Mata H. of BlogHer has a sensitive and poignant entry about the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. I urge you to go read it there, but I’m grafting just a couple of things to share and adding a bit more. First, please listen to and watch this short clip:
One of the truths I’ve always known about has been the failure of the United States to intervene in the events as they unfolded in Europe and resulted in the death of more than 11 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews. However, it wasn’t until I saw a video clip at Yad Vashem this August that retells the story of a Polish resistance fighter and member of the Polish underground government during WWII who met with FDR in 1943 that this ability to rationalize away meaningful assistance hit me.
Here’s what happened:
I asked our guide about whether the museum presented any information on a professor I’d had in college, Jan Karski. Karski is well-known to people familiar with the concept of righteous gentiles. There is even a statue of him in New York City:
Jan Karski (real name: Kozielewski) was born in 1914 into a Catholic family in ?ód?. After graduating in law, he began work in diplomacy. During the Second World War, as an emissary of the Home Army to the Polish Government in Exile, he gave the Allies a detailed account of the extermination of Jews in Poland. In the US, he among others met with President F.D. Roosevelt, who did not, however, believe his reports on the Holocaust.
During a later courier mission, Karski (his wartime underground pseudonym) was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. So as not to breakdown – he tried to commit suicide by cutting his veins. Taken to hospital, he managed to escape with the aid of Poles working there.
To corroborate his reports on the Holocaust, Karski twice entered the Warsaw ghetto in disguise with the aid of “?egota” (the Council of Aid for Jews) and Irena Sendlerowa, who saved 2,500 Jewish children by transporting them out of the ghetto.
In 1994, the 80th anniversary of Karski’s birthday, he was given honorary citizenship of Israel. He also received the Righteous Among the Nations title from the Yad Vashem Institute.
In Claude Lanzmann’s 1984 nine-hour film, Shoah, Karski walks off during the interview (I watched the entire nine hours when it first came out; I’d just returned from a year doing volunteer work in Israel; I will never forget the experience of being in a theater over two nights watching it) though eventually returns to continue helping Lanzmann’s efforts. You can read a transcript of the interview here and see on page 12 and 32 where it is that Karski tries to stop. I cry just reading. He says that he cannot go on, though he does, and repeats multiple times that he understands the reason that Lanzmann wants to have this documentation.
It’s an almost amusing side note to see in the transcript Karski’s oft-spoken phrase from class lectures, “So, then…” or “So, now…” Note too that this interview with Lanzmann occurred just as Karski retired from GU. As I said, we students knew almost nothing about this part of his life, few people did; he comments about never speaking about it on p. 52 of the transcript.
Karski’s description of Poland and Europe and the Warsaw ghetto in those years is gut-wrenching, maybe most when he describes the torture he endured – he was, among other things, a Polish resistance fighter who was captured. But he also describes in horrific detail the suffering he observed in the ghetto, among other places. When you watch the segment in the film, you can see the pain and difficulty of his memories from World War II.
Starting on p. 54 of the transcript, Karski describes how he came to meet with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. They had an 80 minute meeting but only at the very end does FDR ask about the Jews. President Roosevelt tells Karski to meet with multiple other leaders, including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who refuses to believe anything that Karski tells him – of all that Karski has seen and lived through as part of the Polish resistance and courier to England of events unfolding. From outtakes not included in the film but which align with text in the transcript:
TAPE 3140 — Camera Rolls #23-24 — 08:00:02 to 08:17:34
Lanzmann asks Karski to whom specifically he reported his news about the destruction of the Jews, and what were the reactions. He tells of being sent to Washington from London and of a meeting with Roosevelt. Karski first told Roosevelt that the Polish nation was depending on him to deliver them from the Germans. Karski said to Roosevelt, “All hope, Mr. President, has been placed by the Polish nation in the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”TAPE 3141 — Camera Rolls #25-28 — 09:00:11 to 09:33:07
Karski says that he told President Roosevelt about Belzec and the desperate situation of the Jews. Roosevelt concentrated his questions and remarks entirely on Poland and did not ask one question about the Jews. Soon after his meeting with the President, Karski received a message from FDR with a list of several people with whom Karski should speak. One of the people that the President recommended was Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court, who came to see Karski in the Polish embassy. Frankfurter listened to his report and said that he did not, could not believe Karski’s report. Karski was interviewed by Lord Selborne who was in charge of the European underground movement of the British government. Selborne told him that he knew that Karski’s story wasn’t true, but that it was good for propaganda purposes, just as it was necessary in World War I to use atrocity stories against the Germans.TAPE 3142 — Camera Rolls #29-31 — 10:00:07 to 10:21:00
Karski talks about his interactions with the other people to whom he reported. Lanzmann asks Karski whether the people he gave his report to in Washington could truly grasp what was happening in places like Belzec. Karski replies that he doesn’t think so. Karski says that what happened to the Jews is not comparable to any other event in history.
