19 - Chicken Farming: Not a Dream but a Nightmare: An Eyewitness Report

Summary

Eva Berurin Neisserwas born in Breslau in 1920, the daughter and granddaughter of business owners. After the Nazis confiscated her father's business, the family fled Germany, arriving in New York in October 1938. Under the auspices of the Jewish Agricultural Society, they moved to a chicken farm in Vineland, New Jersey, in 1941. In 1944 Eva obtained American citizenship and was able to join her fiance of seven years, who had escaped to Peru. She worked in the main accounting office of Pan American-Grace Airways for three years. In 1948 she returned with her husband to New Jersey, where they started a chicken farm but gave up and opened a travel agency in 1956. After her younger of two children left for college, she returned to school, earning a B.S. in accounting and an M.A. in communications/public relations. She taught at Glassboro State College (now Rowan College of New Jersey) as a member of the adjunct faculty until her husband's terminal illness, when she took over full-time management of the travel agency. She continues to work six days a week, writes a weekly newspaper travel column, and spends time with her three grandchildren. This report was written in 1991.

The German-Jewish refugees who managed to reach New York or other large American cities in the 1930s arrived in the midst of the Great Depression, with unemployment rampant. Men found hardly any work, and the women were lucky if they obtained housecleaning jobs where, for a dollar a day, they did what back at home, their cooks, maids, and washerwomen had done for them.