Neglected Faces A committee in the Education Ministry is about to start designing a compulsory course on the Holocaust for the two final years of high school. During the summer, one thousand teachers will be trained to teach the course, which will be based on excerpts from memoirs of Holocaust survivors, film clips, photographs and visits to museums. It will be studied "from a Judeo centric perspective, and not as a sub heading of Hitlerism and the Second World War." It would indeed be strange if the Holocaust were to be studied "as a subheading of Hitlerism and the Second World War." But the list of source materials mentioned suggests a narrowing, rather than a broadening, of the study. If at last the Holocaust is to be taught intelligently and with an educative purpose, it is not enough to keep alive and even sharpen (as one must) the memory and the sense of its horror, evoking the natural emotional response. It should be presented in the complete context of its historic truth even the possibly conflicting versions of that truth to challenge the intellect and the imagination. Survivors' memoirs, film clips, photographs and visits to museums will tell the human story of the Germans' application of their "final solution" to the Jewish problem. They will no doubt be able on the basis of first hand evidence to go beyond the confrontation between the German savages and the Jewish victims, and project also the existential facts of the anti Jewish collaboration enjoyed by the Germans among the local populations in the occupied lands. But the story of the Holocaust does not begin chronologically with the events that could be photographed, or that could be described in personal memoirs of survivors. If it is to be studied seriously, some of the events that could be photographed, or that could be described in the pre Holocaust's most important lessons for our time are to be learned precisely from the period that preceded the fires of the Holocaust itself, and from circumstances that arose outside while the Holocaust was in progress. Many of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust could have remained alive if the Zionist Movement had not been lacking in political acumen and courage in the years preceding the World War. The German invaders did not find in Poland and Rumania (or in the rest of Eastern Europe) a serene, prosperous Jewish community. Very much to the contrary: the Jews of Eastern Europe were in desperate straits. They were in a state of permanent torment, beset by a virulent anti Semitism encompassing a wide range of discrimination and oppression from economic exclusion to popular violence. Beyond the violence there persisted an ominous and irreversible economic destruction of the Jewish community. They were in the midst of a process the emergence of a Polish middle class which was driving out the Jewish middle class, rapidly cutting the ground from under their feet (by the mid 1930s it was estimated that one third of the Jewish population had been reduced to living on charity from abroad). Door after door was being shut before the Jews in the Polish economy, until it became clear that Jewish existence in Poland had neither hope nor prospect. Their plight was not a secret to the Zionist leaders. Both Weizmann and Jabotinsky soberly recognized its nature. Weizmann told the British Royal Commission on Palestine, in 1937, that the Jews of Eastern Europe were "dust, moral and economic dust in a cruel world. They will bear their fate or they will not." He had neither comfort nor advice for his people in Eastern Europe. Jabotinsky launched his "evacuation" campaign, urging them to leave Europe and press for opening the gates of Palestine. With the limited means at their disposal, Jabotinsky's movements, (Revisionists, Betar, Irgun) succeeded in bringing out some 16,000 Jews to Palestine. His campaign was stultified by the Jewish establishment. The Zionist Organization launched a vigorous counter campaign. They denounced Jabotinsky as co-operating with anti Semitic governments anxious to get rid of their Jews. They urged the Jews of Eastern Europe to disregard his gloomy prognostications and rather to devote themselves to struggling for their civic rights. And they dissuaded Jews in the West from contributing to the funds essential to Jabotinsky's enterprise. Finally, they even denounced the conditions on the crowded immigrant ships. Had the Zionist Organization applied its very much larger resources to a gigantic emergency campaign, they would conceivably have worsened their relations with the British, but a very large number of Jews would have been saved from the European death trap. Nor is it possible to teach the Holocaust and to ignore the part played by the Western Powers, primarily the British. One of the central features of British international policy in the years before the war was the swift evolution of its effort to put an end to Zionism. The British had long since smothered the fact that their presence in Palestine had neither legal reason nor moral justification once they had betrayed the Zionist cause. Recent research has made plain the depth of the cynicism (and contempt for the Jews) in their policy in those desperate years. Incredibly they even discussed a proposal of Foreign Minister Lord Halifax (quoted by Martin Gilbert) that it should be suggested to the Jews that they "themselves should voluntarily give up their rights (in Palestine) instead of having it forced on them." This was in January 1939. Whether the formal invitation to a ceremonial national suicide was ever issued, is not known. Very shortly afterwards, however, the British announced the policy (the White Paper) which effectively violated their pledge and their obligation to the Jewish people whose implementation meant permanent minority status for the Jews in Palestine and the end of the Zionist upbuilding. At the same time, they stepped up their efforts, vigorous and far-reaching, to prevent the escape of the Jews from Europe. Every country of potential transit - Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece - was badgered and bullied not to allow Jews to go through. They even demanded Nazi co-operation. Jews were succeeding in leaving Germany without visas (presumably with German connivance) and with a view to trying to "land in any territory that seems to present the slightest possibility of receiving them" (in the words of the British Foreign Office). The British Ambassador in Berlin there upon called on the German Government (in March 1939) to "check unauthorized emigration" of Jews. Simultaneously, the British Colonial Empire was closed to Jewish immigrants. Almost all the countries of the world followed suit. At the Evian Conference in July 1938 this attitude found formal expression; the only exceptions were Holland, Denmark and Santa Domingo. The United States, for its part, refused to relax its quotas, and indeed collaborated with the British in some of their diplomatic moves in the war against the Jewish refugees. How is it possible to teach the Holocaust, and ask the student to learn its lessons without his being guided to learn the crucial fact that before the Holocaust began the German Government (up to 1941) preferred the Jews to leave Europe and did not prevent them from going; and that it was British anti Zionist policy and the vigour with which it was pursued, and the climate it created throughout the world that closed the trap on the now doomed Jews of Europe. That is not all. The physical destruction of the Jews was not merely the pragmatic alternative method to execute Hitter's decision to get rid of the Jews. Can there be any doubt that the demonstrated universal indifference to their fate and the British eagerness to prevent them escaping convinced Hitler that he could launch the "final solution" with impunity? Hitler's confidence on this subject was given a tremendous boost after he had invaded Poland, and when his conquering forces began killing whole Jewish communities, men, women and children, and burying them in mass graves they had themselves been forced to dig. There was no reaction from Britain. These atrocities were not even used in British propaganda against the Germans. The popular press (with one major exception, the then Liberal "Manchester Guardian") did not even mention them. Nor was there any relaxation of the British war on those Jews who were still getting passage on the rickety ships of the "illegal" immigration. At that time, Dr. Weizmann appealed to the British Government to give "legal" immigration permits to 20,000 children still within the British quota. This was refused, and these children, like all the others, were left to Hitler. By 1941 there could be no doubt in Hitler's mind that his enemies were according him an open season in his policy towards the Jews. In January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference the plans were laid for the "final solution," which became the Holocaust. The subsequent refusal of the British and the Americans when the Holocaust was in progress to lift a finger to help save various groups of Jews who by connivance with Nazi officials could be saved; and the British refusal, accompanied by equivocation and subterfuge, in the later stages of the war, to bomb railways leading to Auschwitz or the camp itself, and thus at least slow down the process of destruction, only underlines their eagerness to see in the disappearance of the Jews of Europe a substantial stepping stone to the consummation of their own anti Zionist policy in Palestine. The revelations in these less known comers of the Holocaust will no doubt arouse discussion, perhaps even controversy. But if the Ministry of Education is serious about giving the new generation an opportunity of understanding the Holocaust (and indeed the history of Zionism and of Israel) the exploration of these areas cannot be excluded from the special course on the Holocaust. 27.4.79