US immigration and families: A tale from the Holocaust era

Well into her retirement years, Annette Lachmann enjoys a happy and active life, teaching critical writing at a New York community college and spending time as a doting grandmother.

The flood of migrant and asylum-seeking families across the U.S.-Mexico border might seem to be worlds away from that of the comfortable Upper West Side octogenarian.

But news of families detained in fetid conditions and, above all, of infants and small children being separated from their parents took Ms. Lachmann back eight decades, and pierced her heart.

In the summer of 1940, a 3-year-old Annette was the youngest passenger on the SS Quanza, a ship whose passengers included 83 mostly Belgian Jewish refugees fleeing an increasingly menacing Europe and hoping for asylum in the United States.

But the Quanza arrived in an America

Individuals who made a differenceScreenings of the filmMaking “ourselves uncomfortable”