Issuing the Visa that Would Save a Jewish Girl
Richard H. Davis, a young Foreign Service officer from Chautauqua County, New York, began his distinguished career in 1938, serving at his first post in Hamburg, Germany, as the world stood on the brink of one of history’s darkest chapters. That same year, Nazi policies were rapidly tightening their grip, and Jews, including those who up to that time had been able to lead relatively normal lives in Germany, found themselves increasingly isolated and persecuted.
The young chocolate maker Markus Kayem was a Jewish man married to a Christian woman in 1930s Germany, when the Nuremberg Laws forbidding marriage between Christians and Jews forced them to divorce. The night of Kristallnacht in 1938 – the “Night of Broken Glass” – when the Nazi government of Germany launched a state sponsored pogrom and destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues, convinced Markus that it was time to leave Germany with his daughter, Irmgard. Fifteen-year-old Irmgard had been home alone on Kristallnacht, and was spared only because the chief of police was their neighbor and the rioters did not want to disturb him. Irmgard was terrified, narrowly escaping the horrors of that night.
In the wake of Kristallnacht, Richard H. Davis, a vice consul at the U.S. Consulate in Hamburg on his first diplomatic posting, played an unexpected yet crucial role in Irmgard’s journey to safety. Markus had been able to secure a visa for himself under immigration laws, benefiting from preferences given to skilled workers like chocolate makers. Irmgard, however, was not immediately granted a visa because her application fell under the United States’ severely restrictive annual quota system based on country of birth – there were already more than 100,000 Germans on that year’s waiting list for fewer than 28,000 immigrant visas.
Markus would not leave Germany without his daughter, so he continued to check with the consulate about her visa. The details are lost to history, but one imagines Markus telling Davis about the terrors Jews were facing and saying he would never leave Irmgard behind. Whatever words were exchanged, Davis signed off on her visa on December 3, 1938. Irmgard’s son Stephen Keat, who eventually became a U.S. Foreign Service Officer himself, remembers his mother giving credit to her father’s persistence for saving her from the Nazi concentration camps. Davis played a vital role in saving both of their lives.
[Keat] remembers his mother giving credit to her father’s persistence and Richard Davis’ kindness for saving her from the Nazi concentration camps.
With the Nazi regime increasing its persecution of Jews, Irmgard’s visa was a lifeline. Just days after it was issued, on December 14, 1938, Irmgard and Markus left Hamburg aboard the S.S. Manhattan, one of the last ships to leave Germany before the doors to emigration would largely close. The M.S. St. Louis would be turned back from Cuba just months later, as the pathways for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust disappeared.
Irmgard and Markus would go on to rebuild their lives in the United States and become active members of the broader community of refugees who fled Nazi persecution. As for Richard Davis, his career as a Foreign Service officer was just beginning. He would go on to leadership positions within the U.S. State Department and serve as America’s Ambassador to Romania. While signing that immigrant visa in 1938 may have been just another piece of paperwork for Davis, for Markus and Irmgard it was a glimmer of hope in a dark world, and perhaps the most important thing Davis could have done in his diplomatic career.
