I thought I knew how my family escaped the Holocaust
SOSUA, Dominican Republic: On the eve of Kristallnacht - the night in November 1938 when synagogues burned across Germany and the Nazis arrested tens of thousands of Jews - my father’s family escaped from Berlin and fled to one of the few places in the world willing to take in Jewish refugees. They settled in Sosua, a remote beach town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. The country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, had offered the Jews safety in exchange for a promise to develop the land.
This is the story I heard countless times. “It was paradise,” my 89-year-old Aunt Hella would say, weaving my family’s heritage into a littleknown part of Holocaust history.
But the story never entirely made sense.
As it was told to me, a small Caribbean country saved my family at a time when more powerful nations such as the United States and Britain refused to do the same. In return, the Jews transformed a jungle coastline into a peaceful settlement with a hospital and a school. My grandfather, a salesman by trade, became the village baker. Hundreds of others - accountants, nurses, tailors - learned to ride horses and clear roads.
The story always ended the same way, and with little explanation. Sosua had been ruined, I was told, its streets overrun by prostitutes and foreigners. The town had become a destination for sex tourism, tainted by pickpockets and drugs. My family moved away, like so many others, and never returned.
My father lives in Santo Domingo, where I was raised, and his parents and two sisters ended up in Miami. People often act surprised when I tell them that I’m Jewish and Dominican, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who knows about Sosua. “Never forget,” people say about the Holocaust. But this part of Jewish history has been almost completely lost, and the story I’d been told seemed incomplete.
I thought I knew the beginning and the end. In July, I left for Sosua to find out the rest. It quickly became clear why so many chose to forget.
The first thing I wanted to see was the beach. I remembered seeing photos of my father’s family along the shore. The refugees would hang their clothes on sea grape trees and wade into the shallow waters. After school, the village children would often have the beach to themselves.
My father warned me to stay away from the shore. The beach, he said, had become a site for prostitution and crime.
Could it really be that dangerous? I remembered going there as a kid, but I hadn’t been back to the town in more than a decade. I asked Ivonne Strauss de Milz, a family friend and a descendant of refugees who lives in Sosua, to take me there. “Is that the purse you’re taking?” she asked, then instructed me to zip it shut.
The shore was strewn with mismatched umbrellas and beach chairs scattered in front of hundreds of shacks selling cigars, souvenirs, Presidente beer and Dominican aphrodisiacs. It didn’t look that unsafe. But around the beach, several people later told me, tourists can find any type of sex they might want: Straight, gay, trans - even illegal sex with minors.
Prostitution has long been a part of Dominican culture, but nowhere does it feel more entrenched than in Sosua. Elsewhere, the industry exists in the grays of life, largely unregulated, widely known but rarely seen.
The sex trade took off in Sosua in the 1980s and ‘90s, after a nearby airport opened and foreign tourists flooded the town. Over the next few decades, the hotel industry boomed, and Dominican women, facing insecure and lowpaying job prospects, headed for Sosua hoping to find more profitable work. As prostitution increased, it drew more tourists looking for sex, and the town got a reputation as a major sextourism destination. Today, a short walk from the beach, on the main drag of Calle Pedro Clisante, dozens of prostitutes line the sidewalk in front of the busy open-air restaurants and bars filled with foreign men.
“Sosua has a before and after,” said Alexandra Lister, a programme manager with CEPROSH, a health organisation based in Puerto Plata, who has worked with sex workers in the region since the 1990s. “And the ‘after’ isn’t pretty.”
Many long-time locals, such as Ivonne, are upset that prostitution has consumed Sosua’s reputation. Efforts to discourage the trade have failed, and its prevalence means that the town’s businesses - hotels, restaurants, cafes - benefit from it, whether the owners condone sex work or not.
As we drove away, Ivonne pointed out one hotel. It was a three-storey building, painted lime green and white, where she said my grandparents’ house had once stood.
A man named Joe Benjamin had lived next door. Before my trip, several people had told me to speak with him. He understood why Sosua had changed. He was the one I was going to see next.
Joe’s family arrived in Sosua in 1947, part of the last refugee group selected by the Dominican Republic Settlement Association, an organisation founded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in New York, which sought safety and relief for Jews. In 1938, Trujillo had offered to take in up to 100,000 refugees. In turn, the association funded and populated Sosua, but the outbreak of World War II and a 1941 Nazi ban on Jewish emigration meant that only about 4,000 visas were ever issued.
The association gave farmers such as Joe’s father a mule, a horse, 10 cows and 75 acres of land. In the early days, urban transplants wearing wide straw hats rode horse-drawn wagons from one plot of land to the next. Joe told me that his father, once a furniture maker, got up at 4.30 every morning to milk his cows.
On weekends, a projector would light up at the theater in town for a matinee movie. Joe and his sister would make the two-kilometre walk back to the family farm in the dark. He never told his parents where he was going. Nobody feared anything then.
For decades, Joe, now 76, was an executive with a successful dairy and meat cooperative founded by Sosua’s Jews. Today, he lives in a spacious house on the outskirts of town, in a plush development behind a guarded security gate. He told me how he’d slept with his windows open as a kid. He remembered the town library, the cafe, the nights when everyone gathered around a record player to listen to opera.
But I had heard those stories before. I wondered if that was all he knew. There was a long pause. “What else is important for me to know?” I asked.
There are things you won’t find in the history books, he said.
Then he made a reference to a best-selling book I had never read, about a fictional small town where sex, gossip and scandal hide behind the pretense of paradise.
“Sosua,” he said, “was a small Peyton Place.”
I didn’t understand. What did a racy novel have to do with my family’s past?
The few published works about Sosua read like history textbooks. But there were other texts and documents that I had never seen, and I knew where to find them.
Next door to the town synagogue that the refugees founded is a small Jewish museum. The synagogue offers services only a few times a year and isn’t visited much, and peeling paint covers the museum doors. Inside, I found a damaged photo of my Aunt Margot’s wedding. Documents on display showed the stains of age.
But the story never entirely made sense. As it was told to me, a small Caribbean country saved my family at a time when more powerful nations such as the United States and Britain refused to do the same.