Some time ago, Yitz Twersky of New York found a page torn from a magazine showing his mother-in-law, Ernestine, two years old at the time, with her parents at Ellis Island. While this was exciting, there was no information which magazine it appeared in.

However, Twersky noticed tiny print alongside the picture that identified the photographer: Ollie Atkins. As Mr. Twersky soon discovered, Ollie Atkins was a big name in photography — a renowned photojournalist who took award-winning photos of history makers like Truman; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Richard Nixon and others. In fact, Atkins served for several years as the White House photographer.

The search for Ollie Atkins led to a repository of the photographers’ work at George Mason University. Fortunately, Atkins was a meticulous record-keeper, who kept exhaustive lists of his work. The curators at the Atkins collection identified Mr. Twersky’s photo as one that accompanied a 1949 article in The Saturday Evening Post, entitled “They Do Anything to Get Into the U.S.A.”

Twersky was over the moon. The archivist could practically hear him leaping for joy over the phone. How did his mother-in-law react? “She was crying,” Twersky told us. “I went online and found an old copy of January 29, 1949, Saturday Evening Post so she would have the original issue.”

The manifest for the ship that took Rabbi Kresch and his family to America. He was number 16 on the list.
Courtesy of Yitz Twersky

Mr. Twersky even e-mailed us a copy of the ship’s manifest from 1948 that his in-laws had kept all these years, showing Rabbi Feiwel Kresch as number sixteen on the list, with his wife Mala and tiny Ernestine (our reader’s future mother-in-law) listed below him. “This is the document that’s in front of the official in the photo,” Mr. Twersky informed us.

Little Ernestine’s parents had escaped Nazi-run Poland, eventually surviving an arduous journey to France. The Post article, (link below) shares many stories, humorous to pitiable, about what immigrants would do to beat the quotas and gain admittance to American soil. But Mr. Twersky’s tale gave us a new slant as to why people were so desperate. As tragic as WWII Europe was, the post-war years were brutally bleak as well. The U.S. was still determined to keep out “undesirables,” and post-war Europe was hoping to avert the next war by insisted displaced people return to their homeland, no matter how unhealthy that would be for them.

The few who managed to reach America found that the quota set for their country had already been filled. Men of the cloth were among the exceptions to the quotas, so Rabbi Kresch and his family were duly admitted. Below is a photo of Ernestine today, a pretty lady with her own grandchildren.

Yitz Twersky's mother-in-law, Ernestine, today. She was two years old when she appeared in the Post.
Photo courtesy of Yitz Twersky

The 1949 article was by James McFarland, an American visa official who had the often unenviable task of permitting or denying admittance to the U.S. “I have nursed my aching ears against a babel of foreign tongues, have intervened in fist fights and pacified drunks,” he wrote of his job. “I have joggled wailing babies on my knee, have fended off bribes and turned a chill eye to the lures of female charmers.” He concluded that “on occasion I have been shocked and disillusioned. But I have also been genuinely touched and inspired by the sincerity and resoluteness of purpose of a host of Europeans, Asiatics, Latin Americans and our good neighbors to the north, the Canadians, who want to become American citizens.”

With immigration a hot issue today, it is worthwhile to read how generations of immigrants have always struggled to enter America.

We thank Yitz Twersky and family for sharing their tale and giving us the opportunity to help them fill a gap in their family’s chronicle.

  Read “They Do Anything to Get Into the USA,” by James McFarland. Published January 29, 1949.

I Know the Girl in That Photo! The Saturday Evening Post

On July 30, 1916, saboteurs working for the Imperial German Army blew up a munitions plant on the New Jersey shore, directly across from Liberty Island and Ellis Island. The blast, which was felt throughout New York, had the equivalent force of a 5.0 Richter-scale earthquake. It knocked sleepers out of their beds in Manhattan and rained debris for a two-mile radius. The shock of its force drove shrapnel into Miss Liberty’s gown and weakened the structure of her arm.

Incredibly, German agents caused this damage—estimated at half a billion dollars in 2010 currency—eight months before they were at war with the United States.

According to a 1940 article, the explosion on Black Tom peninsula might have served several purposes for the Central Powers. The author, Emanuel Voska, was a Czech spy living in New York who provided intelligence to the British government. In 1916, as he learned that German agents were tampering with munitions intended for Czarist Russia, which was then fighting for the Allies.