The New York Times’ obit of Karski, gives this version of the meeting with Roosevelt and Frankfurter:
In July 1943, Mr. Karski arrived in the United States. Two months earlier, attempts by the Germans to liquidate those Jews still remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto was met with armed resistance. In a desperate, uneven struggle over three weeks, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, more than 10,000 Jews were killed in the fighting or in fires set by the Germans to destroy the Ghetto. The 56,000 Jews remaining were taken to the Treblinka death camp.
”Almost every individual was sympathetic to my reports concerning the Jews,” Mr. Karski said. ”But when I reported to the leaders of governments, they discarded their conscience, their personal feeling.
”They provided a rationale which seemed valid. What was the situation? The Jews were totally helpless. The war strategy was the military defeat of Germany and the defeat of Germany’s war potential for all eternity. Nothing could interfere with the military crushing of the Third Reich. The Jews had no country, no government. They were fighting, but they had no identity.”
He kept telling what he knew, honoring the promise he had given to the two men in the Ghetto. A secret meeting was arranged between Mr. Karski and President Roosevelt. He said that commanders of the underground Home Army were estimating that if there was to be no Allied intervention in the next year and a half, the Jews of Poland would ”cease to exist.” He did not tell Roosevelt of his own experiences or observations.
Mr. Karski believed that he failed to move Roosevelt to any real action. But John Pehle, who became head of the War Refugee Board, a federal agency that helped settle surviving Jews, said later that Roosevelt had decided to establish the board as a consequence of his talks with Mr. Karski. The mission, Mr. Pehle said, ”changed U.S. policy overnight from indifference to affirmative action.” [emphasis mine]
At Yad Vashem, there is an entire floating wall exhibit with a lengthy film clip of Karski describing his meeting with Roosevelt and how FDR completely fails to get it. Unfortunately, I can’t find the text of the clip, but Karski is a uniquely animated figure and dramatically states and gesticulates FDR’s show of confidence that all war will end and there will be peace, while at the same time entirely ignoring the plight of millions while he waits for that peace to come. This issue, I know, is not without its controversy.
Commemorating Kristallnacht, recalling the years and events that led up to beginning of the end of Jewish European life, as well as that of five million other extinguished lives, is necessary because, especially at this time in America, we have the ability to choose to not look away, to choose to speak out in one form or another, that we won’t forget and it will not happen again. As Mata says, we must remain vigilant, on behalf of all individuals whom others seek to persecute based on differences such as race, sexual orientation or political ideology (just as examples):
It is easy to look at something as obvious, as blatant as the events of that night, and to accurately congratulate ourselves for no longer living in that world. But we must be ever-vigilant of the “small steps” that, if left to grow, can blossom into larger cancers, and hurt even more people. Any hatred of any people for who they are, what color they are, what their faith is, what gender they are or prefer is just one thorn on the same evil stem.
As many of us continue to say, we are all connected to each other, all creatures of the same hand, all inhabitants of the same fragile world. We are responsible for each other’s fair treatment. And when we see these small steps, we can never afford to sit idly by.
…
There are lessons in the broken glass of Kristallnacht. Do not forget. Be vigilant. Stand up to hatred. This lesson is not about being politically correct, it is about deciding to live a life of acceptance and inclusion. There is evil in the world. That evil has the heart of hatred. Our love for our fellow human beings must be and act stronger than any hatred. And that means watching, and stopping “the little steps”.
Last week, my post at BlogHer focused on not defining a different standard of speech for political rhetoric than I would for how my children should speak to other people – even other people with whom they’re arguing. And just today, I read this article about an International Bullying Prevention Association convention:
About 20 percent of middle-school age kids say they have been bullied, but more than a third of American adults face the same kinds of abuse on their jobs, experts say. Researchers say about 71 million Americans reported being bullied at the workplace or reported witnessing the bullying of co-workers.
“Bullying is a full-bore, laser-purpose interpersonal campaign of destruction,” said Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Washington state. Namie was the conference’s keynote speaker on Friday.
…
Workplace and school bullying share the same power-and-control dynamic, said Marlene Snyder, associate professor at Clemson University and director of Development for the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program — the blueprint many schools use to thwart bullies.
Snyder, also a conference presenter, said it is important for educators, janitors, cooks and other adults in schools to learn how to end bullying before youths take the behavior into adulthood.
…
Bullies are becoming more tech-savvy — using text messages, e-mails and social-networking sites to intimidate and harass, according to recent reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sounds like some political campaigns, doesn’t it?
Each of us can never know about or cover or confront every act of intimidation, bullying or persecution, in part because we do have different sensitivities. But again, I go back to my kids and parenting: if I wouldn’t be okay with my kids doing it, then what excuse could I possibly accept for an adult to do the same?
I’ll end with the famous poem which Mata includes in a comment at her post (Dachau concentration camp, outside of Munich, is the only concentration camp I’ve visited; its population was overwhelmingly Catholic through much of its existence):
Martin Niemoeller, a German pastor who survived Dachau is the attributed author of the following:
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
Cross-posted from Writes Like She Talks.