‘Lee’ is a movie on the circuit at the moment. Telling the story of Lee Miller, the photographer who took some of the iconic photographs of the death camps immediately after liberation from the Nazis, the movie highlights the power contained in one small booklet – a passport.
When Lee, who is working as a fashion photographer for the British edition of Vogue magazine, first hears about the conflict in France in the early days of World War II, she feels that she must go there to photograph the unfolding war. But, the British military authorities will not permit a woman to travel with their forces. Determined to go back to the country she had spent a great deal of time in during the 1930s, she realises that, being an American citizen, she has more chance of getting to France with the Americans – and so she uses her US passport as the means to avoid the limitations imposed by the British.
Continuing the theme of passports, it was just a few days before I saw the movie that the horrific attacks against Israeli football fans took place in Amsterdam. There, the attackers demanded to see peoples’ passports – a case of using the passport to identify people targeted for physical attack.
This recalls the marking of people on identification documents for their ethnic grouping or religious affiliation that occurred in both Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. That identification could determine a person’s survival or death, or their work and residential choices.
These documents are also sometimes core to a quirk of fate of history. For instance, by chance, Lina Amato-Kantor from Cape Town did not end up being yet another death statistic of the Holocaust but rather a survivor of it. Lina’s family were given Turkish passports, instead of the Greek ones that most of the Jewish population of the island of Rhodos held; those with Greek documents fell under the control of the Nazi occupiers of the island – and their passports essentially sealed their fates – while Lina and some other islanders gained Turkish protection because of their passports. They continued living on the island, right under the noses of the Nazis, who did not incarcerate or murder them because of the little books they had.
Today, we tend to complain about our South African passports, because they are limiting in terms of the destinations we can travel to. Perhaps we don’t realise the potential power of this document: a passport can be the guarantor of safety – or the Angel of Death.
This edition of the Cape Jewish Chronicle is particularly special. Celebrating 40 years since the publication printed its first edition, the Chronicle has become entrenched in Cape Town’s Jewish community. For many, it is as iconic a symbol of their lives here as is Table Mountain to the many adoring tourists who visit our shores.
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Wishing us all a very happy birthday and a Happy Chanukah!
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