First off, I recognize the emotive factor of this topic more than any of you might think. I grew up with mostly Italians and Jews, and I heard many of the same stories that others have. Additionally, one of my all time favorite teachers, my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Gold, was in the camps as a child.It was she who encouraged me to write:
The Nazis were like monsters to us, they didn't even seem human. In the camp, we told stories to survive.
Things to remember when you ask how could it have been done is that the Jews in Europe had been part of those communities for centuries. They could not imagine that their country could turn against them. Also keep in mind that those communities were fairly isolated and communications in the 30s and 40s were not what they are today, so communities would not know what was happening elsewhere.
Ya know, I'm not so sure. I had a teacher, Mr. Joseph Greenstein, who left Poland for the U.S. around 1907. He'd survived at least one pogrom in Poland before he left, though.
The fact is, long before the first nation-wide pogrom in Germany, in 1938, Jews had suffered violent persecution throughout eastern Europe for a long time-the first reported one was around 1880 in Russia, but with Martin Luther actually calling for such acts of anti-Semitism as an article of faith in
On the Jews and Their Lies, in 1543, and describing in detail what should be done: the burning of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. While this didn't have a prevailing influence in Germany during the 18th and 19th centuries, it was an influence elsewhere, and was again in Germany by the end of WWI.
Frankly, when the talk started, when other measures were implemented-one of the first things Hitler did when he became Chancellor, in 1933, was implement the Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service, which removed many Jews from their Jobs-and certainly when
Kristallnacht fell in 1938-and basically happened all over the country at once, so there was no need to communicate what had happened elsewhere-these all should have been an indication that their "countries were turning against them."
In fact, it was-an awful
lot of Jews left their countries for Great Britain, traditionally neutral European countries, and the United States. It's how we wound up with Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi-while not Jewish himself, most of Fermi's assistants, and his wife were Jewish, and they fled the restrictive, anti-Semitic laws which Mussolini instituted in Italy at about the same time as the Germans. Lisa Meitner, the great and overlooked Austrian born physicist, left Germany for Sweden in 1938, and was not only critical of colleagues who remained and collaborated with the Nazi regime, but criticized herself for remaining in Germany from 1933 to 1938. In one of her more damning statements, she singled out Werner Heisenberg, who collaborated with the Nazis (but might just have hindered their atomic bomb efforts through inaction), saying that,
"Heisenberg and many millions with him should be forced to see these camps and the martyred people." She also wrote to her longtime associate, Otto Hahn, the man who recieved the Nobel that she should have been recognized for:
"You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered ... [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany
So,while to my mind it would be an even uglier thing to say about the facts of gun-control, the fact may be that more would have lived if more had read the writing on the wall,
and run away. I recognize, though, that disbelief and inertia were part of this, and, that for some, emigration was financially impossible. Still, many remained to have their wealth and eventually their lives stripped from them, when it was within their means to go elsewhere, and no longer within their means to resist.
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