(glass shattering) (dramatic music) - "My husband and I are both Jews.

I am sure you know what is going on here and need not give you a more precise explanation."

(crowd shouting in foreign language) - This is the initial letter that Gertrude Perles sent to Hasele Deutsch.

(dramatic music continues) - [Barbara] "It is growing worse every day.

Our only hope is to emigrate to the USA."

- The first letter comes on October 23rd, 1938.

It's a cold call.

It comes completely out of the blue.

(victorious military music) - [Barbara] "Please, if you able to send affidavits for me and my husband."

- [Eric] She's looking for affidavits for her and her husband in order to leave Vienna and come to the United States.

- I had no idea that my aunt and uncle rescued people from the Holocaust.

(dramatic music continues) - "For Heaven's sake, do it, before it will be too late for us."

(dramatic music continues) (Adolph speaks German) - The policy of the Hitler government at that time was to really get rid of the Jews.

Well, Hitler, of course, was one of those disgruntled veterans of World War I.

He could not accept the fact that Germany lost.

(tense music) And he began looking for scapegoats and the Jewish community was the perennial scapegoat and he jumped on that theme.

Well, 1938, the first event really of tremendous note is the Anschluss, where Hitler basically marches into Austria.

For the Jews, of course, it's a disaster.

There were between 180,000 to 200,000 Jews in Austria and there were scenes of Jews waiting on lines for blocks around the US embassy to get visas to try and get out.

It was a nightmare because what had been building gradually in Germany against the Jews, the persecution, the intimidation, the segregation, was an immediate factor in Austria.

So people were attacked on the street, women were humiliated, all kinds of horror stories.

(melancholy music) - I'm the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center.

One of my favorite collections that we have in the archive came about a decade ago.

It's a single folder of letters between a woman in Vienna and a man in Pittsburgh.

It's mostly bureaucratic in nature, but as you dig into the records there's an incredible human story there.

(dramatic music) Gertrude Perles is a Viennese dressmaker and she has written to Pittsburgh entirely as a cold call.

She was reading an issue of Women's Wear Daily and saw Hasele Levy, at the time she was not yet married, her name was Hasele Deutsch.

Gertrude Perles' maiden name was also Deutsch.

She and her husband were trying to leave Austria and they needed affidavits to get out of the country.

And the affidavit is just a document.

It's a document where the person in America is promising that they will vouch for this person who would be coming over from Europe.

- "My name is Gertrude Perles, born Deutsch.

I am 29 years of age, born in Vienna, and German-Austrian citizen.

Married, childless.

(dramatic music) My husband, Dr. Erwin Perles is also born in Vienna and a German citizen.

He was commercial expert and financial editor of two of the greatest newspapers here.

We both lost our positions and it is forbidden here to employ Jews.

- [Eric] Abe Levy, who is the husband of Hasele Deutsch, replies on November 10th, 1938.

The Levys were a young couple.

They had been married about four years at this time.

She was in fashion.

She worked at a Downtown department store.

Her husband was a lawyer, early in his career.

- My aunt was almost the head of Kaufmann's Department Store.

She was the buyer for their most elite women's section.

She was in the newspaper all the time, which was why they found out about her.

- To leave Nazi Germany at that time, you had to work with two governments.

You had to work with the Nazi government in Germany and you had to work with the American government here.

(melancholy music) - If we go back to 1938 and we look at what is the US refugee policy, okay?

First of all, there was no distinction between an immigrant and a refugee.

In the law that was passed in 1921, it was called the Johnson-Reed Act.

Mr. Reed was actually David Reed, a senator from Pennsylvania.

But he was convinced that the immigrants that had been streaming into this country in the early 20th century were destroying American democracy.

This act put a limit on the total number of refugees, about 153,000, and there had been streaming in 800, 900,000, a million people per year.

There were going to be quotas in place to determine how many people could come from which particular countries.

Well, the German/Austrian combined quota was about 27,000.

There were 500,000 Jews in Germany.

Now, several hundred thousand had already left, but you know have about 180,000 more Jews from Austria who are trying to get in.

(melancholy music continues) - Jews were being encouraged, in some cases very forcefully, to leave, and many of them were trying to come to the United States.

- "I entreat you again not to throw this letter into the wastebasket.

If you are not able yourself to help us in our despair, perhaps there will be a friend of yours who will be ready to send affidavits to us.

Please, please answer."

(melancholy music continues) - That's a great picture of my aunt.

I really love that.

I like that of my uncle.

He was really handsome and young.

