[Sisters Marion, Renate, and Karen Gumprecht, refugees assisted by the National Refugee Service (NRS) and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), shortly after their arrival in the United States, Central Park, New York]

Sisters Marion, Renate and Karen Gumprecht were born in Hamburg, Germany, and arrived in New York on September 12, 1941, on the Spanish freighter S.S. Navemar. Designed to carry fifteen passengers, the ship was crammed with more than 1,100 Jewish refugees when it left Europe on a harrowing thirty-eight-day voyage, and many contracted typhus during the journey. Werner Gumprecht, the girls’ father, later recalled that the “Navemar was not the paradise we were looking for when we got our tickets. It really was hell—but it saved our lives.” Shortly after their arrival, Vishniac took this uncanny photograph of the sisters in Central Park.