Photo: von Trapp Family | By Rebecca Brenner Graham | The Sound of Music won an Academy Award in 1965. That year also witnessed the death of 85-year-old former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act that abolished the xenophobic quota system put in place in the 1920s. During this time, a critical mass of Americans were also beginning to form ideas about the incomprehensible horrors of the Holocaust. In the film, seven adorable white Christian children, their esteemed father, and their jovial stepmother escape Nazi-annexed Austria by first singing, then hiding in the abbey where their stepmother once entered the novitiate, and finally hiking to Switzerland.
The Trapps’ real-life story shared key elements with the tale that unfolded in the film. They sang. They were not Jewish. They escaped successfully from Austria in 1938, and they lived the rest of their lives in the U.S. Missing from the movie was the fact that Frances Perkins aided this family of singers. The family and Perkins shared a mutual contact: reformer and suffragist Gertrude Ely, of Pennsylvania. Perkins expedited their visitor visas once in spring 1940, then again in fall 1940. She paid attention to their case both before and after the Immigration and Naturalization Service transferred from the Department of Labor to the Justice Department. The Trapps’ immigration story sits on the most successful end of the spectrum of Perkins’ efforts.
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Their non-Jewishness, their non-otherness, their whiteness, their musical career, and their father’s birthplace—in a region that changed nationalities but ended up in Italy—enabled the family’s relatively smooth immigration process. The Trapp family represents an archetype for the people that the U.S. could help. In 1965, when the hills came alive and The Sound of Music delighted viewers across the U.S., that’s all that Americans were ready to see.
The film takes creative liberties with the family’s circumstances. While Agathe von Trapp was the oldest child in the family, her life did not play out as portrayed by the character Liesl. She did not date a Nazi named Rolf, and she did not call out “Rolf, please!” while hiding in an abbey. She was not 16 going on 17. To the contrary, Agathe, born in 1913, was 25 in 1938, when the family arrived in the U.S. In the early 2000s, Agathe authored a memoir titled Memories Before and After the Sound of Music.
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Go here to read the full article:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/sound-of-music-true-story-nazis-immigration.html?
Photo: von Trappy Family | Photo by Conrad Poirier, January 24, 1946, from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapp_Family#/media/File:Music._The_Trapp_Family_BAnQ_P48S1P13784.jpg