Part 2 of 2
Destination UnknownWithin a few days of the July demonstrations, another important dimension of the "final solution" began to become apparent. From the Nazi perspective, this development was an obvious part of the extermination plan, but it could not yet be recognized as such from the outside. It was a massive deportation of Jews from western Europe to "an unknown destination" in the East. Labor service was the announced purpose. But in reality these evacuations were part of the Europe-wide transportation of Jews to the still-secret killing centers already in operation in Poland. [38]The deportations from France in 1942, especially those from the Vichy, or Unoccupied, Zone, were more fully exposed to the scrutiny of the outside world than any other Holocaust development. At work were the usual European news outposts in Switzerland, England, and Sweden. Beyond that, the peculiar status of Vichy France, which was partially autonomous and maintained diplomatic relations with the United States, meant that American newsmen could operate in the Unoccupied Zone, yet bypass Vichy censorship by dispatching their reports from Switzerland. Even closer to the deportation events were Americans and others who had been assisting some of the many thousand Jewish refugees who had earlier fled to France to escape Nazi persecution. These relief workers were in touch with their agencies in other countries and could thus transmit to the outside world detailed information on events in the Unoccupied Zone.
The relief organizations had been active in southern France for some time, helping refugees in applying for visas to countries abroad and in arranging the necessary transportation.
After mid-1940, emigration became more and more difficult as overseas nations, the United States included, all but closed their doors to immigration. Accordingly, the relief agencies had increasingly concentrated on supplying food, clothing, and other assistance to the refugees caught in France. By the time the deportations struck, two years of hard work had raised conditions to a barely livable level in the squalid detention camps in which the Vichy government had incarcerated thousands of the fugitives. [39]
Whatever stability Jewish refugees had attained in France was smashed by a series of ruthless roundups that began in mid-July 1942 in the Occupied Zone. Lacking sufficient forces to carry out mass seizures, the Nazis had to secure the collaboration of the Vichy government and the French police. The price of that cooperation was the exemption of French-born Jews from deportation, at least temporarily. Left vulnerable were 75,000 Jewish men, women, and children, most of whom had already endured a variety of hells in their attempts to escape the Nazis. [40]
At four o'clock on the morning of July 16, the trap was sprung in Paris. French police dragnets swept up 13,000 refugee Jews amid scenes of anguish and terror. Buses backed up to apartment buildings and were filled with screaming, crying people. Hospital beds were emptied. A cancer patient operated on the previous day was carried away. One woman gave birth while police waited to haul off mother and baby. Younger children were permitted to be left behind, and many parents desperately accepted that choice in the hope that neighbors or orphanages would take them in. Family groups, comprising some 9,000 people (half of them children), were funneled into the winter sports arena (Velodrome d'Hiver) and penned up like animals. Water and food were scarce; some infants died for lack of milk. Since only ten latrines were available, people stood in line for hours to use the toilet. After five days of this nightmare, adults and children were separated and transferred to different deportation centers to await shipment to Poland. [41]
Relief organizations in the Unoccupied Zone learned later what had become of the children left behind in Paris. Many were hidden. But French police gathered up thousands of others who were found in apartments, wandering the streets, or crying at locked doors of houses. Nearly 4,000 of them, aged two to fourteen, were sent to "unknown destinations," packed into windowless boxcars without adult escort, without food, water, or hygienic provisions, without so much as straw to lie on. They were even without identification. The Nazis had destroyed their papers. [42]
Close to 50,000 refugee Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the Occupied Zone, mostly from Paris, before France was liberated in 1944. More than half of them were seized in the roundups of July, August, and September 1942. [43]Early in August, the Vichy chief of government, Pierre Laval, began the evacuations from the Unoccupied Zone. The Vichy police started with refugees who had already undergone misery and degradation in the internment camps of southern France. In the words of an American relief worker, they were now exposed "like fowl in a chicken pen with a hawk circling overhead, only here very few, if any, escape." [44]
In rapid order, 3,600 Jews were collected from the camps and dispatched to the Occupied Zone for transshipment to Poland. The first train pulled out of the camp at Gurs on August 6, carrying a thousand refugees into the night. Within four days, two more trains swallowed the rest from Les Milles, Rivesaltes, Vernet, and other camps which, though their names had come to mean wretchedness, had not killed all hope of survival. [45]
A French citizen who witnessed a deportation recorded what he saw:
We were at the Camp des Milles the day the last train left. The spectacle was indescribably painful to behold. All the internees had been lined up with their pitifully battered valises tied together with bits of string. Most of them were in rags, pale, thin, worn out with the strain. ... Many of them were quietly weeping. ... Their faces showed only hopeless despair.
