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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
[b]INTRODUCTION[/b]
May 1944, three weeks before D-Day. A convoy of Jews from Hungary arrives at the railway station of a small Polish town. Auschwitz, someone on the train announces. Nobody seems to hear him. It is a name without echoes. Auschwitz? Just the name of a place. Nobody knows, nobody can guess, its terrifying implications. Nobody knows, nobody could know, that for the Jewish people this name already means the last stop, the terminus, the place where, at night, Jews from all over Europe meet to die.
The Hungarian Jews don't know this, but the leaders of the free world do. Washington knows, and so does London. The Vatican knows, and so does Switzerland. Only the victims are still in the dark.
But let's go on with our story. Under a flaming sky, a Jewish boy fends his way through the crowd in the direction of a German officer who is busy sorting people out. Some are sent to the right, others to the left. A few prisoners pass through the ranks advising old men to say they are younger and young men to say they are older, urging everybody to deny they are either ill or weak. In a few whispered words, they tell the truth about Birkenau. Impossible, the Jewish boy says to his father, they are just trying to scare us, that's all. How can they expect me to believe that in this place there are people who burn men and women alive? After all, this is the twentieth century: nobody would let a thing like that happen.
But the prisoners were not lying, as the Hungarian Jews would soon realize. It was true: in the middle of the twentieth century, in the heart of civilized Europe, a massive enterprise was manufacturing death on a large scale. Was the free world aware of what was going on? Surely not; otherwise it would have done something to prevent such a massacre. This was the consoling thought the prisoners clung to in order to protect their unwavering faith in humanity. Had they heard that all the details and all the aspects of the· "Final Solution" were known to the White House, they would have sunk into despair and resignation. But they discovered the truth only after the war.
The truth. But what was the truth? Read David Wyman's courageous, lucid, painful book and you too will learn it. Read it, and you will lose all your illusions. Within the context of war, the destiny of persecuted Jews carried too little weight to tip the scales in their favor.
How else explain the semi-indifference of an FDR faced with the agony of the European Jewry? how justify the anti-Semitic political tendencies of some of the higher officials in the Department of State? how understand the passivity and lack of perspicacity of most Jewish leaders in the United States? David Wyman, gifted thinker and historian, tries to answer these questions. And his answers hurt. All those Jews waiting for help that does not arrive and will never arrive; all those refugees lining up in front of consulate doors, returning home in the evening with an empty heart and empty eyes; all those children who could have been saved from a fatal trip to Draney and Auschwitz had it not been for a slow, insensitive bureaucracy; all those unused visas, all those unheeded appeals, all those useless screams. How can we not be ashamed of the hypocrisy behind the Evian Conference, or of the cynicism that dominated the Bermuda Conference? It almost seems as if both diplomats and statesmen spent more time inventing reasons not to save the Jews than trying to find a way to save them.
Indeed, the title of this book is a perfect reflection of its content. The Jews were abandoned. And once they were delivered to their butchers, they could no longer count on anybody. Not even on those of their people who were living free in America. Sad and revolting as it might sound, both the major Jewish organizations and the most powerful figures of the Jewish community could not or did not want to form a unified rescue commission. Peter Bergson and his group-whose energy and devotion the author praises highly-were held back for political or personal reasons. Rabbi Stephen Wise was already burdened' with too many responsibilities. As for the other leaders, most of them were much too busy thinking of the postwar period, and of the necessity of establishing a national Jewish homeland, to give much attention to the rescue operations. The Biltmore Conference barely touched upon the tragedy of European Jews, and as for the debates of the American Jewish Conference, they devoted one session to the question in September 1943, just one session, and not even a plenary one at that.
Meanwhile, from all over Occupied Europe, trains kept arriving at Birkenau. When the American government-under the joint pressures of the Bergson group and of public opinion-decided to found the War Refugee Board, it was already too late. It was too late for Polish Jews. It was too late for Dutch Jews. It was too late for French Jews.
Proud as we are of the generosity that America showed in fighting against Nazi Germany, we are embarrassed and dismayed by its behavior toward Hitler's Jewish victims.
Roosevelt's politics was only part of the problem; the rest had to do with the particular mood of the country at that time. David Wyman provides us with a few striking instances of it: the Congress's unequivocal opposition to immigration, the Christian churches' near-silence, the press's burial of news of the death factories in the back pages of their newspapers. It is all very clear: this open, generous country closed its doors and its heart to the European Jews of the ghettos. Even in 1945, after the victory, it still did not want to have anything to do with them.
This is why it is so important to read, to reread, and to encourage others to read this disturbing book. It might help us understand how, by abandoning a people, we can jeopardize our own future.
Elie Wiesel September 1985
(Translated from the French by Anna Cancogni)
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