Moving memorial to Jewish settlers.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: !Ojo!

LUIS HESS LIVES ALONE in a modest house fronting Avenida Pedro Clisante in the little Dominican town of Sosua. At the age of ninety-five, he's the oldest of a dwindling group of European Jews rescued from Nazism in the 1940s by the country's dictator, General Rafael Trujillo.

"I was the first Jew here to marry a Dominican woman," says the German-born Hess, displaying a picture of his late wife, Ana Julia. "We were married sixty years. She was from Puerto Plata, a good woman and a good mother. We never had any differences, despite our very different backgrounds. In fact, she felt more Jewish than me."

Hess, along with six other original survivors, have recorded their testimonies on video for the benefit of visitors to Sosua's newly inaugurated Museo Judio.

Housed in a modern structure next to the original wood-frame synagogue used by the refugees, the museum tells the story of how Trujillo-attending the 1938 Evian conference in France--offered 100,000 Jews safe haven in the face of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution."

The Museo Judio was inaugurated February 3, 2003, in the presence of many dignitaries, including Israel's ambassador to the Dominican Republic. At its entrance is the text of the 1940 agreement between the Trujillo dictatorship and the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (Dorsa), the New York-based organization that intended to rescue thousands of Jews from Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

Between 1939 and 1942, the Dominican government issued more than five thousand visas to Jews, though in the end, only seven hundred actually came. That was mainly a consequence of the difficulty of getting exit visas in the midst of World War II, but also because many Jews--not realizing the gravity of the situation--were reluctant to give up their sophisticated city lives in exchange for an uncertain future in a desperately poor Caribbean country.

Those who did come were each given the opportunity to purchase eighty acres of land (as well as ten cows, a mule, and a horse) with low-interest loans near the village of Arroyo Sosua, where a twenty-five-thousand-acre tract had been abandoned by the United Fruit Company. With Dorsa's help...