The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2014

48 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL of Puritanism, Childs threatened to have any offenders and their husbands transferred out of Ethiopia. Fascist Visas Save Jewish Lives During his time in Spanish-occupied Tangier of the 1940s, Chargé Childs had initially approached the Spanish authori- ties with circumspection, assuming that High Commissioner General Luis Orgaz was a Franco fascist. But working contacts fostered warmer relations, which would lead to an important humanitarian action. Tangier, like the Casablanca depicted in the film of that title, was an important hub for refugees fleeing both the war and the Holocaust. Renée Reichmann, herself a refugee fromHungary, was a key figure in relief efforts from Tangier, and was affiliated with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Reichmann’s efforts in sending tons of food parcels to occupied Europe were herculean, and she even performed the unimaginable: a trip back through fascist Europe to Hungary in 1942 to see her parents for what proved to be the last time. By early 1944, the Jewish community of Hungary was targeted for the Final Solution, and her focus shifted from relief to rescue. She approached Childs to enlist his help in extricating hun- dreds of Jews in Budapest from the clutches of the Nazis. Reich- mann’s request came just after the Roosevelt administration created the War Refugee Board, a belated attempt to intervene on behalf of Jews and other threatened populations. Childs was therefore able to add official U.S. government weight to what was initially a personal, humanitarian gesture. It turns out that Spanish High Commissioner General Orgaz was not the fascist that Childs had assumed him to be. He issued several tranches of visas for Tangier, which was sufficient for the Nazis to consider the threatened Jews to be protected by a friendly power. On the eve of Childs’ departure from Tangier in June 1945, Reichmann wrote him to express thanks “for your extremely noble and generous assistance in the affair of the entry visas for Tangier. ... Thus, 1,200 innocent souls owe their survival to Your Excellency.” At the Tangier American Legation’s museum, we display the full text of Reichmann’s letter, and note the fact that J. Rives Childs kept the letter in his pocket for years afterwards. For this action, worthy of Raoul Wallenberg and other World War II dip- lomats who saved Jews by the thousand, Childs—as in the title of his autobiography—“let the credit go” to Reichmann for propos- ing the action and to Orgaz for issuing the visas. An Arabist, but Not an Anti-Semite The operation, however, clearly left its mark on the seemingly stiff diplomat. Responding to Reichmann, he wrote: “I do not know of any work which I have done in my whole career which has given me greater personal satisfaction than the efforts made on behalf of these friendless persons.” At the same time, Childs’ motivation for keeping Reich- mann’s letter went beyond sentiment. In his mind, it refuted any One of Childs’ vice consuls in Morocco, Carleton Coon, portrays him as woefully out of touch about the nature of clandestine work. The cover of the invitation to Childs’ farewell dinner in June 1945. Courtesy of the Tangier Legation