The YMCA's Donald Lowrie, an American relief worker, described the evacuation:
The actual deportation was as bad as could be imagined: men and women pushed like cattle into box-cars, thirty to a car, whose only furniture was a bit of straw on the floor, one iron pail for all toilet purposes, and a police guard. The journey, we were told, would take a fortnight or eighteen days. . . . All of us were curtly refused permission to accompany the trains or even to organize a service of hot drinks and refreshments at the frontier where they passed into German occupied territory. [46]
In the first stage of the deportations from Unoccupied France, refugee parents were allowed to leave children under eighteen behind. Fearing the worst from their return into German hands, most chose separation. After watching the leave-taking, relief workers felt they could "never forget the moment when these truck loads of children left the camps, with parents trying in one last gaze to fix an image to last an eternity." Later in August, however, the powers in Vichy betrayed both children and parents with an order requiring deportation of all refugee youngsters. "We are solving the problem humanely," lied the Vichy spokesman. "We want children to go with their parents." Many whose parents had already been carried away were now deported. The others remained in constant danger of evacuation. [47]
After clearing the camps, the Vichy government moved to hunt down the thousands of foreign Jews who had managed to avoid detention or had gained release from the camps before the deportations had commenced. Houses and hotels were searched before dawn. Mass arrests took place. Frantic parents, hearing of the raids, besieged the relief groups, begging them to hide their children. But French police had also started tracking down children who were in orphanages and care homes throughout Vichy France. These roundups of children, frequent in the summer and fall of 1942, continued sporadically throughout the war. This firsthand account is typical:
There was the first raid on the nursery at 4 o'clock in the morning with two trucks. There were similar raids in all of L___ that same night. The big trucks were to be seen everywhere. ... Within a quarter of an hour the children [some as young as three years] had to be awakened, dressed and their belongings packed. [48]
The great tide of Vichy roundups outside the camps lasted from late August until mid-September 1942. It swept another 7,000 Jews onto trains to Occupied France and then to Auschwitz. These large-scale deportations from the Unoccupied Zone in August and September carried away about 10,600 Jews. Before the Germans were driven from France, nearly 4,000 more were transported to Auschwitz, making a total of over 14,000 delivered to the Nazis from the southern sector of the country. [49]
Shock waves from the calamity that struck in the Unoccupied Zone quickly registered in the offices of relief organizations in the United States. As early as August 10, Donald Lowrie traveled to Geneva to send the first in a series of thorough reports to the YMCA in New York. The New York headquarters of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began receiving detailed information by cablegram from its Lisbon office by August 13. Many starkly brief messages of despair were dispatched from Marseilles to the American Friends Service Committee office in Philadelphia. These telegrams reported on people for whom the Quakers had been trying to arrange immigration to the United States. Filed away a generation and a half ago, they may stand as the only epitaphs that scores of Jews ever received. These three are representative:
A_______ L _______ DEPARTED CAMP RIVESALTES UNKNOWN DESTINATION
MOTHER DEPARTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION
[to an uncle on Long Island] PARENTS DEPARTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION
SITUATION DIFFICULT [50]
The deportations were devastating on the personal level, even before people realized that evacuation meant murder by gas. A family that had done everything possible to escape from the Nazi grasp offers an example. The fragments of information that remain show that the S__ family had fled German territory some time before and had made its way to southern France. It succeeded in moving one young son into safekeeping in Switzerland. And a second boy, C__ , had been lucky enough to reach the United States earlier in 1942. But the parents had to remain in France, even though the relevant American immigration quotas were 90 percent unfilled at the time. The manner in which U.S. immigration laws were administered during World War II kept most refugees out. [51]
After reaching the United States, C__ wrote to his parents several times. He became increasingly concerned when he received no response. The explanation came in November in a letter from C__ 's sponsoring agency in New York to his case worker in the city where he lived with his new foster parents. Enclosed was one of C__ 's letters to his father. The agency worker wrote:
What we feared would happen has actually taken place. C__'s father was deported, because the enclosed letter, as you will note, came back with the famous stamp "partisans addresse." [52]
