Western Holocaust commemorations have a peculiar uniformity to them. They speak of Nazism as a warning against intolerance and chauvinism. They recall the dead. They speak of the genocide as a single event, that for all its cataclysmic scope and impact was nevertheless short-lived and with a clear beginning and end.
This way of remembering is a tragedy in its own right. It downplays a long history of persecution, ignores the Holocaust’s deeper roots in favor of the emotional salve of simplistic moral lessons, and detaches the specific gas chambers and killing fields from a broader history of which they are an apotheosis, not an aberration.
There is a more Jewish telling of the Holocaust, one that notices that the 20th century was already one of the bloodiest periods in Jewish history before the start of the Holocaust, one that includes the flight of millions of Jews before their compatriots were trapped by Western immigration quotas in the Nazi embrace. It is a version of the story that begins not in 1939 or 1941, but in 1880.
Jews began their mass flight from Europe following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, an event that sparked mass popular pogroms in the Russian Empire and saw new laws enacted against Jews. That combined pressure from above and below culminated in the massacres of Jews by all factions fighting in the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, when well over 100,000 Jews were killed.
Most of the Jews who fled westward in the six decades that preceded the Holocaust went to the United States. Their story is often swallowed up in the larger tale of American immigration, of millions of other Europeans who sought a new life and new opportunities in America. But the Jews were not like the Poles, Italians or Germans who landed alongside them at the New York docks.
Polish or German families sent their young men ahead of the family to establish themselves and make the family’s arrival more comfortable. Italians who found the immigrant life too difficult returned to their home country in large numbers.
The Jews behaved differently. They sold everything at once, boarded ships and arrived on America’s shores as whole families.
During the Panic of 1907, 300,000 Italian immigrants returned home to Italy. What would have happened, British Jewish author Israel Zangwill asked in a 1908 speech in London, if 300,000 Jews were to do the same?
“What home does the Jew have to return to? He has burned all his bridges. Often he was made to flee without a passport. He cannot return.”
It was no idle musing. More than half of European immigrants from many countries would actually return to their home countries between 1908 and 1925: 57% of Italians, 40% of Poles, 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians and 55% of Russians.
Among Jews, the figure was 5%.
The Jews stuck it out in America no matter how well or poorly they fared. Where other immigrants were merely seeking a better life, the Jews were running away.
The German author Eugene Doctor wrote in detail about the antisemitic hatred driving the Jews westward and fretted that their mass arrival in America would only spark the same hatred there. Jews “no longer knew where they should tread or lay their heads,” Doctor lamented in a 1908 pamphlet cited in German historian Gotz Aly’s book Europe Against the Jews.
If a solution to this Jewish quandary wasn’t found, he warned, the situation in the east would “come to a boil… One fine day, even this [situation] will be swept away, and all we’ll have will be the revival of the old refrain: ‘The Jew must be burned alive.’”
The antisemitism was expressed in law. Between the czarist May Laws of 1882 and the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws of 1935, many European states instituted a tightening noose of restrictions on Jewish work, citizenship and education that would keep Jews out of professions, universities, and ultimately entire countries.
In the summer of 1938, before any German occupier forced their hand, Poland passed a law stripping citizenship from any Jew who hadn’t lived in Poland for the previous five years. The Nazis, fearful the move would leave them saddled with now-stateless Polish Jews, rounded up 17,000 of them living on German soil and drove them to the Polish border, where they lived in a kind of limbo, refused entry to either Germany or Poland, until the start of the war.
During the standoff over the now stateless Jews, Poland turned to Britain, the US and the League of Nations demanding that they offer new homes to the unwanted deportees. Poland’s deputy ambassador to London, Count Jan Balinski-Jundzill, warned of the terrible consequences that awaited the Jews if the West refused. Poland would have “only one way of solving the Jewish problem — persecution.”
Similarly, Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu didn’t need Nazi propagandists to convince him the Jews were a problem. After the Nazi declaration of war on the Soviet Union, he was suddenly thrilled at the opportunity offered by the chaos engulfing Europe. “Romania needs to be liberated from this entire colony of bloodsuckers who have drained the life essence from the people,” he declared of the country’s Jews. “The international situation is favorable and we can’t afford to miss the moment.”
As the pressure on the Jews grew, so did Western fear of them flooding in as refugees.
In 1910, after the US had absorbed more than two million East European Jews, New York Immigration Commissioner William Williams ended his annual report with a warning: “The time has come when it is necessary to put aside false sentimentality in dealing with a question of immigration, and to give more consideration to its racial and economic aspects and in deciding what additional immigrants we shall receive, to remember that our first duty is to our country.”
American immigration officials working under Williams began turning back more and more Jews arriving in New York, even as the killings and legal restrictions increased in the east. But the Jews kept coming.
In 1921, the US Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, followed up three years later by the 1924 Quota Act, which severely limited Jewish immigration from over 120,000 per year to under 3,000 a decade later.
America, and after it, Britain, Canada, Argentina and countless other nations systematically closed their doors to the Jews, and kept them closed right through the Holocaust, even when they learned of the extermination.
The Holocaust was understood by the Nazi leadership as a solution to a problem felt by all. No one wanted the Jews, all sought ways to be rid of them. It was only when the West closed its doors – when the Jews became, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “undeportable” — that Europeans began to contemplate and even embrace the Nazi solution to that problem. Millions of people could be snuffed out of existence because they were unwanted by all and protected by none.
And much of Europe took part.
This is a contentious point only because there’s scarcely a European nation that can claim meaningful innocence in what was to come. There were countless individual Europeans who risked life and limb to save Jews, and even some political and religious leaders who did so. But these are almost everywhere the exception. As eminent historian Saul Friedlander has shown, no major social or political group anywhere in Europe rallied collectively to the Jews’ defense.
