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AMERICAN JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST

AMERICAN JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST
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April 18, 1982, Section 6, Page 47Buy Reprints
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*Copyright 1952 by W.H. Auden. From ''W.H. Auden Collected Poems,'' edited by Edward Mendelson. Reprinted by permission of Random House Inc.Lucy S. Dawidowicz is the author of ''The War Against the Jews 1933-1945.'' Her most recent book is ''The Holocaust and the Historians.'' By Lucy S. DawidowiczThe mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came. ...* - W.H. AUDEN

In October 1942, Jan Karski, a liaison officer of the Polish underground in Warsaw, was ordered to go on a secret mission to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. Before leaving, Karski met with two leaders of the Jewish underground who told him of what they had named ''Hitler's war against the Polish Jews.'' By their calculations, more than 1.8 million had already been murdered. Some 300,000 of the 500,000 Jews pressed into the Warsaw Ghetto had already been deported to Treblinka, an obscure village about 60 miles away, where the Germans had set up a murder camp.

Karski asked what help they wanted. The Jews' answer, he later recalled, was ''bitter and realistic,'' as if they knew that their proposals could not and would not be carried out. They said the Allies should drop leaflets over Germany, informing the Germans of what was being done to the Jews and threatening that the same would be done to them unless the murdering stopped. The Jewish leaders asked for a large-scale evacuation of Jewish children, women, the sick and the old. ''Offer the Germans money,'' they urged. Karski said that such a course ran counter to all war strategy.

Then Karski asked what message he should deliver to Jewish leaders abroad. Their answer was unhesitat-ing: ''Let them accept no food or drink. Let them die a slow death while the world is looking on.Let them die. This may shake the conscience of the world.'' Weeks later, in London, Karski met with Szmuel Zygelboym, who represented the Jewish Socialist Bund in the National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile. Zygelboym listened in agitation as Karski talked. Then he said, ''It's impossible, utterly impossible.'' If he went on a hunger strike, he said, the authorities would send the police and drag him away to an institution. But, as Karski was leaving, Zygelboym blurted out, ''I'll do everything I can do to help them. I'll do everything they ask.''

A few months later, on May 12, 1943, as the fires which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had ignited were still smoldering, Zygelboym took his own life. In his farewell letter to the President and Prime Minister of Poland, in exile, he wrote: ''By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the annihilation of the Jewish people.''

Zygelboym's suicide stirred consciences in the world, though not ''the conscience of the world,'' wherever it may have resided. But his suicide did not bring about the rescue of the Polish Jews or of Jews anywhere in Hitler's Europe - in ghettos, in slave-labor camps, with the partisans, in hiding and on the run, or in the gas chambers. For them, the West had embodied the hope of rescue, which was never realized. At the war's end, six million of Europe's nine million Jews had been murdered - a devastation this Tuesday, Holocaust Day, commemorates.

The Jews who survived Auschwitz, Belsen and Maidanek were stunned by the normalcy of the world to which they returned. They soon noted that American Jews - notwithstanding those who had served in the armed forces - had lived through the war years in safety, without having made great sacrifices. It rankled the survivors that American Jews had not staked their own security to save the European Jews. Some survivors spoke out, charging American Jews with indifference and callousness, accusing them of hypocrisy, even of betrayal. Some survivors spoke out. The novelist Elie Wiesel wrote: ''People knew - and kept silent. People knew - and did nothing.''

It is four decades since Hitler launched his war against the Jews, but time has not cooled the survivors' resentment. Just this fall, one survivor who had prospered in the United States provided funds for the American Commission on the Holocaust, with Arthur J. Goldberg, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, as its chairman. The commission's task sounds like an arraignment: ''We propose to embark on a search-2d openering inquiry into the actions and attitudes of American Jews and others in our country during the Holocaust.'' The first background materials which the commission distributed to its members reflected its biases: ''Why were American Jews so passive?'' The verdict, it appeared, had preceded the evidence. The commission's official verdict is promised for the end of this year.

But the survivors are not the only ones to point a finger. Children and grandchildren, raised in an era of activism, accuse their elders: ''Why didn't you do more?'' At a time when it is fashionable to denigrate any establishment, it is no surprise that the conduct of the establishment Jewish organizations during the war should also come in for its share of criticism. The City University of New York's Graduate School and University Center recently held a conference on the role of Jewish leadership in the free countries during the war years. Several doctoral candidates in history have issued a stream of indictments against American Jews in the form of scholarly articles published in various Jewish journals. A documentary film - ''Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?'' - has been produced by a 25-year-old American Jew and it blames the American Jews and their organizations for inaction and indifference during the war.

To anyone familiar with the history of the American Jewish community, the imputation of inaction is at once laughable and outrageous. For that history - beginning in 1840, when there were barely 15,000 Jews in America - has been animated with energy and passion on behalf of Jews abroad. American Jews have responded with vigor to every infraction of the rights of Jews abroad and to every act of violence against them. The archives of Jewish organizations bulge with representations to the United States Government and to foreign nations on behalf of Jews abroad. Thus, in 1906, the American Jewish Committee was created to aid the Russian Jews in the wake of pogroms. In 1914, the Joint Distribution Committee was created to help European and Palestinian Jews during World War I. In 1918, the American Jewish Congress was created to defend the postwar rights of the East European Jews at the Paris Peace Conference.

There is no evidence at all to support the notion that American Jews suddenly became indifferent to the fate of the European Jews in those terrible years of World War II. There is, in fact, a rich body of evidence to the contrary. But it is indisputable that - for all the energy American Jews expended, for all the projects they launched, for all the heartache they suffered - they accomplished very little. The European Jews were not rescued, not because American Jews were passive but because American Jews lacked the resources to rescue them. In the final analysis, what counted most was the Third Reich's unalterable determination to annihilate the European Jews. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the bitter divisions between American interventionists and isolationists gave way to national solidarity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his unprecedented third term as President, brought to the problems of war the same buoyancy, hope and confidence that he had brought to those of the Depression. More than any man of his time, Roosevelt radiated faith in the survival of democracy and decency.