Several other children who reached the United States from southern France in July 1942 sent postcards to their parents. Most of the cards came back marked "DEPARTED -- DESTINATION UNKNOWN." [53]
In France, the deportations brought a barrage of denunciation. Several Roman Catholic prelates, including the archbishops of Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse, protested vigorously. The cardinals and archbishops of the Occupied Zone united in condemnation. [ii] [54][/quote]
A statement by Bishop Pierre Theas, of Montauban, read in all the churches of his diocese, was representative of the attitude of the Catholic leadership:Hereby I make known to the world the indignant protest of Christian conscience, and I proclaim that all men, whether Aryan or non-Aryan, are brothers because they were created by the same GOD; and that all men, whatever their race or religion, have a right to respect from individuals as well as from States. [56]
Pastor Marc Boegner, leader of the Protestant Federation of France, assailed the Vichy government for its collaboration in the roundups and the deportations. With the explicit support of the archbishop of Lyon, Pastor Boegner insisted on an audience with Laval in September in a last, unsuccessful attempt to halt the evacuations. [57]
The outrage of church leaders was shared by many others in the French population. It broke out even within the ranks of the police, many of whom resigned or accepted dismissal rather than round up Jews. The military governor of Lyon was removed because he refused to send his troops to hunt out Jews. [58]
Although the protests failed to stop the evacuations, they may have contributed to the fact that the Nazis never undertook large-scale removal of France's native-born Jews. Moreover, the denunciations voiced by church leaders and spread by local clergy shattered the secrecy that the Vichy regime tried to impose by banning the news from the French press and radio.
Several religious leaders sent out pastoral letters calling on church members to help Jews. Many French families took in Jews and hid them. Children, especially, could be concealed, and, despite some betrayals and disasters, about 8,000 were saved by the combined efforts of Jewish organizations, private families, schools, youth groups, and Catholic convents and monasteries. [59]
Interfaith cooperation flourished. The head of the Jewish Boy Scouts in France came to the leader of a Protestant youth federation and simply stated, "Mademoiselle, I have 600 foreign Boy Scouts to be hidden from the police." They were hidden. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a Protestant village, successfully concealed scores of Jews, despite persistent police searches as well as government threats to reduce the town's food rations. Again,
a force of Protestant and Catholic social workers broke into a prison in Lyon and "kidnapped" ninety children who were being held there with their parents for deportation. The parents signed releases placing their children under the care of a Christian organization, with the assurance that it was simply acting as a protecting cover. The parents were deported the next day; the children were hidden in convents. When Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, refused an order to surrender the children, Laval struck back by arresting Father Pierre Chaillet, a member of the cardinal's staff. Cardinal Gerlier responded by again instructing the priests in his diocese to conceal Jews. His personal commitment and prestige enabled him to face down Laval; the children remained hidden and Father Chaillet was released. [60]
Americans also spoke out vigorously against the deportations. As soon as they learned of the crisis, American relief workers in France alerted the news agencies and moved to press the issue with the Vichy government. Early in August, Donald Lowrie, a spokesman for several of the relief agencies, and Father Arnou, a special representative of Cardinal Gerlier, saw the chief of state, Marshal Henri Petain. The aged leader, who seemed barely aware of the developments, agreed that the matter was regrettable but indicated that he was helpless to change it. "You know our situation with regard to the Germans," he said. That same day, Roswell McClelland and Lindsley Noble, of the American Friends Service Committee, had a conference with Laval in which he offered no hope of moderation. Instead, he broke into a long tirade against the Jews generally and the damage Jewish refugees allegedly had caused to France. During their visit to Vichy, the American relief workers gave the U.S. embassy its first detailed information about the roundups and evacuations. [61]
Following an exchange of communications with the State Department, Pinkney Tuck, charge d'affaires at the embassy, saw Laval and registered an extremely sharp protest against the "revolting" and "inhuman" treatment of the Jews. In fact, Tuck's deeply felt vehemence disturbed middle-level policymakers in the State Department who complained to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles that Tuck had exceeded his instructions. Tuck, in fact, was even in advance of the leadership of the main American Jewish organizations, which on August 27 submitted a joint letter to the State Department calling on the United States to protest to the Vichy government. Welles replied that the American embassy in Vichy, "in compliance with instructions sent by the Department," had already made "the most vigorous representations possible." [62]