Cases labeled and listed as ammunition, but really containing scrap iron, old lead, or anything else heavy and useless, were being sent to Russia. This was not only sabotage but graft on a large scale. The men back of this were undoubtedly Russians collaborating with Germans. They made the Russian government pay for this junk as ammunition, and pocketed the money.

By the middle of July, thousands of cases of this stuff, together with enormous quantities of genuine ammunition, had piled up in warehouses, barges and freight cars at the Black Tom terminal of the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

This extraordinary accumulation of explosives worried me. It seemed like an invitation to the German dynamiters.

Allied Intelligence was already increasing the number of inspectors munitions factories. According to Voska, he ordered a dozen men specifically to guard the approaches to the Black Tom peninsula. He then informed the head of Russian intelligence in New York about his suspicions. Before any action could be taken, though, the saboteurs struck. Shortly after 2:00 AM, on July 30—

I woke in the small hours of the morning in terror. My stout brick house was shivering, my bed was swaying, the windows were rattling. I jumped up, fully awake, and ran to a window facing south. The distant skyscrapers rose black against a sky that seemed all aflame. My mind jumped to the explanation. The worst had happened! Someone had blown up Black Tom.

The phone rang. The jerky, excited voice of one of my guards on the Jersey shore reported, “Everything is blown up—everything! Black Tom is just one big flame!”…

I took the subway to South Ferry. The port of Manhattan Island, usually deserted at that hour, boiled with activity. Police reserves were pushing back crowds to make way for fire engines. My feet crunched on glass—the explosions seemed to have smashed every window around. Southward, huge geysers of flame showed where burning barges were loose from their moorings. Now and then, a dull explosion would precede the appearance of a gigantic moon in the southern sky. A sickening odor of burning chemicals filled the air.

I crowded onto a ferryboat for New Jersey. By enthusiastic shoving, I managed to land ahead of the others. For a fare amounting to a bribe, I got a taxicab. We made slow progress—all New Jersey seemed to be rushing toward Black Tom. When I posted my guards, I had selected a little all-night beer joint as a rendezvous. I found that although the explosion had smashed all its windows and blown its door off its hinges, the bartender was still doing business.

These live shells were salvaged by workers after most of the vast store of ammunitions at Black Tom had been destroyed in the blast.

Machachek, commander of our patrol on Black Tom, was waiting for me. He gave a quick account.

At a little before one o’clock in the morning a sudden fire broke out in a freight car. Near it were dozens of cars filled with shells and raw explosives. Sensibly and prudently, the watchmen gave an alarm and ran. At eight minutes past one, the barge, tied to a wharf more than a hundred yards from the fire, blew up. It was half an hour later before the fire in the freight car reached the other cars on the tracks, bringing the second explosion.

Only one detail of his story has any special interest after all these years. “The first explosion,” he said, “was on a barge tied up to the pier. A few minutes before the barge went up, I saw a rowboat approaching it. I could make out the figures of two men aboard. After that, everything blazed, bright as day. I saw no boat come away.”

By now, the German agents were not working in one tight organization, but in groups. Jealousy and the secretiveness of men engaged in a trade, which endangered their necks kept them from confiding in one another. Probably, the cause of the fire in the freight car was one of those time bombs, which the Germans had used to burn ships at sea. But the men in the boat? Machachek saw them approach the barge; he did not see them come away. It is possible that the directors of the plot worked a diabolical trick on their own dynamiters. This affair was so dangerous that they wished to take no chances with an operative who might be caught and confess. The man who ordered the job may have handed the perpetrators an apparatus which he described as a time bomb, but which, actually, would go off when it was set.

Ultimately, Germany accepted responsibility for the destruction and paid reparations to the United States. To Voska, though, the responsibility lay elsewhere.

As I went home that night, I kept repeating to myself, “It was the Russians—it was the Russians!” Even after all these years of reflection, I cannot get that thought out of my head.

He was convinced that Black Tom was destroyed by Russian double agents. They had accepted money from the Kaiser’s government to keep munitions from reaching the Russian army. They were also probably working for the Bolshevik forces who hoped a Russian defeat would speed the revolution (which it did). And they were lining their own pockets by selling the same withheld munitions time and again. And, most likely, they were directed by the head of Russian intelligence in New York—the same man Voska had informed of his suspicions.

For more information, you should check out the original Post article, “‘Canadian Invasion’ and Black Tom” [PDF], published in 1940.

Enemy Agents Strike New York—In 1916 The Saturday Evening Post