Beyond Belief (41 page)

REPORTS SLAUGHTER OF POLISH JEWS
⁶²

The
New York Times
continued to pursue this story, but in its own restrained fashion. On page 6 of the July 6 edition of the paper, reporter Daniel Brigham described how the information on Auschwitz had been obtained and verified. Brigham noted that if Hungarian Jews had been included in the toll of those killed, it “would lie somewhere around the 2,000,000 mark.” But, he noted, those who died en route to the camp were not “to be pitied,” for those who survived had to endure a “living hell.”
⁶³

On the same day twenty lines on page 3 in the
New York Herald Tribune
were devoted to the news that the 100,000 Hungarian Jews who had been deported on May 15 were now being “put to death in gas chambers at Oswiecim.” On July 7 the
Washington Post
devoted twenty-four lines to the news that Poland had become a Jewish “abbatoir.”
⁶⁴

Once again the
Christian Science Monitor
chose to treat the story of European Jewry in a unique way. It certainly did not ignore the tragedy. On July 3 and again on July 9 the paper mentioned the death toll at Auschwitz and the fate of Hungarian Jews. But on July 6, while the
New York Times, New York Herald Tribune
, and
PM
were describing the method of killing, the
Christian Science Monitor
ran a lengthy page 1 exclusive on what had happened to the Jews of Roumania. The story contended that the “burden of persecution” had fallen mainly on the poor Jews of Roumania, while the rich managed to retain “a large measure of their wealth . . . and even some political influence.” These “wealthy upper-crust” Jews were mainly intent on “safeguarding their wealth,” though they did send some clothes to those Jews who had been deported to Transnistria, the Roumanian-controlled area between the Dniester and Bug rivers. This aid amounted to “no more than a drop in the limitless . . . sorrow,” but, the reporter surmised, it may have “helped to save a few individual lives and salve more consciences.” According to the
Christian Science Monitor
reporter, these Jews had found the means to continue to run their businesses and enterprises even under an antisemitic regime.
This story began on page 1 and covered almost 40 percent of a subsequent page, while the shorter article on the toll of 1.75 million appeared on page 7.
⁶⁵

Continuing with this theme, a month later in an article on the Hungarian situation the
Christian Science Monitor
reported that “32 members of the wealthiest Hungarian Jewish business families” had arrived in Portugal in a special German aircraft with forged entry visas. According to the article, a
Christian Science Monitor
exclusive, this group had been taken from Budapest to Stuttgart in a special train and then flown to Lisbon “while less happily-situated Jews in Hungary were reportedly being deported by the thousands to the notorious Nazi ‘extermination camp' at Oswiecim in Poland.”
The Christian Century
treated the story similarly.
⁶⁶

* * *

By late summer 1944 even those papers which had paid some attention to the Hungarian story had generally abandoned it. First, though, in July and August there was brief but limited interest in an offer by the Hungarians to release some Jews. Most papers never seriously considered the offer and generally dismissed it out of hand.
⁶⁷
When it seemed increasingly certain that the deportations from Hungary would be completed and that over 200,000 Jews still in Budapest were in imminent danger, there was a last flurry of calls for rescue. The
New York Times
proposed that Hungarian cities and towns be retaliated against if the “murders do not stop.” Anne O'Hare McCormick, the
New York Times
columnist, attacked those who argued that Hungarian Jews' fate was “hopeless.” She believed that since the Nazis stood on the brink of defeat, they and their allies would be more inclined to abandon this policy, particularly if they knew its ramifications. There had to be serious and sustained “protests [and] demands” that rescue be initiated not just to save Jews “from death . . . but to save ourselves from ignominy.”
⁶⁸

The Nation
proposed that temporary asylum be provided refugees in neutral countries and that Palestine be opened to Jewish immigration.
⁶⁹
The New Republic
suggested that the United States and Britain give these “unhappy victims” the protection of American or British citizenship.
⁷⁰
Alexander Uhl,
PM
's foreign editor, called for rescue efforts to be mounted through neutral countries and for the British to facilitate immigration to Palestine.
⁷¹
Paul Winkler, columnist for the
Washington Post
, suggested the creation
of Allied-backed “visas for somewhere,” which would serve as guarantees that the Allies would ensure that the refugee reached some safe haven. This, he argued, would encourage neutral countries bordering on Nazi-controlled lands to admit more Jews, and would aid more Jews than just those who might reach free ports.
⁷²