Some two weeks later, Secretary of State Cordell Hull followed up by personally delivering a blunt condemnation of the "revolting and fiendish" deportations to the Vichy ambassador to the United States, Gaston Henry-Haye. (The next day, Henry-Haye privately expressed his own disgust, with respect both to his rough handling by American officials and to the situation in France. He reportedly told a visitor that his ambition when he went back to France was to become a farmer "so that his dealings will be with animals instead of people. He feels that his dealings with people have spoiled his enjoyment of their society.") [63]
While in Vichy to see Petain and Laval, Lowrie and the two American Friends workers had asked the Vichy leaders and the American embassy about the possibility of permitting some of the Jewish refugee children to leave for safety in the United States. Laval offered almost no hope but did not refuse outright. At the suggestion of American relief workers in France, their organizations' home offices appealed to the State Department for 1,000 immigration visas for Jewish children stranded in France. Actively aided by Eleanor Roosevelt and the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, the plea was successful. On September 18, the State Department cabled its consuls in France authorizing the 1,000 visas and instructing the consuls to waive virtually all the usual red tape involved in visa issuance in order to hasten the process. Because of increasingly dire reports from France, the American relief agencies soon asked Washington to raise the number to 5,000. By the end of September, the State Department had compiled. [64]
But the great difficulty was extracting exit visas from the Vichy regime. While the children were being collected and readied, a sleight-of-hand game was played out in Vichy. On September 30, Tuck sought Laval's cooperation. Laval replied that he agreed "in principle" to the exodus of the children, adding, as Tuck reported it, "that he would be only too glad to be rid of them." But when it came to arranging the details with Laval's underlings, it turned out that a combination of German pressure and Vichy recalcitrance had shifted the ground. [65]
Throughout October, the Vichy government stalled on releasing the children, falling back on sham arguments to drag out discussions. Some religious groups, asserted the secretary-general of police, had illegally hidden children. For the government now to allow those children to emigrate would be to justify illegal acts and encourage such conduct in the future. Vichy officials hypocritically spoke of their government's great concern about separating families and its belief that eventual reunion was more likely if the children remained on the same continent as the parents. [66]
Tuck's constant pressure finally wrenched out of Laval a promise of 500 visas. It was then the end of October, and before a convoy of children could be assembled, moved through the documentation process, and placed on a train for Lisbon, the entire project ended precipitously. On November 8, Allied forces landed in French North Africa. The Vichy government severed diplomatic ties with the United States the next day. By then a group of a hundred children with the precious exit visas had reached Marseilles and needed only their U.S. visas. But the American consulate was closed. On November 11, the Germans occupied the southern sector of France and demolished the chances of salvaging anything from the project. Until spring 1944, diplomatic efforts were made, chiefly by the Swiss government, to persuade the Vichy regime to allow at least the promised 500 to leave. These attempts were fruitless. [67]American newspaper readers in the summer of 1942 could follow the main configurations of the Jewish tragedy in France. Most metropolitan dailies provided fairly thorough coverage of the mass arrests of mid-July in Paris. The fearful and chaotic conditions connected with those roundups appeared in many of the major newspapers, and some of them carried partial descriptions of the Velodrome d'Hiver episode. Almost none reported the barbaric shoving of 4,000 children into boxcars for shipment across the Continent without the necessities of life and without adult escort. But the UP did reveal that outrage, and the Los Angeles Times, for one, ran the dispatch. [68]
The deportations from the camps in southern France and the roundups in the Unoccupied Zone received widespread notice. Nothing specific appeared, however, concerning conditions on the deportation trains. But the protests raised by the French archbishops and other members of the clergy drew repeated coverage. Accounts of the church's role in hiding children and the Vichy government's challenge to the church by arresting a priest also ran in most major newspapers.
