by Jay Winik
How did he keep going? For one thing, the pendulum of war was swinging decisively in his favor. News from the fronts was increasingly positive. The Allies’ blistering bombing of Germany commenced with a vengeance: by day American aircraft began pounding German cities, while the British did the same at night. For another, Roosevelt always found a way to relax. He had his beloved cocktail hour, where any talk of politics or war was strictly forbidden; his movies, which he could never get enough of; and his card games, which he loved to win. When he could, he restricted his schedule in the White House. When he felt it necessary—and he often did—he retreated for weekends at Hyde Park, where he slept late, postponed any work until afternoon, and took leisurely drives through the countryside that left him feeling glorious.
But then came a mass rally in New York City on behalf of the European Jews; a meeting with Stephen Wise; and an almost hour-long discussion on July 22 in the Oval Office with a member of the Polish underground, Jan Karski. Sometimes, illusions die hard, and that was the case with the world turning a blind eye to the plight of the Jews.
But now this was one illusion that was dying.
NEAR THE END OF July, humanitarians, disgusted by the inaction of the Bermuda conference, sought to take matters into their own hands. For three straight days, some fifteen hundred people gathered at the Hotel Commodore in Manhattan to discuss a program of action to help the Jews who still survived in Nazi-occupied Europe. Earlier, Wise had been the guiding force, but this conference was organized by Peter Bergson. One by one, an impressive roster of speakers, Jews and non-Jews alike, representing diverse backgrounds and political views, took their places on the rostrum. There was the mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, railing impassionately. There were distinguished writers such as Max Lerner and Dorothy Parker, eloquent and incisive. Even the former president, Herbert Hoover, participated by telephone.
As was often the case, the president had waited for a crisis before acting. Impelled by public pressure, Roosevelt sent a message to be read at the end of the conference. But its promises were, in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s words, “vague” and “noncommittal.” He cited the administration’s “repeated endeavors” to save the European Jews; but the delegates to the conference knew better. He further promised that the government’s endeavors would not “cease until Nazi power is forever crushed,” yet the conferees asked themselves what those endeavors were, and whether the Jews would still be alive by the time Nazi power was overcome.
Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been sympathetic in the past, also sent a message to this emergency conference, but this time she too was off the mark. She insisted that she was glad to help “in any way,” yet was uncertain what specific actions could be carried out. Then she offered the sort of stock phrases that the State Department so often used. The American people, she averred, were “shocked and horrified” by the Axis powers’ actions toward the Jewish people, and would be willing to do all they could “to alleviate the suffering of the Jewish people in Europe and help them reestablish themselves in other parts of the world if it is possible to evacuate them.”
But there were measures that could have been taken right away, ones that would not have hindered the military efforts of the Allies. Over three long, scorching days, each of the advocates of rescue laid these out in meticulous detail. Mayor La Guardia pointed out that the time was long overdue for the United States to open up its gates to greater numbers of immigrants. “Our own government,” he said, “cannot urge other nations to take the initiative before it takes action on its own.” More fundamentally, the speakers underscored the need for a specific governmental agency that would have the sole purpose of saving Jews. It would fight the bureaucratic battles, provide the political muscle, and take the necessary risks. Former president Hoover weighed in further, pointing out that additional measures were also needed: for starters, protection by the Allies for Jews who managed to smuggle themselves into neutral countries; more refugee sanctuaries in neutral territories; and seeking to compel Axis satellites not to deport Jews. Further, the conferees suggested threading the needle of Middle Eastern politics and putting pressure on British-controlled Palestine to take more Jews.
On its conclusion, the conference turned itself into a new organization, called the Emergency Committee.
The committee’s leader, Peter Bergson, met privately with Eleanor Roosevelt in August. His heartfelt appeal on behalf of the Jewish people made an indelible impression. The next morning (August 8, 1943) she wrote in her column “My Day”: “The percentage killed among them far exceeds the losses among any of the United Nations. I do not know what we can do to save the Jews in Europe and to find them homes, but I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.” She fell short of calling for decisive actions, but, more importantly, she relayed a letter from Bergson that outlined the need for a special governmental rescue agency.
Yet a distracted Roosevelt was unmoved. He scrawled a note to Eleanor: “I do not think this needs any answer at this time. FDR.”
TIME WAS NOT A commodity the Jews could afford.
Never was this more evident than on July 28, 1943, when Roosevelt met Jan Karski, a thirty-two-year-old leader in the Polish underground who risked his life to uncover the horrific events unfolding in Poland.