Jewish groups also called for action.
⁷³
A massive rally was held in Madison Square Garden on July 31. Despite the heat, over 40,000 people attended. Those who could not find seats packed the surrounding streets. The rally was designed to pressure the government to act, but the press paid it and subsequent efforts only cursory attention. When President Roosevelt and Governor Dewey sent messages to the rally expressing their “abhorrence” of Nazi behavior, I. F. Stone suggested in
PM
that they were doing nothing more than indulging in a “sentimental gesture,” since they condemned the Nazis but refused to actively support American efforts which would save lives. Rescue, Stone argued, was possible but neither Britain nor America was willing to “provide . . . a destination” for those who might be saved.
⁷⁴

Though the
New York Post, The Nation
, the
Washington Post
, the Hearst papers, and
The New Republic
all insisted that “no effort should be spared” in order to save those who faced deportation, there was desperation and futility in the air. This was exemplified by the attitude of
The New Republic
, one of the first journals in the United States to argue that rescue before victory was not only possible but a moral imperative.
The New Republic
, which exactly a year earlier had published an entire section on how to help the Jews of Europe, now admitted that it did not seem likely that much could be done and mused that in all likelihood the “delivery of Hungary's Jews will come through military liberation rather than evacuation.”
⁷⁵
To all intents and purposes the story of Hungarian Jewry was over and this passionate advocate of saving Jews seemed to know it. Despite the Allied condemnations and the press calls for action, little was accomplished by the Allies to save Hungary's Jews. They were dispatched to their death in the same manner that so many of their co-religionists had been murdered in the preceding years.

Even as some papers reported each step in the ghettoization, deportation, and murder of Hungarian Jews, the press in general was beginning to tell a much happier tale: the liberation of Europe. Though it would be a while before the guns were totally silenced and all those in danger—Jew and non-Jew—were safe, reporters
were already beginning to discover that in most of the places liberated by Allied armies there were no Jews left. After returning from Minsk, Edmund Stevens of the
Christian Science Monitor
reported on CBS that there remained “only 25 or 30 Jews where there were once nearly 30,000.” According to Stevens the “rest were in nearby ditches.”
⁷⁶
A Soviet writer returned from the liberated portions of Poland; he had “heard many groans and seen many tears in Poland but no groans or tears of Jews,” for “there are no Jews in Poland.”
⁷⁷
When Rome was liberated, the Italian paper
Il Tempo
estimated that out of a prewar Jewish population in Rome of 11,000, 6,000 had “vanished.” There were reported to be 5,000 Jews surviving in Germany out of a prewar population of 500,000, and 180 in Vienna out of a prewar total of 150,000. For those few Jews who had miraculously managed to survive, “life ha[d] been very cruel.” In a dispatch from a liberated Paris,
New York Times
reporter Raymond Daniell wrote of the few surviving Jews in that city that “no where else . . . is the mark of Nazism so indelibly printed as it is on the faces of these folk.” On August 30 a UP report in the
Washington Post
estimated that only fifteen of the approximately 50,000 Jews of prewar Pinsk were “alive today.”
⁷⁸

One cannot attribute the paucity of press coverage on Hungarian Jews to skepticism. It may have been that by the summer of 1944 most journalists had simply tired of this story even though they had never really paid it much attention. It was a familiar tale, and its very familiarity rendered it unworthy of page 1 or even page 10. It is possible that if the press had raised a major outcry, nothing would have happened. The Allies were as intent on adhering to a policy of rescue through victory as the Nazis were intent on destroying the remnants of European Jewry before their defeat. They would soon begin the terrible death marches designed to keep surviving Jews from falling into the hands of the liberating forces. But the press does not decide how it will treat a story on the basis of whether attention to a topic will effect a change in policy. The press pays attention to those stories it considers significant. And even at this late date for much of the American press this news was still a minor “sidelight.”

11

Since the onset of Nazi rule Americans had greeted almost all the news of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews skeptically. Inevitably, their first reaction was to question whether it was true. Before, during, and even
after
the war many Americans, including those associated with the press, refused to believe the news they heard.

In September 1942 Vernon McKenzie, writing in
Journalism Quarterly
, decried Americans' tendency to dismiss all reports of atrocities as propaganda. He blamed an American “attitude of cynicism” which prompted many people to declare that they would “not be such simpletons that they would be fooled again” as they had been by the much publicized but false atrocity stories of World War I. In a January 1943 Gallup poll nearly 30 percent of those asked dismissed the news that 2 million Jews had been killed in Europe as just a rumor. Another 24 percent had no opinion on
the question. Informal polls taken by the
Detroit Free Press
and the
New York Post
in 1943 found that a broad range of Americans did not believe the atrocity reports.
¹