On December 16, during the Fall Meeting of the Association, the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was the setting for an oral history workshop, European Refugee Psychoanalysts Come To The United States. The upheaval in Europe in the 1930s, as Nazi domination spread from Germany to Austria and Czechoslovakia, wreaked havoc among psychoanalysts there as noted in the introduction by the Chairman, Arcangelo R. T. D'Amore.
Edith Jacobson described her arrest and imprisonment in Germany with a severe deterioration of her physical health. She escaped to Czechoslovakia and reached New York in October, 1938. In March, 1938, the Nazis occupied Austria. Edward Kronold described leaving Vienna and going first to Prague. Emanuel Windholz, in a written contribution in lieu of personal attendance, described psychoanalysis in Prague which he left in February, 1939. Upon his arrival in Los Angeles on March 15 for a visit with the Fenichels they listened to a radio announcement that the Nazis were marching into Prague.
Edith Buxbaum had arrived in the United States in September, 1937, and found that the Americans were much better informed than the Europeans as to the peril. She worked to get other Viennese to leave, too, as soon as possible. Kurt Eissler, who came from Vienna, expressed the opinion that Sigmund Freud would have lived longer if his life in Vienna had not been disrupted, and he might have produced another good paper before he died.
Both Martin Wangh and Hans Loewald went first to Italy, where anti-semitism was not prominent until Mussolini was awed by Hitler's takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and then came to the United States and trained in psychoanalysis here. Else Pappenheim contributed her reminiscences on settling here.
Bettina Warburg, who took over the chairmanship of the Association's Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration from Lawrence S. Kubie, described their work during those eventful years. (The Committee's reports were printed in the Bulletin, vols. 1-3.) In recent years several of the emigrees have been tape-recorded. Transcripts of interviews by Bluma Swerdloff are in the Columbia University Oral History Collection. The Committee on History and Archives has plans for an oral history workshop at each meeting of the Association.