Karski was trim, handsome, fearless, with piercing eyes. And he had a photographic memory. Earlier in the war he had been captured by the Gestapo and tortured nearly to death—he slashed his own wrists so he wouldn’t give away secrets—but had somehow been rescued by a Polish commando team. Now, working with Jewish leaders, Karski, who spoke German, had been given the daunting mission of witnessing conditions in the Jewish ghettos and at the actual extermination camps themselves. Disguised first as a Jew, wearing tattered clothes and the blue Star of David, he was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto, where, as he noted, “there was hardly a square yard of empty space as we picked our way across the mud and rubble” and where “Hitler youth hunted Jews for sport, cheering and laughing.” Then, dressed as an Estonian militiaman, he was infiltrated into what he believed to be the Belzec concentration camp, which was about a hundred miles east of Warsaw. Actually, he may have been in a transit point at Izbica. He knew from earlier reports that every Jew who reached the camp was doomed to death, without exception. But how?
He set out to discover this firsthand.
After seeing the atrocities with his own eyes, he made a harrowing trek across Europe by train, from Warsaw to Berlin to Vichy to Paris to Spain and then back to London, carrying his reports in microfilm tucked into the shaft of a simple house key, which contained hundreds of documents.
His observations were searing. Karski was struck by how even a mile away from the camp he could hear terrifying “shouts,” “shots,” and “screams.” And in the camp he saw chaos, squalor, and “the hideousness of it all.” He saw elderly Jews, shivering and sitting silently on the ground, motionless, without a stitch of clothing on them. He saw small children clad in a few rags, crouched and utterly alone, staring up with “large frightened eyes.” He saw how on any given night two thousand to three thousand dehumanized, starving Jews were forced to sleep outside in cold, raw, rainy weather. He watched as, for three ghastly hours straight, the Germans, alternately swinging and firing their rifles, stuffed 130 wailing Jews into freight cars that were designed to carry forty soldiers each at a maximum—forty-six cars in all. He watched as they were asphyxiated with quicklime, dying “in agony” as the thick, white powder ate away their flesh.
In a sense, what the German Eduard Schulte had hoped to begin, earlier in the war, the Polish Jan Karski now hoped to finish—if only the Americans would act.
Karski well understood that for many Americans, it would at first be difficult to comprehend the sheer scope and savagery of Hitler’s efforts to wipe out Jewry. In fact, when he met with the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, a stunned Frankfurter, himself a Jew, found the a
ccount difficult to believe. Karski would later write, “I know that many people will not believe me, but I saw it, and it is not exaggerated. I have no other proofs, no photographs. All I can say is that I saw it, and it is the truth.” Clearly this was no mere collateral damage or an unfortunate by-product of the ravages of war as the State Department often suggested. And when Roosevelt asked if the published reports of Jewish casualty figures were true, Karski replied, “I am convinced that there is no exaggeration in the accounts of the plight of the Jews. Our underground authorities are absolutely sure that the Germans are out to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.”
He informed Roosevelt that 1.8 million Polish Jews had been slaughtered, and that Polish Jewry would cease to exist within months unless there was some kind of intervention by the Allies. What could be done? Karski suggested the same policy that Schulte had proposed earlier on: retaliating against German civilians “wherever they could be found.”
Roosevelt asked detailed questions about Polish partisan activities, as well as about the morale of the German soldiers. Karski then methodically ticked off a list of concentration camps, naming each of them, including Auschwitz itself.
Roosevelt was, by all accounts, stunned by Karski’s firsthand reports. Indeed, the two spoke for an hour—thirty minutes over schedule. Cordell Hull later acknowledged that Roosevelt had been “completely absorbed.” Roosevelt told Karski to tell the Polish underground, “You have a friend in the White House.” Karski was impressed by Roosevelt’s fervor. But then, as Karski walked out of the White House, the Polish ambassador mentioned to him that the president had uttered nothing but platitudes.
WERE THEY NOTHING BUT platitudes? There was little doubt that the president was consumed by the task of winning the war and crushing Hitler. He was reluctant to let anything divert time, attention, or resources from that goal. But there was also little doubt that whenever other humanitarian needs arose—as when refugees in Yugoslavia and in Greece were pleading for help—the U.S. government was able to muster transportation and find solutions.
It was also the case that the successful invasion of Italy opened up a slew of opportunities for Roosevelt—and, as it happened, for the Jews, although these same opportunities involved political and military problems. With the Allied soldiers fighting their way through Italy, Roosevelt was anxious to secure the actual assistance—or at least the tacit support—of the peoples of the Mediterranean. Here lay a chance for a concerted effort by antifascists, and here lay the predicament. These were nations riddled with ancient enmities and insuperable suspicions—toward the great powers, and toward each other.
The greatest prize was Palestine, at once a coveted haven, at the same time a quagmire. For the Jews ensnared by the Nazis, the escape lines largely were not westward to Britain and America, but southeastward across the Mediterranean. Thus, of all the opportunities for Roosevelt concerning the Jews, the most hopeful sanctuaries for them seemed to be in Palestine—in the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Acre. The fear, of course, was that any such plan would antagonize Muslims in countries where battles were still raging, thus somehow thwarting the president’s single-minded focus on victory.
