My thanks to the Barbara Brodie Fellowship from the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Historical Nursing Inquiry, University of Virginia and the H15 grant from the American Association for the History of Nursing for enabling the visit.
I arrived on Saturday night to dreadful weather that only improved slightly on Sunday, which was my day for finding my bearings in Philly. Still this didn't dampen my enthusiasm for visiting Independence Square and other historical sites. The museum curators at Independence Square have recently made much of the tragic irony that the writing of the Declaration of Independence was supported by the work of a slave. There was much to learn here about the horrors of the slave trade and its lasting impact.
On Monday I started my research at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing. I was working on the International Council of Nurses files supporting refugees from across the globe to prove their nursing credentials. The files cover the years from 1945 to 1969 and can only be viewed at the Center.
Although they detail refugees from multiple conflicts and occupations, I was looking specifically for those who were Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe who fled often without their nursing documentation. Sadly, whilst some were able to prove their registration, many could not. The ICN clearly did work hard to try to support them, but the files suggest a general distrust.
I spent three days at the Center and then on the Thursday took the train to Washington DC to view a range of archives at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Unfortunately, I hadn’t quite worked out that the archives are not actually at the Museum, but a reading room about 15 miles out of Washington itself. It was, I confess not the easiest place to access, but once there I found a diary that I had not known about, so it was a most profitable trip. The young refugee in question was one of the few refugee nurses who was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940. The mass internment following the fall of France and increasing suspicion of all Germans and Austrians, tragically included Jews who had fled the regime.
On the Friday before I left, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum itself. Even though I have been to the one in Berlin and have been researching the Holocaust for over a decade, I was transfixed and immensely moved by the stories and the artefacts. Perhaps the most devastating was the railway truck on they have on display, into which would have been transported up to one hundred Jews - to their death. If anyone has the opportunity to go to the Museum, please do. It concentrates all of one’s mind on the persecuted, the hounded and the exterminated.