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The Hollywood Legend Who Mobilized Public Opinion on Behalf of the Jews of Europe and Israel
(Mosaic) Rick Richman - Ben Hecht was Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriter. He wrote 65 movies, 25 books, including several best-sellers, 250 short stories, and 20 plays, receiving six Oscar nominations and two Oscars. In 1939, Hecht wrote a tale of an "International Pogrom," carefully planned for the "extirpating of the Jews," that kills a half-million and drives "another million or so" into "forests, deserts, and mountains." In August 1942, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland, Gerhart Riegner, learned from a reliable German source that within months the Nazis planned to murder between 3 1/2 and 4 million Jews. By November, the New York Times reported (on page 10) that "about half of the estimated 4,000,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had [already] been slain in an extermination campaign." Hecht organized and wrote the script for a massive, celebrity-studded pageant at New York's Madison Square Garden called "We Will Never Die" on March 9, 1943, to honor those murdered in Europe. Performances followed in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles (from which it was broadcast nationally by NBC). The pageants were a significant factor leading to the establishment of the War Refugee Board in January 1944. But by that time, at least 4 1/2 million Jews had been murdered. Hecht wrote a play, A Flag Is Born, telling the story of Holocaust survivors who die trying to reach Palestine, which opened on Broadway on September 5, 1946. The proceeds went for efforts to smuggle displaced Jews into Palestine.