American Jews loved him for his good works and ideals, but most of all for his hatred of the Nazi regime. The Jews were perhaps the most interventionist Americans. A bare 3.5 percent of the population, a minority vulnerable to persistent prejudice, their prowar stand intensified that prejudice. Jews were used to hearing the kind of accusation that Democratic Representative John E. Rankin of Mississippi leveled on June 4, 1941: ''Wall Street bankers and international Jews are dragging the country into the war.''

Notwithstanding the anti-Semitism that did not abate with America's entry into the war, and which lasted until well after, American Jews continued their efforts to help the European Jews. The familial ties were strong: most Jews in the United States were then either immigrants from Eastern Europe or American-born children of those immigrants. They expended much time, energy and money to convince Congress it should enact emergency legislation to bypass the restrictive immigration policy, but they failed. The country's mood was inhospitable, xenophobic. What American Jews could manage on their own was to raise money, and they did so in amounts unprecedented for any other ethnic community in the United States.

From 1933 until Pearl Harbor, the Joint Distribution Committee had spent well over $20 million (when dollars were worth more than today, and harder to come by) for aid to the European Jews and had assisted the worldwide migration of more than a quarter of a million Jewish refugees. Other organizations, like the Orthodox Agudat Israel and the socialist Jewish Labor Committee, ran similar programs on a smaller scale. In 1939 and 1940, with the help of friends in high places, they extracted from the State Department several hundred emergency visas for Jewish political and religious leaders then in Poland. In 1940 and 1941, the J.L.C. used the Polish Government-in-Exile's under-ground courier network to transmit money to Jews locked in Polish ghettos.

Orthodox institutions, for their part, had other legal channels for sending relief packages to Poland. In a grim irony, Jewish groups that supported a boycott against Germany began picketing Agudat Israel headquarters in the summer of 1941 because of their suspicion that supplies were falling into Nazi hands and their conviction that breaking the boycott was undermining Jewish unity.

''Jewish unity'' is one of those shibboleths of Jewish organizational life. (The Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz once said that unity could be found in the graveyard.) In the United States, Jews were not more divided than they had ever been in their millennial history. As a matter of fact, American Jews had developed and refined the strategy of ad hoc united action, which enabled organizations with diverse backgrounds, beliefs and methods to cooperate successfully on specific programs.

The deepest cleavage within the American Jewish community during the 1930's and early 1940's was over the question of Zionism and a Jewish state. Zionists believed that a Jewish state in Palestine would solve the problem of Jewish homelessness and powerlessness. Anti-Zionists feared that a Jewish state would undermine the security of Jews in other countries, threaten their civic status and cast suspicion on their patriotism. Non-Zionists, sharing some of these anxieties, were nevertheless persuaded that persecuted Jews needed the haven which Great Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917 had promised in its ambituous formulation of ''a national home for the Jewish people'' in Palestine.

Despite these fundamental ideological differences, Jewish organizations denounced the British White Paper of 1939 because it cruelly limited Jewish admission to Palestine precisely when refuge was the Jews' most desperate need. The British policy on Palestine created an intractable dilemma for Jews. Britain was, after all, fighting Hitler. In 1940-41, Britain stood alone against the fury of the German air war. The Zionists set themselves a goal, which served them better as an aphorism than as practical policy: ''To fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper.''

But under intensified pressure from the Palestinian Arabs, Britain remained adamant on the White Paper. Consequently, even the small number of Jews who escaped from Hitler's Europe had no place to go. The tragic history of the Struma was a case in point. Early in 1942, the Struma, a small and quite unseaworthy ship, sailed from a Rumanian port on the Black Sea with 769 refugees, its destination Palestine. The ship managed to get as far as Istanbul, but was in no condition to put out to sea. The Turkish authorities refused to admit the Jews without British assurance that they could enter Palestine. The British refused. The Turks then towed the ship out to the Sea of Marmora, where on Feb. 24, 1942, it went to pieces. Only one person survived.

Differences over Zionism did not hinder Jewish unity then. In March 1942, shaken by the Struma tragedy, the major American Zionist and non-Zionist organizations submitted a joint appeal to the State Department urging the American Government to use its good offices to persuade the British to modify the harsh limitations of the White Paper.

The most serious disturbers of American Jewish solidarity were a handful of young men who had come to the United States just before war broke out. Their mission was to raise money for the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist military organization in Palestine that had broken with the Palestinian Jewish settlement's defense arm, Haganah. Politically, it was close to the Zionist-Revisionist movement, which advocated the establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. The head of the American mission was Peter Bergson, a dapper young man and a smooth talker. His attractiveness and that of his associates from Palestine and Eastern Europe won them entree from Park Avenue to Hollywood, from Brooklyn to Las Vegas. They were the outriders for a mysterious, romantic Palestinian underground. They had glamour.

Separated from their home base by an ocean and a war, they had no constituency and reported to no one. Their extremist methods put them on a collision course with all Jewish organizations then and for years to come. In 1942, David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Zionist Executive in Palestine, condemned them as nothing but a front for the Irgun terrorists in Palestine.

