Millions of European citizens were displaced from their homes, their livelihoods, and their native countries by the Second World War. Many of these “displaced persons” were Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other outcast groups who were persecuted by the Nazis. During the war, and immediately after it, various displaced persons tried desperately to leave Europe for the United States. Nabokov’s own family was a case in point. His younger brother Sergei, who was homosexual, died in a German concentration camp; Nabokov’s wife and son, who were Jewish, were also in jeopardy. The family fled first from Berlin to Paris in the late 1930s, and then to the United States in May 1940, immediately before German tanks rolled into Paris.
After the war, the proportion of American immigrants who were political refugees increased dramatically. The Displaced Persons Act, which Congress passed in 1948 and renewed in 1950, allowed over 400,000 Europeans to become American citizens, relaxing the rigid quotas established after the First World War. As Americans grew anxious about international communism, however, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 returned to earlier quotas and barred entry to anyone who had ever belonged to an organization seeking to overthrow the United States government. The following year, the Refugee Relief Act set aside the quota in the case of individuals who had been persecuted by communist regimes.
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