it says here Évian Conference - Wikipedia that Trujillo offered to take in 100,000 refugees. It also says that in fact just 800 came. What gives? Similarly, why didn’t the captain of MS St. Louis - Wikipedia unload his refugees in Dominican Republic after he was turned down by Cuba and America, whereas instead he seems to have just sailed back to Europe?
Why did only 800 come? Because a lot of Jews actually thought that the Nazis were not going to hurt them, and they thought that if they just stayed the course, eventually the war would be over and they would be returned to their homes. A lot of Jews back then had no idea what the Nazis were really trying to accomplish; they just thought they were being deported to “work camps,” like many other people were during the war; the Jews’ endless history of persecution gave many of them a mentality that the Nazis were just another one of the many people who had persecuted them, and that eventually it would be over.
I’ve heard stories - possibly apocryphal - that there were Jews who, even as they were being shoved into the gas chambers, shouted to the guards, “wait until the Fuhrer finds out about this!”
This article from nine years ago discusses the surviving Jewish community of Sosua. Not much detail on why so few took advantage of the offer, other than the fact that “[t]he transition from urban sophisticate to tropical farmer was not easy”.
ne thing I know is that they had to find a way out of Europe. Once the war started, for example, it was very difficult to leave France. Were there ships taking refugees to the Domincan? I know that 150 families went to Barbados, but around 1929-30. Ironically the last native Jew in Barbados had just died. The native Jews were originally from places like Brazil, after the Dutch ceded it to Portugal and Portugal expelled them. Eventually, the descendants of both waves moved away, mostly to the US, and the synagogue there, lovingly restored, is visited only by tourists like me.