The United States and the Nazi Holocaust by Barry Trachtenberg

Author:Barry Trachtenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Firsthand accounts

Soon after the Holocaust—long before it was ever referred to by that name and well before most Americans fully comprehended that Hitler’s plans included the murder of all Jews—several books appeared that provided accounts of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Some of these were written by Polish Jews who had found refuge in the United States during the war years and then returned to their native country to report on the condition of the surviving remnant in Poland. One such work was by Jacob Pat, a member of the Jewish Labor Committee and a Yiddish cultural activist. Pat traveled back to Poland in the winter of 1946 and met with the survivors of once-vibrant Jewish communities and heard story after story of the tragedies that had befallen Polish Jews. The following year, he published a report of his travels, first in Yiddish and then in English translation, under the title Ashes and Fire.1 This work was one of the first detailed accounts of the fate of Polish Jews to appear in the United States, and it described the horrors of life in the ghettos, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Jewish resistance movements, and the death camps at Chelmno and Auschwitz. Pat had encountered survivors around the country and was impressed at their many attempts to rebuild Jewish life in the postwar era. With the support of the Jewish Labor Committee, Pat was able to distribute relief funds to Jewish communities seeking to reestablish businesses, cooperatives, cultural projects, and welfare programs in Poland. Although the ferocity of many ethnic Poles’ anti-Jewish violence after the war convinced large numbers of Jews that there was no longer a future for them in Poland, Pat’s work introduced to American readers a portrait of a tenacious people seeking to return to their lives.

Another work in this vein is that of the journalist Samuel L. Shneiderman, who returned to Poland soon after the war and found it unrecognizable. Shneiderman was no stranger to reporting on war—in the 1930s he had covered the Spanish Civil War for Polish newspapers—but he was shocked by what he witnessed when he flew into Warsaw in 1946. As he wrote in Between Fear and Hope:

Finally we came above the ruins of the Polish capital. The empty shells of its bombed house and its gaping naked chimneys were flooded with sunlight. The green patches of parks helped me to orientate myself to the city where I had spent the best years of my youth but, though the plane was now flying very low, I was unable to recognize a single street.2

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