In America, the Irgunists operated a succession of fund-raising front organizations, with the same list of supporters adorning the letterheads. With a gift for publicity, the Irgunists were the first Jewish group to use the techniques of advertising and mass propaganda. They did not much care for the fine points of accuracy in their claims - once, for example, they listed Senator Harry S. Truman as a supporter when he was not - but they did succeed in raising the decibel level of public protest. The Jewish organizations, discomfited, tried vainly to invite the Irgunists into their counsels. Until the war's end, when they went back to Palestine, the Irgunists remained an embarrassment to the organized Jewish community, Zionist and non-Zionist. In the summer of 1941, the Germans began to murder Jews in outdoor mass-shooting operations in the areas taken from the Soviet Union. Then, at the end of 1941, the Germans began to kill Jews by gas in Poland. Auschwitz and Chelmno were the first two death camps to be constructed; then came Belzec,Maidanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Until that summer, when news from Poland still reached the West, it was known that the Jews under German rule were dying of hunger, disease, abuse and sporadic violence. But not even the most lurid imagination had entertained the idea of systematic mass murder. The first news of these killings reached the West only in June 1942, in a report from the Jewish Bund in the Warsaw Ghetto. That report described the mass shootings on Soviet territory and mentioned for the first time the killings by gas. Some 700,000 Polish Jews had already been murdered, according to the bund's estimate. To stop the killings, it asked the Allied Governments to put in force a policy of retribution against Germans living in their countries.

In swift response to that report, the Polish Government-in-Exile and five other governments-in-exile submitted a memorandum about the mass murder of the Jews to the three Allied powers and to the Pope. The press and the radio disseminated the news. The New York Times published the story on July 2, 1942, in a single column on page 6. At that time, most Americans had other preoccupations: The war was going badly on nearly all fronts.

Tremors went through the Jewish community. The statistics of murder were terrifying. Could they be believed? Perhaps the figures were exaggerated.

The major Jewish organizations conferred about circulating the terrible news and doing something about it. The American Jewish Congress organized a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden on July 21, to which President Roosevelt sent a message, declaring that the American people would ''hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.'' The rabbis and the religious organizations arranged special memorial services. But the military situation in Europe offered no hope for the Jews or for anyone under Germany's rule.

Early in August 1942, new information reached the West, disclosing that Hitler was planning the systematic destruction of the European Jews to ''solve the Jewish question in Europe.'' The in-formation had been obtained from a reliable German source by Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland. Riegner imparted this information to the United States Consulate in Geneva, whose officials transmitted it to the State Department on August 8, with the particular request to pass it on to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress.

State Department officials considered the cable too fantastic to be believed and did not forward it to Wise. But the British Foreign Office had also been informed from Geneva and had passed the news to Samuel Sidney Silverman, M.P. and head of the World Jewish Congress's British Section. On Aug. 28, Silverman sent a copy of Riegner's message to Wise:

''RECEIVED ALARMING REPORT THAT IN FUHRER'S HEADQUARTERS PLAN DIS-CUSSED AND UNDER CONSIDERATION ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CON-TROLLED GERMANY NUMBER 3 1/2 TO 4 MILLION SHOULD AFTER DEPORTATION AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED TO RESOLVE ONCE FOR ALL JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE STOP ACTION REPORTED PLANNED FOR AUTUMN METHODS UNDER DISCUSSION INCLUDING PRUSSIC ACID STOP WE TRANSMIT INFORMATION WITH ALL NECESSARY RESERVATION AS EXACTITUDE CANNOT BE CONFIRMED STOP INFORMANT STATED TO HAVE CLOSE CONNECTIONS WITH HIGHEST GERMAN AUTHORITIES AND HIS REPORTS GENERALLY RELIABLE STOP INFORM AND CONSULT NEW YORK STOP FOREIGN OFFICE HAS NO INFORMA-TION BEARING ON OR CONFIRMING STORY.''

Wise left no record of his immediate response, but he called an emergency meeting of the American Jewish Congress's executive board and also, on Labor Day, of the heads of the major Jewish organizations. They decided he should see Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles promptly, to try to confirm this news. In Washington, Wise had to promise Welles not to release Riegner's cable until it could be confirmed. Welles then turned the cable over for corroboration to Myron C. Taylor, Roosevelt's personal diplomatic representative to the Vatican, a former industrialist, for some years actively concerned with the problems of refugees.

Riegner's cable forecast terrible things to come, though we know now that the program of mass murder had been under way for nearly a year. For most Americans, however, and especially for top people in the Government, the discouraging war news was the most immediate concern. After all, America had millions of its own men and women in the Armed Forces - 16 million by the war's end, among them 550,000 American Jews. In September 1942, the Germans had advanced to the gates of Stalingrad. In North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was heading toward Alexandria and Cairo. The war in the Pacific was going badly, too.

During the two months it took for the State Department to verify Riegner's information, reports of the mass killings of Jews continued to come in. The New York Times printed small items; the Jewish press printed big stories. Everywhere, American Jews devoured what news they could get. ''In my private history of the world,'' Alfred Kazin wrote in his memoir ''New York Jew,'' ''I took down every morsel of fact and rumor relating to the murder of my people.''

Wise scurried between New York and Washington, discussing the various projects of relief and rescue then occupying the attention of Jewish organizations. He saw Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson about the long-discussed plan to feed the Polish Jews. (He showed him the ''awful'' cable.) He saw Vice President Henry A. Wallace and Milo Perkins, head of the Board of Economic Warfare. (He showed them the cable.) Wise had a plan whereby neutral nations would represent American organizations in feeding the Polish Jews. He went to see Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr., who - it had been suggested - could take the idea up with the Archbishop of Argentina. He saw the Polish Ambassador. He saw Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes about using the Virgin Islands as a temporary asylum for refugees. He took up with the State Department the question of rescuing 5,000 Jewish children from Vichy France, a matter in which Jewish leaders had interested Eleanor Roosevelt.

Stephen Wise, like a number of other Jewish leaders, had access to many important people in Washington. He had long been active in the Democratic Party and had campaigned for Roosevelt in 1936 and 1940. And Jews were among the many professionals and academics working for the most exhilarating Administration in their lifetime. Roosevelt himself brought into his immediate circle more Jews than any other President before or after him. Felix Frankfurter, Bernard M. Baruch and Henry Morgenthau Jr. were his close advisers. Benjamin V. Cohen, Samuel Rosenman and David K. Niles were his friends and trusted aides.

