be, from this point on, the newest bastion of the German Reich."
One month later, a Jewish tailor, Geza Bata, who had fed the Nazis to Budapest, Hungary, signed his name to a letter that meant life or death for him, and asked President Franklin Roosevelt for help to join his family in New York. Bata initially received a response from the State Department notifying him that it would be two to three years before his turn.
Bata eventually made it out of Hungary. He arrived in New York on January 2, 1939. Six months later, in June 1939, he declared his intent to become a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Letter from Geza Bata to President Roosevelt, April 12, 1938 |