Much of the French deportation story thus appeared in the American press. But it was almost never featured. For instance, the New York Times published some twenty-five items but placed only two on the front page. Those reports reached page 1 apparently because they involved leaders of the Catholic church. Even so, each story received only a few inches of type at the foot of the page. One told very little, the other nothing, about what was actually happening to the Jews. Other major newspapers generally conformed to the same pattern. They printed considerable information, but almost always on inner pages, and even there it was often barely noticeable. [69]
In sum, the American daily press carried fuller information on the calamity of the refugee Jews in France than it did on any other development in the Nazi extermination program. As with all news about the Holocaust, though, American newspapers gave this information very limited emphasis.
The disaster that struck France in the summer of 1942 was the most noticeable part of a large wave of deportations from western Europe to the gas chambers in the second half of that year. Though the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway were nearly walled off from the Allied world, bits of information filtered out about the mass arrests and evacuations there. In July a roundup of 60,000 Jews began in Amsterdam. Convoys rolled to the East, despite the protests of Dutch Protestant and Catholic church leaders. Popular demonstrations against the deportations, urged on by broadcasts from the Dutch government-in-exile in England, obliged the Germans to reschedule train deportations for the middle of the night. But the transports continued to move. (The first of the trains to reach Auschwitz from Holland arrived while SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was there on an inspection tour. Himmler observed the whole murder process, from opening the railway cars to removal of the bodies from the gas chamber.) [70]
The few accounts to break out of Belgium mentioned nighttime roundups and mass deportations. Isolated reports from Norway told of the arrest and later removal by Ocean freighter of many members of that country's tiny Jewish population. [71]
The massive deportations from western Europe in 1942 were one step in the still-secret program of genocide. The Nazi explanation -- labor service at an unnamed destination in the East -- seemed plausible at the time. It especially appeared to make sense in view of the poor response to the Vichy government's effort to recruit 150,000 French workers to go to Germany to help fill the labor shortage there.
News reports concerning the deported Jews regularly referred to "forced labor" and "slave labor" as their fate, a view that was generally accepted. But some observers, especially those close enough to witness the events, had doubts. [72]
Commenting in August on the announcement that the Jews were being sent to a labor area in Poland, Donald Lowrie pointed out certain inconsistencies:Since children, the aged and ill (we know some cases of epileptics, palsied, insane and even bedridden put into the corral for deportation) are taken, and since their destination is uniformly reported (by Laval, Petain, the Police) as the Jewish reservation in Poland, the need for labor does not totally explain this action. In view of the present transport difficulties in Germany it is hard to understand a German desire to have these unfortunates.
Two months later Lowrie was still suspicious, although he did not speculate on what was actually happening:
By no stretch of the imagination, however, can the majority of the unfortunate Jews thus delivered to the Germans be considered as capable of labour service. Of one convoy totalling 700, not more than 60 were in physical condition to do any useful work. [73]
A Jewish refugee physician working at the Unitarian Service Committee's medical facility in Marseilles had just about figured it out. Months of hoping for a favorable decision on his application for a visa to the United States had run out. Shortly before being forced onto the deportation train, he said, "I waited for the help that was promised.