Caution, as a rule, governed the actions of Jews in high places. They were sensitive to their visibility as Jews and vulnerable to the malice of anti-Semites who charged that they were a government within a government. All through the Roosevelt years, Baruch, Frankfurter and Morgenthau were vilified, not necessarily because of the policies they advocated, but because they were Jews. Understandably, they tried to keep their Jewishness out of their public lives. ''I don't feel that I should push myself into Jewish matters when the skipper does not ask my advice,'' Ben Cohen once wrote Wise.

Understandably, they tried to separate their Jewishness from their public lives, but they were not always sure of the dividing line between public and private interests. Morgenthau showed the most self-confidence in making the distinction. In an interchange with Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary of State, whose mean-spirited, obstructionist policies had in effect spelled a death sentence for thousands of Jews, Morgenthau said, as he later recorded in his papers, ''Breck, we might be a little frank. The impression is all around that you, particularly, are anti-Semitic.'' Long remonstrated, but Morgenthau was steadfast: ''After all, Breck, the United States of America was created as a refuge for people who were persecuted the world over, starting with Plymouth. ...'' As for his official responsibility, he said, ''I am carrying this out as Secretary of the Treasury and not as a Jew.''

Years later, Morgenthau recalled that his life changed the day Wise read him ''that unbelievable cable.'' They talked about informing Roosevelt, but presumably decided to wait for State Department corroboration.

On Nov. 24, 1942, Sumner Welles summoned Wise to Washington, authorizing him to release the terrible news which had finally been confirmed through State Department channels. Returning to New York, Wise called an emergency meeting of eight national Jewish organizations, sharing his information with them. They planned a program of action, to begin with the release of the cable and to culminate in a meeting with President Roosevelt, which Welles had promised Wise to help arrange.

A torrent of activity followed. Jewish organizations issued a proclamation; memorial services were held in synagogues and churches around the country and on national radio. In New York City, half a million workers stopped work for 10 minutes. Across the nation, twominute periods of silence were observed.

In preparation for the meeting with Roosevelt, Wise wrote to him: ''I do not wish to add an atom to the awful burden which you are bearing. ... But do you know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass massacres?'' He concluded on a cautionary note: ''It would be gravely misunderstood if, despite your overwhelming preoccupation, you did not make it possible to receive our delegation and to utter what I am sure will be your heartening and consoling reply.''

The delegation, consisting of representatives of six organizations, saw Roosevelt on Dec. 8, 1942. They had earlier agreed that they would leave with him a memorandum detailing the atrocities committed against the European Jews and asking the President to appoint a commission to collect and examine ''all evidence ofNazi barbarities against civilian populations.'' The President talked to the delegation for about a half-hour, assuring them of his concern.

Did Roosevelt then think that the only way to help the Jews was to defeat Hitler? He was surely preoccupied with the course of the war. The Anglo-American invasion of North Africa was just a month old and terrible fighting was still going on in the desert. That invasion had triggered the German occupation of Vichy France. On the Russian front, Leningrad was still under siege; the slaughter at Stalingrad was estimated at hundreds of thousands.

The Jews, for their part, in desperation began to think of rescue on a large scale, not only in terms of specific opportunities to help a few hundred or thousand Jews here or there. After the Allied nations issued their declaration ''German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race,'' on Dec. 17, 1942, threatening the Germans with retribution, the B'nai B'rith called on the Allies to do something now, to rescue those who could still be rescued, to ask neutral nations to provide havens for them. At the start of 1943, the Jewish organizations moved into high gear. They had few resources: meager staffs, their commitment and that of the Jewish community, and their contacts with people in power. Most obviously, these organizations had no machinery with which to rescue the Jews - no planes, no ships, no trains, no commando teams, no medical corps, no voice in the conduct of the war. What they could do was to rally public opinion and pressure those who they thought had the machinery for relief and rescue. But in January 1943, public opinion had not been much stirred. A Gallup poll taken then showed that less than half of the American people believed that two million European Jews had already been killed. Most people polled thought it was ''just a rumor,'' or they had no opinion.

Still, the Jewish organizations set to work. Propitiously, the American Jewish Committee had a new president. Once the most influential organization of American Jews, the A.J.C. had since 1929 been led by a succession of weak, elderly, ailing men. The new man, Joseph M. Proskauer, a prominent attorney and former New York State Supreme Court Justice, was vigorous and dynamic despite his 65 years.

Proskauer and Wise had been friends since the 1920's, when they were close to Alfred E. Smith, Governor of New York and unsuccessful Democratic Presidential candidate in 1928. However much they differed in temperament and style, however much they disagreed about Zionism, Wise and Proskauer made a good team, because they shared a sense of responsibility to the Jewish community.

Right after Proskauer became A.J.C. president, he wrote to a friend: ''I have a client and my client is the Jewish community, and not the American Jewish Committee. I am serving the American Jewish Committee to make it, in turn, a servant of the Jewish community.''

Proskauer and Wise began to work on a program for rescue. An A.J.C. memorandum of Feb. 4, 1943, headed ''Proposals for Emergency Committee,'' listed 11 courses of action. Appended to the memorandum was an inventory of ideas for rescue advocated by Jews and non-Jews in the United States and abroad. On March 15, 1943, the Joint Emergency Committee on European Jewish Affairs was formally constituted, with seven organizations as members and two as observers. The full story of its activities has yet to be told.