So, time and again, Roosevelt, seeking to avoid a politician’s purgatory, straddled the fence. His position was uncomfortable, precarious, awkward, and probably inevitable. He sometimes paid lip service to the dream of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. But not unlike Lincoln, who until as late as 1862 considered the notion of resettling American blacks in Haiti or Africa, Roosevelt also flirted with the idea of Jews being resettled in more distant places, like Cameroon, and later Paraguay, and still later Angola in Portuguese West Africa. For Lincoln nearly a century earlier, such a policy was doomed, just as it was doomed for Roosevelt.
As 1942 came to a close, Roosevelt again thought about Palestine. “What I think I will do is this,” he told Morgenthau. “First, I would call Palestine a religious country. Then I would leave Jerusalem the way it is and have it run by the Orthodox Greek Catholic Church, the Protestants, and the Jews—have a joint committee run it. . . . I actually would put a barbed wire around Palestine.”
Bristling with energy, he continued, “I would provide land for the Arabs in some other part of the Middle East. . . . Each time we move out an Arab we would bring in another Jewish family. . . . But I don’t want to bring in more than they can economically support.”
However, in 1943 this proved to be mere talk. When Roosevelt received Zionist delegations, such as when he met with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizman in June 1943, there were violent reactions in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt. In 1943 Roosevelt also sought to prod Jewish and Arab leaders to meet with one another, but this attempt foundered on the shoals of Arab intractability—Ibn Saud refused to cooperate—and the War Department’s own hesitations. In late 1943 Roosevelt tinkered with a new concept—a trusteeship for Palestine that would transform it into a certified holy land administered by the three dominant religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but this idea proved to be unworkable.
Roosevelt was once quoted as saying that he had never approved of Britain’s 1939 white paper restricting Jewish immigration. But whenever he himself was confronted with the choice between stability in the Middle East and rescuing Jews, he invariably opted for peace—or stability. Such was the terrible calculus of global struggle. And so, in a situation characterized by continuing feuds and endless delays, the dismal impasse remained.
Meanwhile, the Nazi death machine continued unabated. There was no getting around the haunting question raised by the editors of the New Republic. On August 30, they wrote this: “The failure of the democratic powers to make any sustained and determined effort to stay the tide of slaughter constitutes one of the major tragedies in the history of civilization.”
They added: “And the moral weakness which has palsied the hands of our statesmen is nowhere more vividly disclosed than in the now conventional formula . . . that only victory will save the Jews of Europe.”
And then this: “Will any of these Jews survive to celebrate victory?”
IN SWITZERLAND, A TIRELESS Gerhart Riegner, for one, hoped so. For some time in the spring he had been working on a “wide rescue action” for Jews from Romania and France. There were now two significant, if slim, opportunities. In Romania itself, the hope was that children there could be transferred to safety in Palestine “if funds were made available.” Moreover, food, medicine, and other relief could be dispensed to the Jews in Transnistria, a part of Ukraine under Romanian control; this was a variation of the earlier proposal under which Romanian officials would let seventy thousand Jews in Transnistria depart for the sum of $170,000. At the same time a second opportunity was presenting itself in France, where the cattle cars continued to roll and large-scale deportations were still underway at a staggering pace. Here, Riegner contemplated a daring rescue of fugitive Jewish children who were concealed in safe houses and other hiding places; plans were being readied to help them flee to safety in Spain. In both cases monies for the measure would be provided by American Jewish organizations rather than the government. At no time would the money move into or out of Axis territory. All the U.S. government had to do was guarantee repayment by transferring funds from America to accounts in Switzerland, which Romanian officials would collect after the war.
Back in the United States, Stephen Wise then spent eleven weeks fervently negotiating with the State Department to approve Riegner’s plan. But the plan went nowhere. First the State Department insisted that the proposal was too vague. Then it fretted that money might be used to pay ransom, which the government opposed. Finally, the State Department acknowledged that its real reluctance about a wide-scale rescue plan was not that such a plan would fail, but that it would succeed; there was a quota of only thirty thousand under the terms of the Palestinian white paper, and the department maintained that it did not know of “any other areas to which the remaining Jews could be evacuated.”
Not until June did the State Department finally discuss the plan with the Treasury Department, which was the agency responsible for issuing the licenses required for transferring funds overseas. Hearing the State Department’s objections out, the Treasury Department was nonplussed. It moved quickly and, on July 16, indicated that it would on its end issue the license.
Nevertheless, with the State Department dragging its heels, the impasse continued.
CONCERNED, WISE WAS ABLE to arrange for a private meeting with Roosevelt at the White House on July 22. Laying out his vision of the plan, he sought to assuage any of the president’s fears that somehow the plan could hinder the prosecution of the war; he pointed out that the funds would not be tapped into until the war was over. Deeply moved by Wise’s plea, Roosevelt quickly signed off on the plan, telling Wise, “Stephen, why don’t you go ahead and do it?” When Wise fretted aloud that Morgenthau might object, the president promptly rung him up: “Henry,” he enthused, “this is a very fair proposal which Stephen makes about ransoming Jews.” In truth, at this stage Morgenthau needed little convincing.
