Part XVI

On January 15, 1940, the JTA reported that it had received “authenticated” accounts of raping of Jewish girls by German soldiers and officers in Nazi-occupied Poland. About 40 girls were seized by German Army officers and taken to an apartment, which had belonged to a prominent Warsaw Jew. After being stripped naked and forced to dance, they were all violated.

“This was only one incident of many that occurred in Warsaw daily,” noted the JTA. Similar accounts had been received from the Polish provinces.

Another “blood-curdling” report of Nazi barbarity came from Dr. Moshe Kleinbaum (Sneh), former president of the Polish Zionist Organization, in a report he brought to Geneva, Switzerland, published in Der Tog. He found that Jews escaping from Poland to Soviet territory often had an eye removed to prevent them from joining the Soviet military against the Germans.

In Russian-occupied Bialystok, the largest city in northeastern Poland, Kleinbaum saw many one-eyed Jews living under horrible conditions. Famine had spread quickly and the industrial center of the city had become silent. Nothing he read in the press had adequately described the true suffering and hardship endured by the Jews under Soviet rule.

On January 17, JTA reported the confiscation of Warsaw’s only Jewish hospital and the expulsion of all its Jewish patients, including those suffering from typhus. The patients were forced to leave their beds and ejected from the building during the coldest weather of the year. They were taken to Jewish schools, which lacked medical supplies and equipment. The rapid spread of typhus, which increased in two weeks from 250 cases to 1,400, raised enormous apprehension.

Three Thousand Jews Marooned on the Danube

Equally alarming was the tragic plight of the 3,000 Jews marooned on barges and small boats in Rumanian and Yugoslavian harbors on the ice-locked Danube River, Europe’s second longest river. The JTA and the Times reported that for more than three months, the Jews suffered from disease, hunger and freezing temperatures, with scarce possibility the foul weather would enable them to search for havens “for at least two months.”

In “Rescue and Liberation: America’s Part in the Birth of Israel,” Isaac Zaar recounted how plans to transport these refugees to Palestine by Revisionist Zionists were initially thwarted after the United Palestine Appeal and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee refused to fund transportation for these “illegals.” The rejection caused much discussion among the leadership and supporters of the Zionist Organization of America, which highlighted the disunity pervading American Jewish communal life, according to the JTA.

The February BULLETIN of the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, Inc. reported how the organization had for two months “pleaded and begged and cajoled for funds to transport these unfortunates… The great agencies, not content with steadfastly refusing aid, maligned us when we went out into the streets and into private homes for money. Finally, to top it off, came the Rumanian Government’s threat of deportation. We knew what that meant. The Gestapo, when it lets us take these poor strays out of German territory, makes it abundantly clear what their fate would be if any returned.”

After exposing the scandal to “the public gaze,” the response was “magnificent.” The United Jewish Appeal provided aid. Before the deadline expired, the refugees were on their way to Palestine. The Herald-Tribune of February 16, 1940, reported “2,000 Jews Slip into Palestine After Months on Danube Barges…according to a message received in New York by the American Friends….” The report explained how the refugees began their voyage “with the secret connivance of the Gestapo, [and] were illegally …smuggled through the British patrol off the coast of Palestine.”

An official of the American Friends said that the latest group of arrivals brought the number to 26,000 Jewish refugees who had illegally entered Palestine in the past 18 months. He described how there were an additional 2,200 Jews stranded at Sulima, Black Sea Port, until a Turkish ship picked them up. Another 500, who were waiting at Eastern Mediterranean ports for the opportunity to sneak into Palestine, were taken aboard along the way.

“In Any Way Short of Direct Mass Execution”

The JTA, Forward, Der Tog, Congress Bulletin, The Jewish Exponent, Opinion, The New York Times, The Nation and The New Republic described the mass arrests and forced labor.

Reports of Jews being massacred and executed were reported in The JTA, Contemporary Jewish Record, The American Hebrew, Jewish Frontier, The Jewish Exponent, Opinion, The Chicago Jewish Chronicle, The New York Times, The Nation and The New Republic.

The JTA reported the establishment of the Jewish Councils (Judenräte), and appeals for help. The US Holocaust Memorial explained that “these Jewish municipal administrations were required to ensure that Nazi orders and regulations were implemented. Jewish council members also sought to provide basic community services for ghettoized Jewish populations.”

Members of the Judenräte were viewed as Nazi collaborators for allegedly assisting in the murder of European Jewry. In his book “Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation,” Isaiah Trunk, a leading Holocaust scholar and the chief archivist of YIVO, the Jewish Research Institute, concluded no general statement could be made either about the members involved, or their activities, motivation or culpability. The actions of each Jewish council and its members have to be examined separately.

In the January-February issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record, the American Jewish Committee concluded that “there is little doubt that the ultimate aim of the Nazi government is to eliminate the Jews as quickly as possible in any way short of direct mass execution.”

“A Race With Death”

After returning from an extended mission to Europe, Morris C. Troper, European director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, declared in an article in the Times on March 15, 1940: “The European continent is fast moving toward becoming one of the greatest famine areas in modern history…. Large masses of the population in the occupied areas are threatened with extinction on a scale heretofore unheard of…. Lack of food, clothing, shelter, and medical supplies is daily creating unparalleled misery, beggaring description.” Troper described German Jewry’s attempt to seek refuge in other countries “as a race with death.”

Writing in the Congress Bulletin, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, chairman of the Administrative Committee of the World Jewish Congress, predicted that if the war in Europe continued for another year, “1,000,000 of the 2,000,000 Jews in Poland will be dead of starvation or be killed by Nazi persecutors.” He pleaded with American Jewry to adopt a more aggressive response to Nazi terror. Past reactions amounted to nothing more than advising Hitler that as long as he expropriated German Jewish wealth, American Jewry would provide food and clothing to the Jews. If he expelled them from Germany, American Jewry would arrange for their transportation and care for them. This is the way American Jews would reward Hitler.

An additional consequence of this appeasement, Goldmann believed, was to regard the Jewish question merely as a charity issue for the well-intentioned Gentiles. Many liberal and friendly non-Jews no longer regarded the Jewish problem as a historical fight to survive against their enemies, who continually sought to destroy them. Unless political intervention was attempted to save European Jewry, “our generation will be burdened with the terrible responsibility before Jewish history,” he concluded.

Samuel Margoshes agreed with Goldmann’s analysis. Only if the United States and other neutral countries applied political pressure would the Nazis cease trying to destroy the Jews. In an article in the Times, Oswald Garrison Villard, former editor of The Nation, concurred in the essential need for political pressure. Unless Germany was defeated in the war, the only recourse was to engage in a steady protest.

In spite of this powerful rhetoric, many European Jews asked what American Jews had actually accomplished. After Menachem Treist, a European refugee, described what he had witnessed in Warsaw and other cities under Nazi domination, he voiced the question many honestly will ask: “How is it possible to live under such conditions? I repeat, the question current among Jews in Poland ‘how can people abroad know of this ocean of blood and tears and remain indifferent?’”

By Alex Grobman, PhD