At that time, some possibilities existed for rescuing limited numbers of Jews from France and Bulgaria, and finding refuge for others stranded in North Africa and Spain. Just as pressing was the problem of food and medical supplies for the Jews in Poland. Jewish communal leaders, in their individual organizations and in concert, were continually writing letters, drafting memorandums and visiting chancelleries, ministries and foreign embassies to get help for the European Jews. Jewish Representatives and Senators enlisted the support of their colleagues. A Jewish Congressional delegation complained to Roosevelt about the State Department's red tape.

Jewish leaders went to see Frankfurter; Eleanor Roosevelt; the President's personal Vatican representative, Myron Taylor; Secretary of State Cordell Hull; Sumner Welles; even Breckinridge Long. They talked to the International Red Cross and to top people in international refugee organizations. They approached the Vatican and its Apostolic delegates. They talked to neutral diplomats and officials of the governments-in-exile. They enlisted Protestant and Roman Catholic church groups in the United States, contacted the A.F.L. and the C.I.O., and provided information to journalists.

But rescuing the European Jews was an unachievable task. Most European Jews were inaccessible, beyond the reach not only of the American Jews, but even of the Allied armed forces. They were in Hitler's vise. The most dramatic illustration of their remoteness from rescue was the case of the Rumanian Jews. Under its dictator, Ion Antonescu, Rumania fought alongside Germany on the Eastern front. Staggering losses at Stalingrad from December 1942 through the following month led Antonescu to consider the possibility that the Germans might not, after all, win the war. One of his ensuing acts of rapprochement with the West involved the Jews.

In 1943, some 70,000 Rumanian Jews were interned in appalling conditions in Transnistria, where about 100,000 had already died. Under pressure from Rumanian Jewish leaders who had enlisted the support of neutral ambassadors, papal nuncios, church leaders and the Red Cross, Antonescu offered to let the 70,000 emigrate to Palestine. But he wanted his expenses covered: 20,000 lei ($100) per Jewish head, to be paid by Jewish organizations abroad.

American Jews first learned of the Rumanian offer on Feb. 13, 1943, in a story in The New York Times from London. Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist Organization, was visiting then in the United States. He called Morgenthau, who said he would talk to Roosevelt, with whom he was lunching that day. Roosevelt told Morgenthau to take it up with Welles. Jewish leaders also saw the British Ambassador, Lord Halifax, who promised to cable the Foreign Office to take all measures necessary to remove the Jews, if the offer was genuine. On Feb. 16, before the offer had been confirmed, the Irgunists ran a five-column advertisement in The New York Times:''FOR SALE to Humanity 70,000 Jews Guaranteed Human Beings at- $50 apiece.''

The advertisement also asked for funds to support the group's work, creating the impression without actually saying so that the money would be used to ransom the Rumanian Jews. That ad was later used in direct-mail solicitation with the same intent. The Irgunists, although asked repeatedly, never rendered an accounting for the money they raised, but certainly none of it was used to rescue the Rumanian Jews, because they were not permitted to leave Rumania.

Jewish leaders, still not knowing how things would work out, continued to negotiate in Bucharest, Washington and London. For months, the State Department - a stronghold of men like Breckinridge Long, with ingrained anti-Jewish attitudes - withheld its approval for sending money abroad, even though the Jewish organizations had a plan whereby the money was to be deposited in escrow in a Swiss bank to prevent its falling into enemy hands. At last, on July 22, 1943, Wise got Roosevelt to approve a transfer of a mere $25,000 for a start. The State and Treasury Departments were to work out the details. But even without the obstruction of the State Department and the British Foreign Office, the rescue fell through for causes beyond the reach of the Jewish organizations.

From the moment that Antonescu had announced his willingness to trade the Jews for money, Adolf Eichmann's man in Bucharest sent alarming messages to Berlin. Eichmann and the German Foreign Office protested. They didn't want the Jews released even in Rumania. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, then enjoying the good life in Berlin, protested to Hitler that the Jews must not be allowed to go to Palestine. Antonescu's resolve crumbled. Not before the end of 1943, with the Red Army at his back door, did he let the Jews return to their homes. Despite the obstacles, the Jewish communal organizations kept trying to keep the plight of the European Jews in the public eye and at the same time to accomplish something practical. In February 1943, upon receipt of more news about the continuing murder of the European Jews, Wise decided to organize another mass meeting in Madison Square Garden. It was held on March 1, co-sponsored by the Church Peace Union, the A.F.L. and th C.I.O. There were speeches and prayers; an 11-point program of rescue was adopted.

A week later, in the same arena, a protest of another sort took place. Two performances were given of a pageant, ''We Will Never Die,'' written by Ben Hecht, with music by Kurt Weill, staged by Billy Rose and directed by Moss Hart. Hecht's sense of his Jewish identity had not been very positive in the past, but the murder of the European Jews aroused him to a passionate commitment to the Irgun cause. Thus, show business and hype merged with politics and protest.

On March 3, two days after Wise's demonstration -surely no coincidence - the State Department announced that the United States and Britain would hold a joint meeting in an effort to find a solution to the refugee problem. The initiative had come from the British, but the State Department tried to take some credit. The dismal record of both Governments with regard to refugees, in the light of the murder of the European Jews, demanded rectification.

The Joint Emergency Committee refined its program into a comprehensive 12-point plan which it submitted to Myron Taylor, Roosevelt's Vatican representative, and the State Department, in the hope that the document would serve as the basis for the committee's participation in the coming Anglo-American meeting. The first point proposed that through the Vatican or certain neutrals the Allies should approach the German Government and the states it controlled or partly dominated with a view to securing their agreement to the emigration of Jews.

Then followed proposals for creating temporary sanctuaries, improving administrative procedures in American immigration laws, opening the doors of Palestine, setting up a system of feeding, providing financial guarantees for carrying out the rescue of Jews and, finally, establishing ''an appropriate intergovernmental agency, to which full authority and power should be given to implement the program of rescue.''

The intense interest in their forthcoming meeting must have dismayed the diplomatic planners, who did not think the conference would measure up to growing public expectations. They decided that their April 19 conference would be held on the then inaccessible island of Bermuda, that it would be a closed-door meeting and that no Jewish delegation would be permitted to attend. The American delegation was graced by a token Jew -Democratic Representative Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, widely regarded as a cat's-paw for Breckinridge Long.

The excluded Jewish leaders besieged conference participants with memorandums and pleas. Myron Taylor arranged a meeting of Wise and Proskauer with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on March 27 in Washington. Eden said that their first proposal - the approach to Germany - was ''fantastically impossible.'' Sumner Welles appears to have been more responsive.

The Bermuda Conference opened on the day that the Warsaw Ghetto Jews, with their pitiful arsenal of guns and hand-made explosives, rose up against the heavily armed SS forces. The Bermuda Conference closed on April 30, when the Warsaw Ghetto was still burning. The conference issued no immediate report and brought no succor at all to the European Jews. According to a British participant, it was only ''a facade for inaction.''

Two days later, at a meeting of 20,000 persons organized by Boston's Jewish community, Assistant Secretary of State Berle declared about the plight of Europe's Jews: ''The only cure for this hideous mess can come through Allied armies, when they have cracked the defenses of Western Europe and are able to maneuver on the European plains.'' At that time, Hitler's Fortress Europe was still intact. Fighting was still going on in North Africa. Though the Russians, who had finally driven back the Germans from Stalingrad, were on the offensive, the Germans were preparing a summer counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the trains kept rolling to Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek. One by one, the ghettos in Poland, White Russia, the Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania were being emptied of their Jews. From Greece, Holland and Luxembourg, the Jews were being transported to their deaths. Soon many of the Jews of Vichy France and Italy would disappear.

Until the Bermuda Conference, all the Jewish organizations, Zionist and non-Zionist - except the Irgunists - had observed a policy of disciplined discretion with regard to the British White Paper and with regard to State Department obstructionism. the war and the need to preserve national unity were as vital as for all Americans. vital as for all Americans. ence's refusal seriously to consider any proposals for rescue provoked the Jews to reappraise their position with regard to public criticism on the issue.

A meeting of the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, on May 3, 1943, agreed that the Bermuda Conference had made a campaign against Britain's White Paper imperative. But Nahum Goldmann, a Zionist leader, warned them that if they undertook to fight the White Paper, the protest and rescue activities on behalf of the European Jews would have to stop: ''There is not enough manpower to engage in two campaigns.'' Stephen Wise, on an earlier occasion, had once said, ''We cannot press the Hitler button and the Britishand-Palestine button at one and the same time!''

The trouble was that there were really two Palestine buttons. One involved a campaign against the White Paper, demanding unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine; the other was political, a campaign for a Jewish state.

In the summer of 1943, a new Jewish organization appeared on the scene. Called the American Jewish Conference, it had been a Zionist initiative in the making since the start of the year. Its purpose was to bring all the Jewish organizations together to consider the postwar Jewish agenda at the peace table: Jewish rights and security in post-Hitler Europe and the future of the Jews in Palestine. The non-Zionist organizations had, early on, raised many objections to protect their own institutional and ideological integrity. But after Bermuda, Proskauer was ready to bring the American Jewish Committee into a campaign against the White Paper, though not in support of a Jewish state. Wise and Proskauer both wished to preserve Jewish unity, while not embarrassing Roosevelt and the Administration with regard to the British. In their eyes, unity in the conduct of the war against Hitler was of vital importance.

Zionist leaders, however, were divided - in the United States as in Palestine. Some thought the time for moderation was past. At Weizmann's urging, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, a Reform rabbi in Cleveland, was appointed co-chairman - with Wise - of the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs. He was a stern, forbidding man, not given to compromise. A lifelong Republican and close friend of Ohio's conservative Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, Silver had no scruples about attacking President Roosevelt, his policies and his war allies.

The American Jewish Conference opened at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City on Aug. 29, 1943, and continued - in a relentless flow of rhetoric - through Sept. 2. On Aug. 30, Proskauer made his plea to the delegates to limit themselves, in the interests of Jewish unity, to the campaign against the White Paper. On Aug. 31, Silver, one of the great rhetoricians of his day, demolished the arguments of the non-Zionists. He turned the demand for statehood into a passionate outcry for rescue:

''From the infested, typhus-ridden ghetto of Warsaw, from the death-block of Nazi-occupied lands ... from the pitiful ranks of our wandering hosts over the entire face of the earth, comes the cry: 'Enough; there must be a final end to all this, a sure and certain end!' ... We cannot truly rescue the Jews of Europe unless we have free immigration into Palestine. We cannot have free immigration into Palestine unless our political rights are recognized there.''

If there had been waverers, Silver's oratory convinced them. The next day, Silver's Palestine resolution was adopted with but four dissenting votes to 498 resounding ayes. (Eventually, the non-Zionist organizations -American Jewish Committee, Jewish Labor Committee and Agudat Israel - withdrew from the conference.)

What of rescue? The prepared agenda of the American Jewish Conference had not envisioned rescue, but it was uppermost in delegates' minds. Accordingly, the conference added rescue to its agenda and set up a Rescue Committee. A month later, Stephen Wise proposed that the Joint Emergency Committee for European Jewish Affairs merge with the conference's rescue committee. The non-Zionists opposed the idea, but the issue was forced to a vote at the next meeting on Nov. 5, 1943. The five Zionist and pro-Zionist members voted to dissolve; the four non-Zionists voted against. The Joint Emergency Committee was dissolved. Thereafter, activities for rescue were conducted by the conference, by the A.J.C., J.L.C. and Agudat, all doing what they had been doing before -intervening with those in power to try to save the European Jews.

