(Israel Hayom-JNS) Jonathan S. Tobin - There is no evading the fact that at the moment in history when Jews were being slaughtered in the Nazi death factory at Auschwitz by the hundreds of thousands, their fate was a minor issue even to those in the civilized world who were waging war on Germany. In April 1944, two young Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Verba and Alfred Wetzlter, escape from Auschwitz. They reached safety and reported in detail the way Auschwitz operated to Jewish officials, who then passed the document to the U.S. War Refugee Board in Switzerland. They hoped to warn the Jews of Hungary, who were the next group the Germans and their collaborators intended to transport to Auschwitz for certain death. But throughout the rest of 1944, the trains to Auschwitz kept running. From May to July 1944, 55,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to the death camp every week. Jewish leaders and officials of the War Refugee Board urged that the American and British air forces bomb the railroad tracks and the death factory itself, to put Auschwitz out of commission. U.S. planes were already bombing an I.G. Farben factory complex in the vicinity. But the Allies took no action. The allies already knew about Auschwitz. A year earlier, President Franklin Roosevelt had already heard personally from Jan Karski, a brave Polish officer who had snuck into and then out of the Warsaw Ghetto and German camps and brought out of Poland other evidence of the Nazis' effort to industrialize murder. German plans for the annihilation of the Jews of Europe were also known and published. The lesson here is that the Jews were basically on their own. Israel's ability to defend itself represents a guarantee that never again will the Jews wait in vain for friends to save those in peril. It is the need to preserve the ability and the will of the Jews to defend themselves that is the true lesson of Auschwitz.
2020-01-23 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive