Books: The Nations Did Not Interfere

THE HOLOCAUST by Nora Levin. 768 pages. Crowell. $10. WHILE SIX MILLION DIED by Arthur D. Morse. 420 pages. Random House. $7.95.

Ever since Hannah Arendt’s provocative study on the Eichmann case, there has been no end of speculation along the lines of her major thesis: that the Nazis could not have succeeded in their slaughter of the Jews without the almost lamblike acquiescence of their victims. And there was no dearth of angry disagreement. These two books are the latest in a still-growing list that challenges the Arendt argument. In The Holocaust, Philadelphia-based Historian Nora Levin maintains that the Jews “resisted physically much more than is generally known, and under conditions that are scarcely credible.” In While Six Million Died, Brooklyn-born Journalist Arthur Morse insists that any Jewish acquiescence was insignificant when measured against the apathy and indifference of the U.S. and the world’s other civilized nations.

A Pit Near Minsk. “Collective resistance,” writes Miss Levin, “was never possible; by the time Jews grasped the reality that they were doomed to be killed no matter what they did, they were isolated, weakened and abandoned.” And until that terrible moment, there was the diabolical “tease-and-terror seesaw” psychology of the Nazis, who deliberately “cultivated the illusion that there would be a way out.” Until the war’s very end, for example, Nazi propagandists billed the camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia as a kind of idyllic community, though for scores of thousands—including 15,000 of the more than 1,000,000 Jewish children who perished during the holocaust—it was a way station to Auschwitz’s crematoria.

Author Levin ranges skillfully through Berlin ministries, where Nazi bureaucrats enthusiastically pursued their policy of Endlosung (“final solution”) for the Jews, to Warsaw’s Umschlagplatz, a transfer point to Treblinka, where a child’s tongue was cut out “with a pocket knife for making a face at a guard.” One chilling passage portrays Eichmann himself, standing over a killing pit near Minsk and watching a pleading Jewish mother hold up her baby just before the bullets strike. “I was so close that later I found bits of brains splattered on my long leather coat,” Eichmann said afterward. “My driver helped me remove them. Then we returned to Berlin.”

Despite the horror, Holocaust documents a hitherto unheralded record of resistance, even beyond the suicidal stand in the Warsaw ghetto and the sporadic concentration-camp rebellions. Jews made up 20% of the French Resistance and 30% of a Free Polish Army (in which officers and men often rivaled the Germans in their savage anti-Semitism). All through Nazi-occupied territory, Jews operated secret schools and underground newspapers. Young Boy Scouts and volunteer paratroopers from Palestine carried out rescue missions that saved thousands. Bands of Jewish fighters roamed the dense forests of Russia and Poland, though their mortality rate often reached 100%. What makes their resistance more noteworthy, says Miss Levin, is that “wherever and whenever they fought back, they were doomed and they knew it.” Worst of all, nobody seemed to care. “The Allies,” she says. “had written the Jews off as wartime casualties.”

Chain of Apathy. Morse, whose book is subtitled “A Chronicle of American Apathy” reaches the same conclusion. In the U.S., he says, “a combination of political expediency, diplomatic evasion, isolationism, indifference and raw bigotry played directly into the hands of Adolf Hitler even as he set in motion the final plans for the greatest mass murder in history.”

The basic blame, says Morse, belongs to “patriotic” organizations, which warned against the admission of “undesirable foreigners” to the U.S.; it belongs to Congress, which refused to relax immigration laws even to save doomed children, and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who feared that “the Jewish issue was a political liability.” Above all, Morse blames the State Department, which refused for more than a decade after Hitler’s rise to concede that he really was determined to annihilate Europe’s Jews. Such an indictment by hindsight seems unduly harsh, particularly since so many Americans—and even so many European Jews—were either ignorant of Hitler’s aim or could not believe that anybody would seek to destroy a whole people. But Morse offers considerable documentation for his charge that some key U.S. officials knew for years about the Nazis’ infamous “final solution.”

What Morse describes as “the long chain of apathy” at State was finally broken in late 1943, when Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. submitted an angry report to Franklin Roosevelt. The report charged the State Department with “utter failure to prevent the extermination of Europe’s Jews,” and strongly suggested that its inaction was either “deliberate” or due to the “incompetence” of certain officers. Roosevelt responded by establishing the independent War Refugee Board, which helped bring thousands of Jews to the U.S. from neutral countries—but only, says Morse, after “millions had perished.”

Morse by no means holds the U.S. entirely responsible. Both the Cubans and the British in Palestine turned away refugee ships. The Australians, when asked if they would offer the Jews a haven, replied: “As we have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” There were exceptions, but all too true, says Morse, was the epitaph that Polish-Jewish Poet Itzhak Katznelson wrote in his diary before he was gassed at Auschwitz: “Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they protest, nor shake their heads, nor did they warn the murderers, never a murmur.”