Meanwhile, the Irgunists took out more newspaper ads. For example, on May 4 in The New York Times, one was headed: ''To the 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death-Trap, Bermuda was a 'Cruel Mockery.' '' Then, as if to upstage the forthcoming American Jewish Conference, in late July 1943 the Irgunists convened their own Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, which produced an Irgunist rewrite of the program which the Joint Emergency Committee had submitted to the Bermuda Conference. They also urged the creation of a rescue agency.

On Oct. 6, 1943, two days before Yom Kippur, the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar, the Irgunists dramatized their case further by bringing to Washington 500 Orthodox rabbis, bearing a petition to Roosevelt to rescue the European Jews. They had no appointment with the President, for he had been told by a confidant, Judge Samuel Rosenman, ''that the group behind this petition was not representative of the most thoughtful elements in Jewry.'' But the rabbis -venerable and impressive -delivered their petition to Vice President Henry A. Wallace and saw a group of Senators and Representatives. The incident did not create much of a stir.

The Irgunists were building political support in the House and the Senate, often among isolationists, Democrats as well as Republicans. Most isolationists had a strong anti-British streak and for that reason may have been happy to associate themselves with a group whose prime target was Great Britain.

For example, Democratic Senator Guy M. Gillette of Iowa, one of the Irgunists' most loyal friends, had in 1941 voted against Lend-Lease, against the draft, against the modification of the Neutrality Act. In February 1944, he was the only member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of seven Democrats in the Senate to vote against authorization of funds for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. This man, whose legislative record as an anti-Nazi was hardly impressive, introduced a resolution in November 1943 which embraced the Irgunist demand for a rescue agency. (A similar one was introduced in the House.) Slightly changed from the original Irgunist rescue program, the resolution urged the ''creation by the President of a commission of diplomatic, economic and military experts to formulate and effectuate a plan of immediate action designed to save the surviving Jewish people of Europe.'' At just this time, things were coming to a head behind the scenes. Henry Morgenthau Jr. was preoccupied by the murder of the European Jews. Representatives of all Jewish organizations went to him for help; his door was always open. Within the range of his operations as Secretary of the Treasury - the issuance of licenses for sending money abroad, for instance -he and his staff did whatever they could, as expeditiously as they could. But Morgenthau knew that other Government agencies offered little help. ''Officials dodged their grim responsibility,'' he later wrote, ''procrastinated when concrete rescue schemes were placed before them, and even suppressed information about atrocities.'' The charges referred pointedly to the State Department.

Back in July 1943, when Roosevelt had approved Wise's plan for sending a token sum abroad toward the rescue of the Rumanian Jews, Morgenthau conferred with Hull, who promised full cooperation. But Hull - or his staff - failed to act. By October, State Department inertia had infuriated Morgenthau's staff - principally, general counsel Randolph S. Paul, assistant general counsel Josiah E. DuBois Jr., and John W. Pehle, director of the division of foreign funds control - and they began to investigate what was going on in State, while Morgenthau kept pressing Hull. The Treasury staff eventually uncovered an ugly story of deliberate obstruction and suppression of the continuing flow of information about the murder of the European Jews, on which they ultimately wrote a memorandum for Morgenthau. A handful of men in the State Department had managed to sabotage even the limited possibilities of rescue available. Morgenthau, after confronting Hull with some of this information, soon realized that the old and ailing Secretary of State was uninformed about things in his own department.

At a Treasury staff meeting on Saturday afternoon, Dec. 19, 1943, aides told Morgenthau it was necessary to get the Jewish issue out of the State Department, so that the President could ''appoint a commission or committee consisting of sympathetic people of some importance.'' When the staff met again the next day, a new face was present: Oscar S. Cox, then counsel to the Lend-Lease Administration and Assistant United States Solicitor General. Cox had once worked for Morgenthau, and had helped draft the Lend-Lease legislation. In whatever post he held, he was haunted by the suffering of refugees. (The Lend-Lease Administration had used its funds in some refugee programs.) Cox's absorbing concern was shared by one of his staff, Milton Handler, then on leave from Columbia University, where he taught law. Cox and Handler played a crucial role in the developing events, but this is the first time that their story has been told.

In June 1943, Handler and Cox had drafted a plan for an interdepartmental agency to deal with ''the war-refugee problem,'' but it had not advanced beyond the talking stage. When Cox joined Morgenthau's staff on Dec. 19, he outlined that plan. It called for the creation of a committee of three principal officers of the Government - Morgenthau for the Treasury; Under Secretary Edward R. Stettinius, Welles's replacement, for State, acting as deputy for Hull; and Leo Crowley, Cox's boss, head of the Foreign Economic Administration, under which Lend-Lease and other agencies operated. Cox then said: ''Now this whole proposition of setting up this committee has been discussed with the President. He is in favor of it.'' The only obstruction came from the State Department, the very people whose obstruction had made such an agency necessary.

Cox and Handler had meanwhile been working on Sol Bloom. Bloom was in a tight spot. Afraid that public discussion of the Irgunist resolution, which had been introduced into his Foreign Affairs Committee, would discredit him for following Breckinridge Long's lead at Bermuda, Bloom held closed-door hearings. He let Long expatiate at length and he took advantage of the sessions to harass the Irgunist Peter Bergson. Bloom had let it be known privately that he would welcome an executive order establishing a Government refugee agency. That would take the heat off him. On Dec. 28, Cox sent Bloom a draft of just such an order, complete with press release. It called for a committee headed by Hull, Morgenthau and Crowley ''for the immediate rescue of victims of enemy oppression, for their relocation in havens of refuge and such other measures as may be necessary for their relief.'' Three days later, Cox sent copies of the draft executive order to Rosenman, saying that he wanted to talk to him about it.

