Part of The Wiener Holocaust Library’s PhD and a Cup of Tea doctoral seminar series.

An eyewitness account by Sergeant Gerard Kohn, American Liberation Forces, of the situation of Jewish refugees in Manila. Testifying to the Truth, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

This presentation gives an overview of the admission of Jewish refugees to the Philippines from 1938 to 1941. It discusses the political responses and introduces the key figures involved in two related Jewish immigration programmes to the archipelago. The first provided visas to pre-selected Jewish refugees based on ‘needed’ professions in the country. The second was the so-called ‘Mindanao Plan’, which proposed to admit 10,000 refugees to the southern island of Mindanao as agricultural settlers. These responses took place at the interstices of the Philippines’ independence from the United States. The presentation shows that refugees were part of the process of state-formation, entangled in the creation of new immigration laws and development interests.

About the speaker:

Dr Ria Sunga has recently finished her PhD in History at the University of Manchester. Her research explores the political responses to refugees in the Philippines in the twentieth century. She focuses on the episodes of Jewish, Russian, and Vietnamese refugee admission.

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