No Haven for the Oppressed by Saul S. Friedman

Author:Saul S. Friedman [Friedman, Saul S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814343739
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2017-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

8. Holding the Keys

The problem is too mighty grown

For our democracies alone.

We do not solely hold the keys

To open door to refugees.

In war we must decline to give

Admission to the fugitive.1

By the spring of 1943 the war had taken a decided turn in favor of the Allies. In the Far East supplies were rolling regularly over the Hump to Chiang Kai-shek’s headquarters in Kunming. Orde Wingate’s Chindits and Frank Merrill’s Marauders were causing havoc behind Japanese lines in Burma and Indo-China. General Douglas MacArthur was planning the first Allied assault upon territory which had belonged to Japan before the war in the Pacific began—Rabaul and the Bismarck Archipelago. The Russians had repulsed the Germans from Kharkov, and Stalingrad stood as a scarred headstone to the 1,000,000 men lost to Nazi legions on the Eastern Front that year. On May 12, the Mareth line broken, the Afrika Korps in disarray, Americans pouring across North Africa from the west and the British ripping into Tunis and Bizerte from the east, Erwin Rommel ordered the capitulation of 300,000 troops rather than emulate the suicidal fight of von Paulus at Stalingrad, as Hitler ordered. By summer the Allies were poised to strike at Sicily, the first step preparatory to the liberation of Europe.

In the midst of rising optimism and oft-sounded phrases about the necessity for unity, some Americans were startled to open the pages of the New York Times on May 4, 1943 and see a six-column headline in two-inch block letters which read, “To 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death Trap, Bermuda was a Cruel Mockery.” The article, actually another advertisement purchased by the National Committee for a Jewish Army, accused Great Britain and the United States of giving Hitler a free hand with his extermination plans. It went on:

Wretched, doomed victims of Hitler’s tyranny! Poor men and women of good faith the world over! You have cherished an illusion. Your hopes have been in vain. Bermuda was not the dawn of a new era, of an era of humanity and compassion, of translating pity into deed. Bermuda was a mockery and a cruel jest.2

Two days later Scott Lucas, fresh from his labors at the Bermuda conference, rose to harangue his colleagues in the U.S. Senate about the inflammatory advertisement. He denounced its presumption in judging the conference before a complete report could be issued and went on to charge that the advertisement had been purchased without the knowledge of the illustrious personages, including thirty-six senators, whose names were appended to the text. Most of all, Lucas was mortified by innuendoes that he, a lifelong friend of Jews, was callously indifferent to their plight.

As far as publicity was concerned, the final communiqué from Bermuda stated that nothing would be divulged to the press which had not previously been cleared through diplomatic channels. The cables passed back and forth among Long, Hull, and Dodds on the last two days of the conference indicate an American sensitivity to “heavy pressures” and “public relations” at home, but a willingness to go along with the British demand for secrecy.

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