Meanwhile, Morgenthau had pushed Hull sufficiently so that the financial transfers to help evacuate the Rumanian Jews from Transnistria began to go through. By Jan. 3, 1944, the original $25,000 had been cleared and the Treasury had authorized the Joint Distribution Committee to make a remittance of $200,000 to Switzerland. Now diplomatic obstacles intervened. Morgenthau once again went to Hull and found him ''simply bewildered'' by what was happening. It was then that Morgenthau decided that his only option was to go to Roosevelt.

On Jan. 13, aides submitted to Morgenthau an 18-page, single-spaced memorandum with an extraordinary title: ''Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.'' It indicted the State Department and most particularly Breckinridge Long for their record of procrastination, concealment and misrepresentation. But Morgenthau wanted something more - a concrete proposal for action. His staff met with Handler and Ben Cohen, then general counsel at the Office of War Mobilization. Day by day, they refined the draft executive order for a Government agency. By Jan. 15, it was finished. It called for the establishment of a ''War Refugee Board.''Page 114

Morgenthau had an appointment with Roosevelt on Sunday, Jan. 16, to discuss the rescue of the remaining Jews in Europe. In preparation, he met the day before with his staff and also with Rosenman and Cox. Meanwhile, Morgenthau had cut and somewhat cooled his staff's memorandum. He gave it a quieter title - ''Personal Report to the Presi-dent'' - but retained its first sentence: ''One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated.'' The report closed with Morgenthau's own words:

''The matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust too great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent, callous and perhaps even hostile. The task is filled with difficulties. Only a fervent will to accomplish, backed by persistent and untiring effort, can succeed where time is so precious.''

Morgenthau told Roosevelt that he was deeply disturbed by the State Department's failure to take effective action to save the European Jews. After hearing a summary of the facts of the case - Roosevelt did not read the memorandum then or later - the President looked at the executive order. He did not think Crowley was the right person to be on the board and said it should be Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War. Otherwise, he approved the document. Roosevelt then advised Morgenthau to consult with sympathetic Government officials on arrangements. On Jan. 22, 1944, the White House issued the executive order establishing the War Refugee Board.

It was already too late for most European Jews. Barely two weeks earlier, at a meeting of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in New York, an account was presented of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The room was hushed with tension. When the speaker finished, people spontaneously rose to stand in silence. Someone said, ''Let's recite kaddish,'' and they began to intone the memorial prayer for the dead.

The War Refugee Board gave the Jewish organizations an address to go to. It responded to Jewish pleas for rescue and, in the end, distinguished itself by rescuing Jews from those places where rescue was possible. But the national Jewish organizations continued to intercede with the President, with the State Department, with international relief agencies, with neutral countries. In March 1944, the German occupation of Hungary threatened the survival of the Hungarian Jews. Roosevelt, in response to Jewish pressure, issued a statement on March 24, appealing to the Hungarians to help the Jews escape and threatening punishment for those ''who participate in these acts of savagery.'' But there was little that anyone outside Hungary could do to stop the slaughter that Hitler had unloosed there. Yet the help that came to the Jews from inside Hungary was sparked from the outside by the War Refugee Board. The board had asked the American consul in Stockholm to urge the Swedes to enlarge their Budapest embassy in order to help the Jews there. The best candidate for such a post, Swedish Jewish leaders advised, was Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman who knew Budapest. Assigned to Budapest with diplomatic status, Wallenberg used Sweden's power to extend its protection over some 30,000 Jews. No other neutral country ever responded with such generosity to Jewish pleas. From ancient times until today, people have believed that history is the teacher of life. The Jews, being a people of history, regard themselves as the prime pupils of history and they regard their history as rich in lessons of political conduct.

What, then, are the lessons to be learned from the experience of the American Jews in their failure to rescue the European Jews? The first lesson, surely, must be that without power and without the resources of power - diplomatic weight, military force, unrestricted funds - the American Jews were in no position to rescue the European Jews. The second lesson is that so long as Hitler controlled Europe, so long as the Allied armies had no access to the imprisoned Jews, even the massive Allied resources were unavailing. Those millions of Jews, in the iron fist of the SS, could scarcely have been rescued in Entebbelike commando operations.

Now we know that Hitler's war against the Allies gave him the opportunity to pursue the war against the Jews. He would not willingly have surrendered them. He would not have sold them even for a price which the Allies could never have paid or offered.

To be sure, rescue was possible for those who managed to escape beyond the reach of the Third Reich and who were then stranded in friendless places. For such thousands, the policies and procedures of the British Foreign Office and our State Department often meant death. Breckinridge Long had more power over the fate of those refugees than all the resources that five million American Jews together could muster. Could the Jews have been more energetic in driving Long and the others like him from their strongholds? Could they at least have prevented them from exercising their private prejudices in positions of public trust?

Could American Jews have made a more compelling case before the American public? Even the Irgunists, with all their flair for drama and publicity, did not transform public opinion. Americans were primarily concerned with the progress of the war. For all the information and statistics that the Jewish organizations released about the murder of the Jews, for all the articles in The Nation and The New Republic, and even the few in The New York Times, Americans did not really know what was happening to the European Jews. They didn't know because they weren't interested. Public-opinion polls at the time showed that even when Americans had heard of mass murders in concentration camps, they had no idea of the terrible statistics.

Americans began to see things differently only in April and May of 1945, when Allied troops entered the camps and uncovered the mountains of rotting corpses. Americans were shaken by the testimony of the living skeletons. It was then that the anti-Semitism which had persisted in the United States through the war abruptly diminished.

Nowadays, American Jews feel more secure than they did 40 years ago, confident of their place in American public life. In their guilt for having failed to save the European Jews during World War II, American Jews now publicly declare: ''Never again.'' But if another terrible crisis should arise to threaten the survival of Jews anywhere in the world, will American Jews have any more resources than they had in 1943?

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 6, Page 47 of the National edition with the headline: AMERICAN JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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