The Second Wave: Young Refugees From Central Europe,
and Their Contributions to American Culture, Science, and Society

The Project has made great progress, successfully tackling numerous difficult problems along the way. The data gathering phase is now almost concluded, and we about to enter the remaining stages of the Project: completing our data analysis, and presenting our findings in a book

1. QUESTIONNAIRES
Approximately 7,000 15-page questionnaires have been mailed out so far. We recently reached agreement with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for a survey mailing to the members of their Registry of Holocaust Survivors who fit into our target group. This will add 1,126 questionnaire mailings to the total so far.

By now, more than 2,100 responses have been entered into our computerized database, and counting.

We are often asked what our databases have been for finding members of our cohort. Here is a list of the main sources of the data on out cohort. The data entry of the first thirteen (a. through m.) has already been completed.

a. International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigres
b. Kindertransport Association (KTA)
c. American Men & Women of Science
d. Who's Who
e. Who's Who in American Jewry
f. One Thousand Children®, Inc. (OTC) (a group of roughly 1,000 children who came to the U.S. unaccompanied)
g. Nürnberg-Fürth group
h. Goldberg Schule, Berlin, alumni/ae
i. Jewish organizations and synagogues in New York City
j. Spouses of groups a., c., d., and e. (if identified as refugees from returned questionnaires)
k. Who's Who American-born individuals, used as controls
l. Who's Who in American Jewry controls
m. American Men and Women of Science controls
n. William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, GA
o. Safe Haven, Oswego, NY (refugees who were kept in an internment
camp)
p. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ongoing)
q. Chajes Gymnasium, Vienna, alumni/ae (planned)
r. "Incidentals" (individuals referred to us by participants and others
(ongoing).

While the groups k., l., and m. represent matched comparison groups to particularly successful refugee subpopulations, we were also able to compare the entire refugee population to their American counterparts through secondary analysis of existing representative datasets (see 2.).

2. SECONDARY DATA ANALYSIS
Our acquisition and analysis of U.S. Census data and of National Jewish Population Survey data has been finished. We also now have an analysis of Who's Who data for those born in Germany or Austria, in comparison to their American-born cohorts.

3. INTERVIEWS
In early 2002, we started to work on the design of an interview guideline for our semi-structured interviews, and completed it in summer 2002 after doing several trial interviews (we thank several local members of the advisory committee who helped us greatly by participating in such interviews). In fall 2002, we hired an interviewer.

As in our previous project on the careers of scientists (Project Access), we were very aware that this appointment was critical because the personal characteristics of the interviewer could greatly influence—positively or negatively—the quality of the information collected in the interviews. Moreover, the interviewer had to be able to travel widely to meet our interviewees (e.g., in Florida, California, New York, and New Jersey). After a lengthy and thorough search, we hired Ms. Alexandra Gross, who comes from a refugee family herself (her great-uncle was the artist George Grosz), speaks German fluently, and is familiar with the interviewees' "milieu." She also has had experience in interviewing. We supervised her first few interviews, and she has been doing well. In the proposal, we said that we would conduct 100 interviews. We currently have those 100 interviews, each about 1 ½ hours long on average, but we are going to do a few more so that the final count may be around 110 to 115.

4. TRANSCRIPTION
Transcription of the interviews is in progress. Those transcripts, needed for in-depth insights into often complex issues, will also provide a treasure trove of passages and quotes, all in the participants own voices, that can be used in our presentation of the Project's results. As we found in our earlier work of a similar nature, the authenticity of the participants' own words engages the reader in a way that summary statistics cannot, and it thus greatly increases the audience's interest.

In addition, Ms. Gross has been writing short profiles of each interview that summarize the main points and help us to be alert to particularly interesting features of that interview.

5. TALKS AND PUBLICATIONS
Gerhard Sonnert represented the Project at recent meetings of the Kindertransport Association (KTA) and the Nürnberg/Fürth group. He also presented an invited talk on the topic at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the fall of 2001. In the summer of 2002, he gave a paper at the meeting of the "One Thousand Children" (OTC) organization in Chicago; his presentation has been written up for a proceedings volume that is to be published under the auspices of OTC.

Gerald Holton was invited to present a paper about our preliminary findings concerning the Austrian sub-group of our population in June 2003 at a two-day international conference ("Austria and National Socialism: Implications for Scientific and Humanistic Scholarship") at Vienna University. The paper titled "What Happened to the Austrian Refugee Children in America?" was followed by a panel session with Eric Kandel, Walter Kohn, and Fritz Stern. It is to be published in 2004 in a volume resulting from the conference.