The United States ultimately rescued Europe in World War II, but many would say our nation failed to save the people who most needed American assistance. Scholarship by David Wyman in “Abandonment of the Jews” documents the failures of the Roosevelt administration to counter the Nazi extermination of the Jews with such remedies as increasing immigration, diplomacy or military attacks.
The book has been edited and now re-published (co-authored by Rafael Medoff) more than 30 years later as “A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust.”
Few readers will be familiar with Bergson, who may well have been the single hardest-working individual in the United States seeking to awaken the general public to the carnage wrought by the Final Solution.
Born Hillel Kook in Lithuania in 1915, he and his family immigrated to Palestine and by age 20 he was a full-fledged member of the Irgun underground. In July 1940 Zev Jabotinsky sent Kook to the United States to organize a Jewish Army, a cause to which he dedicated himself with dynamism and imagination. Adopting the pseudonym “Peter Bergson,” the activist leader organized rallies, created hard-hitting newspaper advertisements, lobbied Congress and generally sought every opportunity to inform Americans about genocide in Europe.
Bergson’s activist efforts were opposed by the mainstream Jewish organizations who wanted nothing to do with him, considering his open appeals for action as publicity stunts and embarrassing to the presidential administration, and thus to Jews. They preferred the “quiet diplomacy” of a Henry Morgenthau working within the corridors of power.
Bergson did succeed in keeping the issue of Jewish survival before the public eye, especially through large full-page ads in The New York Times and other major organs. Perhaps his largest success was in organizing a dramatic pageant, “We Will Never Die,” which opened at Madison Square Garden in March 1943.
Some 40,000 people attended the initial performances in New York, and the show played to packed houses in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl. At Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., Eleanor Roosevelt was in the audience. The pageant struck the first major blow at the wall of silence surrounding the Nazi genocide, but raising public consciousness wasn’t enough.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Bergson’s own testimony in the interview is what it reveals about the infighting among Jewish organizations which prevented development of a unified approach. Some Zionist leaders had their heads in the sand, while others felt that Bergson and his supporters were just too shrill and alienating. While even mainstream types avoided directly criticizing Roosevelt, even they admitted to the perception that the Allies were doing little.
In contrast, the Bergsonites splashed bold demands across the nation’s major newspapers, pulling no punches with ads headlined “How Well Are You Sleeping?” or “A Race Against Death.” This style of advocacy anticipated by more than a half-century modern political advertising.
In a long introduction Wyman tries to convey the context in which such desperate appeals were rejected or ignored. It was an era of fear brought on by the Great Depression as much as by the fascists in Europe and Asia. Americans were struggling, nativism was rampant and anti-Semitic demagogues were in high pitch, including Father Charles Coughlin and his ilk.
Despite all this, Bergson sought by every means to confront American political and military leadership with the evidence of systematic annihilation of the Jews in Europe. But the record of equivocation by the State Department, Pentagon, Congress, and White House constitute a sad and shameful chapter in our nation’s history. Peter Bergson died in 2001, largely unrecognized for his gallant struggle. This book may help repair that omission.
“A Race Against Death” by David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff (257 pages, The New Press, $17.95).