My paternal great-uncle, Vincent Sprawka, husband of my paternal
grandmother's sister Francis, told of his emigration from the
Tsarist Russian province of Poland in 1907.
On his way to the port of embarkation he was arrested.
When he was taken before the judge whom Uncle Vincent identified
as a Jew, the judge recognized that no basis existed for Uncle
Vincent's arrest, that the local police had arrested a migrant in
an attempt to rob him, and the judge dismissed the charges and let
Uncle Vincent continue his journey.
Uncle Vincent may have said that his port of embarkation was
Hamburg, Germany.
That suggests that this incident occurred in Germany
In the early 20th century, a Slavic Polish migrant would have been
vulnerable to being preyed upon by local police in Germany and a
Jew may have been more likely to have been serving as a judge in
eastern Germany than in the western borderlands of the Tsarist
Russian province of Poland. Pre-WWI Germany may have been the time
of the greatest freedom and rights for German Jews.