WHO IN EUROPE knew what was going on? Victor Hugo wrote a letter in 1870 condemning “white slavery” from Europe to South America (although he didn’t single out Jews). Sholem Aleichem, the popular Yiddish storyteller whose character Tevye the Dairyman appears in his collection Railroad Stories, wrote “The Man from Buenos Aires” in 1909. From a Polish newspaper report in 1891 to a Polish novel in 1930—and numerous articles about local arrests of traffickers during the in-between years—the published information was unlikely to reach the Yiddish-speaking Jewish population in Poland. They were not only illiterate in the language of the country where they lived but also too dispersed in the countryside to have access to news. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles denounced trafficking as a crime, and in 1921, the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations) held an International Conference on White Slave Traffic. Two years later, the French journalist Albert Londres, who had ingratiated himself into the pimps’ networks in South America, published in France a lengthy exposé that detailed the horrific conditions in which the women lived, with those in La Boca serving up to seventy men a day. The exposé was translated into Spanish and English in 1928 and was reviewed in the New York Times. None of these languages were spoken by the Eastern European victims or their families. Several plays about pimps and prostitutes were produced in Spanish and Yiddish in South America earlier in the century—dramas depicting current events—but they were too late for the women already enslaved there.

Though the reports—and even the occasional letter that sneaked past the pimps’ vigilance—failed to reach families before they entrusted their daughters to the care of strangers or to alarm desperate widows seeking ways to feed their children, they finally spurred into action some benevolent organizations in the Jewish communities of Great Britain, Austria, and Germany. Women activists of Ezrat Nashim, the League of Jewish Women, and the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women roamed European train stations and seaports, on the lookout for naive girls traveling either alone or in the company of well-heeled men. These activists distributed flyers and attempted to offer advice and warnings before the would-be victims sailed away. Unfortunately, rarely was the advice heeded or even believed. The lure of the chance for a better life far from the starvation and hellish anti-Semitism of Europe was too strong.