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Urgent: seeking sponsors

Affidavits from at least two relatives, not to mention documents from banks and police departments… Kurt struggles with high hurdles to emigration

“It goes without saying that we wrote and are writing to any and all our acquaintances all over the world, but haven't yet had any positive results until now.”

Genoa/East Springfield, PA

Not a long letter, only a brief postcard was sent to Ludwig Guckenheimer from his old friend Kurt. Yet these few lines give a vivid impression of the situation in which his friend found himself. Kurt had sent the postcard from Genoa on the 14th of September. He’d been trying to prepare his emigration from there for some time. Kurt knew “that it’s time to rush.” Until now he’d failed for lack of money, but most of all from lack of sponsors. Many countries had massively heightened financial and bureaucratic hurdles to immigration in recent years. The United States for example expected, alongside numerous official certificates, at least two affidavits from close relatives. But Kurt wasn’t discouraged. Hope lay in efforts by his brother-in-law in Dallas.


SOURCE

Institution:

Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin

Collection:

Gertrude Guckenheimer Collection, AR 10042

Original:

Box 1, folder 5

 

on the days before