I recently spent some time with the Nobel Peace Prize–winner Elie Wiesel. He is the foremost chronicler of the Holocaust, having been in the death camps as a teenager, where he lost his father, mother, and baby sister.
He vividly recounts his experience in his book Night. We made plans to meet again, so I felt obligated to read this book. I’m not lacking in imagination, and I’ve never felt the need to read books on the Holocaust, having come from an Orthodox Jewish family that had to flee Europe because of the persecution of the Jews.
The book was everything I expected, which means it put me in a kind of dark mood I rarely experience. It is hard to imagine that you could be taken from your home to be killed for no reason other than you were Jewish, but of course that’s what happened as much of the world stood idly by. Reading the book forced me to confront something I’ve been avoiding my whole life, the role of President Roosevelt in all of this.
Here’s what Newsweek’s senior editor Jonathan Alter had to say about that in his recent book about President Roose-velt, The Defining Moment:
FDR was not entirely negligent. In the face of an isolationist Congress and polls showing that more than 80 percent of the American public were opposed to easing immigration quotas, he raised the specter of the Nazi threat early, and sponsored international conferences on refugees. But Roosevelt did not bring the activist spirit of the Hundred Days to rescuing the Jews. It was never a priority. His 1944 War Refugee Board came years too late. And he made the mistake of listening to military advisors who said that bombing the rail and communication lines to the Nazi concentration camps in Hungary was impractical.
Jonathan Alter goes on to say: “Although bombing the camps themselves would have killed more prisoners, hitting the railheads—while unlikely to save many Jews—was worth a try.”
The refugee ship St. Louis was turned away from the southern coast of the United States in 1939 under great congressional pressure. FDR thought that the refugees would be resettled in other countries, but most ended up dying in the Holocaust.
Eighty percent of the American public didn’t want immigrants, even if they were going to be killed! I don’t know how much of the public at that time grasped that reality, but the president and Congress?!
Are so many of us inhumane? What other conclusion can you draw? Most of us simply don’t have any serious concern about others in the world who are being mistreated or even killed today! Is this a failure of human nature or of the media to better bring us face-to-face with what none of us want to look at?
Mark Twain said, “Moral Cowardice… is the commanding feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000,” and the experience of much of the world proves him right.
In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Weisel said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
That remains true today. When you see inhumanity, speak out!
One of the many things I admire about President (formerly General) Eisenhower is that he made a significant effort to have as many GIs as possible see the corpses stacked like cords of wood in the concentration camps. It seems like it’s just human nature that if something isn’t right in front of us, we don’t think about it. I try as hard as I can not to be that kind of person. I believe I have to try harder.
When my wife and I later had dinner with Elie Wiesel and his wife, Marion, I told him about our felony murder rule. I told him about a boy who was serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for a crime committed when he was home asleep in his bed, because he had lent his car to his roommate. Elie Wiesel, who has seen every kind of horror, stared at me for a moment, speechless. He then said, with astonishment, “In America?!”