A. Sanford Levy and Hazel Levy were my aunt and uncle.

- Uncle Av and Aunt Alice never mentioned to anybody anything about the Perles family and what they were doing, trying to help them escape the Holocaust.

When Uncle Av passed away, he still had a law office.

This other lawyer was concerned that maybe there were some files of Uncle Av's that were left hanging.

They hired this woman who had just graduated from the University of Pittsburgh law school to come in for three weeks and to go through all of his files.

She said, "I found this packet of letters."

And she said, "Being Jewish myself, and I read the letters, "I couldn't destroy these letters.

"It appeared that he was trying to rescue a family "from the Holocaust."

(dramatic music) - One of the things that's really amazing about the collection is the speed with which Abe Levy, who was the American side, responds.

Almost immediately, he turns around and sends them two affidavits, one for each of them, her and her husband.

Those are sent on November 10th, 1938, which was essentially Kristallnacht.

(dramatic music) - Which was this major, major attack on the Jewish community.

(somber music) Where every synagogue in Germany and in Austria was burned to the ground.

Jewish men were carted off to Dachau concentration camp.

(somber music continues) It was also a night of terror for the Jews and it was a recognition on the part of Jewish families that their lives were endangered and they better get out or else.

(somber music) - [Eric] We know that this was a matter of life and death.

(somber music continues) - I believe these affidavits gave the Perleses hope and kept their spirits up in a time where most people would've probably just given up.

- In one of the letters, Gertrude Perles explained that her husband was away and she didn't go into much detail, but the tone of those letters at that point, you could tell she was pretty distressed.

- In the last letter that Gertrude writes to Abe, she explains that her husband, during Kristallnacht, was taken away to a concentration camp.

(melancholy music) - They let him out of the camp with the instruction that he had 45 days to leave the country.

If he didn't leave the country, that was it, he was going back to the camp and we know where he was gonna end up.

- What makes this collection so interesting is that it actually follows the entire bureaucratic process, but in a very, very human way.

The two consulates in each of these countries start requesting more and more paperwork from Abe Levy.

They wanna see his tax returns, they wanna know that he's able to provide a certain amount of money each week if the Perleses come over and are unable to find employment.

And as requests comes, there's also a personal letter and you get to see some of the humanity behind the requests in pretty much real-time, navigating the emotional uncertainty of this intrusion into the life of a total stranger.

- Not everybody responded to the pleas, not everybody could respond because, you know, Jews and everybody else in this country, in this 1930s was going through a Depression.

(melancholy music) People didn't have the resources, Jews included, to vouch for others who they may or may not know.

Sometimes there are stories of people finally responding, the papers finally being approved, and it's too late.

(melancholy music continues) - These people were gonna be killed.

It was very upsetting.

And I'm sure that's how my aunt and uncle felt about it.

And I never realized that the government put so many roadblocks in intentionally in front of them so that they couldn't, they didn't have to act.

They didn't want to let these people in.

(melancholy music) - At the end, Gertrude did not actually end up needing Abe Levy's help at all.

They were using it as a way to make their case rise above the other cases and they already had worked out an opportunity in Richmond, Virginia, and in the last letters that Gertrude sends to Abe, she is finally able to explain the full scope of what was happening.

- And she said, "I wanna thank you dearly for the hope you gave me at the time when I was really down, when my husband was away in the concentration camp and I had no hope, other than the letters that I was getting from you that was going to help me and help Erwin, help us escape."

- June 26th, 1939.

"Perhaps there will come a day we will have an opportunity to drive to Pittsburgh and see you or perhaps you will come someday to Richmond.

(somber music) With the kindest regards, yours faithfully, Gertrude Perles-Deutsch and Dr. Erwin Perles."

(melancholy music) We're living at a time where there is a lot of human migration all over the planet.

People are being forced to leave their homes for political reasons, for environmental reasons, for all sorts of reasons.

(gentle music) - Hopefully, you know, the world learned something from the Holocaust.

I'm not sure how much they learned, but maybe they learned something, that, how to deal with these kind of difficult situations.

(gentle music continues) - Every day we read stories about people who are trying to leave Ukraine and settle in other parts of the world and before that it was Afghanistan.

(melancholy continues) I think that reading this is an opportunity to ask how connected we are to these events and where the boundaries of our generosity lie.

(melancholy music continues) - We are a diverse society and we should draw strength from that, not put one group against another and scapegoat and so forth.

That's what happened in the 1930s, we have to make sure it doesn't happen today.

(melancholy music continues) (melancholy orchestral music)