Camilla Gottlieb's Suitcase

Description: This is a plain, dark brown canvas suitcase with two leather straps with buckles, a metal clasp and a leather-covered handle with brass lock and brass plate on the front. There are three interior leather straps, each with a buckle. The lining is a striped textile (probably cotton ticking). Description: This suitcase belonged to Camilla Gottlieb, whose ordinary life in Vienna suddenly became endangered when the Germans invaded and annexed Austria in 1938. As a Jew, she confronted devastating changes. Description: With their Jewish heritage reviled and their Austrian citizenship revoked, Camilla and her husband Hermann recognized their peril and attempted to come to the United States. Her luggage and the documents Camilla secured in them tell the story of her crisis, imprisonment, and survival. Description: Contemporary U.S. immigration laws impeded the Gottliebs and other potential refugees with restrictive country-of-origin quotas and age limitations. Because her husband Hermann’s birthplace was Romania, both he and Camilla, as his wife, came under a small Romanian quota, and were refused entrance to America. Description: The papers Gottlieb saved over the pre-war years, during World War II, and in the chaotic postwar period document a dark and turbulent time in Europe. They serve as a record of the events that she, and many people like her, endured and witnessed. Camilla kept her family’s official papers, including her Heimatschein—citizenship record—inside her purse to document their lives in Austria.