Now it is too late. We know that nobody returns from the East. Thanks for what all of you have done -- alas in vain." [74]
In the midst of the disclosures from France came news from the London Polish government concerning the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been crowded into the Warsaw ghetto since late 1940. The report revealed that the ghetto mayor, Adam Czerniakow, had committed suicide rather than obey orders to prepare deportation lists that would help the Nazis in their announced plan to evacuate 100,000 Jews to "an undisclosed place in Eastern Europe." (The real destination was death in the killing centers, principally Treblinka. Deportation of the 380,000 Warsaw Jews began on July 22; by the end of 1942, over 310,000 were gone. The remnant included those who would ignite the Warsaw ghetto revolt of April 1943.) [75]
During the summer of 1942, another shocking report was smuggled from Poland by the Jewish Labor Bund, the group that had sent word in May of the murder of 700,000 Polish Jews. A gruesome account of the mass-gassing process at Chelmno, it was the first thorough description of a German killing center to reach the West.
The victims, told to undress for a bath, were led down a hallway and suddenly forced into a large truck. Shut and sealed, the truck drove to a deep ditch in a nearby wood, where it became an execution chamber. Exhaust gases killed those trapped inside. A squad of Jewish gravediggers unloaded the bodies. After German workers stripped rings, gold teeth, and other valuables from the corpses, the gravediggers buried the dead Jews in layers in the ditch. Six to nine truckloads were murdered in this way daily. The gravediggers themselves were killed after a time, but three escaped in late January 1942. They succeeded in reporting their experiences to the Polish Jewish underground, which was already aware that thousands of Jews sent to the Chelmno area had disappeared without a trace. [76]
The American affiliate of the Jewish Labor Bund printed the gravediggers' account on August 5, 1942, in a special issue of its publication The Ghetto Speaks. A month later, a closely allied journal, the Workmen's Circle Call, carried the same report, as did the Jewish Frontier.
The American mass media did not mention the gravediggers' revelations. Nor did most of the Jewish press, apparently because the story seemed so incredible. The quandary of the Jewish leadership is illustrated by the case of the Jewish Frontier, an important American labor Zionist monthly. Its editors could not believe the report. (We were then "psychologically unschooled for the new era of mass carnage," explained one of them a quarter of a century later. "Such things did not happen in the twentieth century.") But they hesitated to ignore an account that came from a most dependable underground source. So they compromised by printing the story in small type in the back of the September issue. There it appeared, placed with unintended irony among advertisements bearing New Year's greetings from commercial enterprises. This decision, taken by a conscientious and deeply concerned segment of the American Jewish leadership, was not, as one of the editors later termed it, "gross stupidity." Rather it was a reflection of the confusion that gripped American Jewish leaders when first confronted with explicit descriptions of such unprecedented barbarism."***
The summer of 1942 revealed disaster after disaster for European Jewry. It was also a time when the war was still running against the United States and its allies. The Germans continued to advance in Russia. The Wehrmacht swept to the Don River early in July and opened the assault on Stalingrad in August. Other forces took Rostov late in July and began to move on the Caucasus oil fields. Rommel's drive across North Africa toward the Suez lifeline and the Mideast reached El Alamein as July opened. Though the Germans were stopped there, the struggle, only 200 miles from the Suez Canal, remained in doubt well into the fall. In the Pacific, the Japanese outward thrust was not halted until June, in the naval battle of Midway. It was August before a limited American offensive, the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, planted the earliest small footholds on the long road back across the Pacific.
But the turning point was approaching. The Russian winter, an ominous threat to the Germans with their overextended supply lines, was approaching. At the start of November, the British would shatter Rommel's forces at El Alamein and Allied troops would storm ashore in northwest Africa. Six months later, the two Allied drives would force the Axis out of Africa. The fight in the Pacific, where the United States applied only 15 percent of its war resources until V-E Day, would be halting and very costly, but the balance was beginning to shift there too.
As the autumn of 1942 unfolded, the situation for America and its allies was becoming more hopeful. For American Jews, though, even more terrible news about the fate of their people in Europe was soon to hit.
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Notes:[i] The term United Nations was beginning to be used by early 1942 to refer to the countries allied in the war against the Axis.
[ii] At the time, the American press reported that the Pope protested to the Vichy government three times during August. But apparently this did not happen, for no confirmation of it has been found. [55]