The Germans planned and initiated the Holocaust. Germany under the Nazi regime bears what Aly called the “ultimate culpability” for the genocide. But everywhere one looks, the same pattern emerges: German efforts succeeded only where massive collaboration was forthcoming.
In Belgium, the Nazis were able to round up nearly twice the percentage of the Jews of Flemish Antwerp (65%), where local police collaborated with the occupiers, than those of French-speaking Brussels (37%), where local officials refused to help.
In Hungary, the government eagerly deported 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 in an operation wholly run by Hungarians. But these deportees were rural Yiddish-speaking Jews from the provinces. When the Nazis asked for Budapest’s assimilated, middle-class Jews, the Hungarian government balked. Its refusal left the Nazis helpless to implement any large-scale killing in the capital. Most of Budapest’s Jews would survive the war.
The same was true in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and elsewhere. Greek collaboration allowed the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Salonica, while Greek refusal to help meant the same could not be done to the Jews of Athens.
The genocide policy was successful only where locals cooperated. Unfortunately, locals cooperated almost everywhere.
“When we examine the daily practices of persecution in various countries, we cannot fail to note the ease with which German occupiers were able to enlist local nationalist, national-socialist, and antisemitic movements to serve their ends… There is no way we can comprehend the pace and extent of the Holocaust if we restrict our focus to the German centers of command,” writes Aly.
This long, slow, purposeful destruction of European Jewry didn’t even end with the war.
After V-E Day came the now-forgotten story of the Jewish DPs, the “displaced persons,” survivors of the Holocaust who would languish for years behind barbed wire as prisoners of American and British forces for the simple reason that no one on Earth would take them in.
It was a postscript to the Holocaust that for many survivors encapsulated its deepest truth: That Auschwitz was not the exception but simply the logical conclusion to a generations-old European desire to be rid of the Jews.
On May 8, 1945, the day the war ended, Germany was “in free fall; chaos reigned; national, regional, and local military, police, and political authorities had abandoned their posts,” writes historian David Nasaw.
“There was, literally, no one directing traffic, no one policing the streets, no one delivering the mail or picking up the garbage or bringing food to the shops, no one stopping the looting, the rape, the revenge-taking as millions of homeless, ill-clothed, malnourished, disoriented foreigners: Jewish survivors, Polish forced laborers, former Nazi collaborators — all displaced persons — jammed the roadways, the town squares and marketplaces, begging, threatening, desperate.”
This mixed multitude on the roadways of a defeated Germany constituted a “living, moving, pallid wreckage,” Collier’s columnist W. B. Courtney would write as he accompanied the US military drive eastward through the German countryside.
And among these wretched souls, the Jews could be singled out with ease, “distinguishable,” writes Nasaw, “by their pallor, emaciated physiques, shaved heads, lice-infested bodies, and the vacant look in their eyes.”
The fall of the Reich left millions of people displaced on German soil from across the European continent. As the Allied effort pivoted from war to occupation, the Allies’ first priority was to return home those who could manage the journey. At checkpoints throughout Germany, Allied soldiers would collect the wandering millions and deliver them to processing sites established in nearby towns. Millions hitchhiked, stole bicycles or vehicles or simply walked to their former homes in France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Poland and elsewhere.
Between May 8 and October 1, “more than 2 million Soviets, 1.5 million Frenchmen, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch citizens, almost 300,000 Belgians and Luxembourgians, more than 200,000 Yugoslavs, 135,000 Czechs, 94,000 Poles, and tens of thousands of other European displaced persons… had been sent home,” writes Nasaw.
Yet as 1945 drew to a close, the Allies came to realize that some of the war’s survivors, the so-called “last million,” could not be sent home because they had no home to return to.
Hundreds of thousands of Polish Catholics were afraid of what awaited them in their violence-wracked, Soviet-dominated country. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians could not return to countries now under Soviet rule because of their active collaboration in the Nazi war effort and occupation regimes.
And then there were the Jews, the survivors of the slave labor camps within Germany and over 200,000 survivors flowing in from the East who had tried returning home and been pushed out by violent neighbors and even pogroms by those who’d felt nothing but relief at the Jews’ disappearance.
With repatriation efforts concluded, by 1946 the US and Britain turned to resettlement of the last million in new homelands. They established the International Refugee Organization, which quickly got to work marketing the remaining DPs to Western and Latin American nations with dire shortages of postwar laborers to help rebuild their economies.
It worked. Over the course of 1946, over 700,000 DPs would be offered new homes by IRO member nations – but this generosity of spirit only went so far.
The first to be plucked from the dismal DP camps were the healthiest and blondest and Protestant: Latvians and Estonians who had mostly spent the war as willing participants in the Nazi war machine. They were prioritized not despite their collaboration with the Nazis but because of it. To Western recruiters, it proved their anti-Communist bona fides. It also had the advantage of leaving them at war’s end healthy and ready to work.
The recruiting nations then turned to the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox DPs, primarily Ukrainians, Poles and Lithuanians who were often unwilling laborers in Nazi war factories but were nevertheless cared for well enough to emerge healthy from the experience.
Then the recruiters swiftly closed up shop and left the camps, leaving behind the last 250,000 DPs to spend the next two years imprisoned by their liberators.
These were, of course, the Jews.
“On May 8, the war in Europe ended,” survivor Hadassah Rosensaft would write in her memoir. “I have often been asked how we felt on that day… Of course, we were glad to hear the news of the Allied victory, but we in [concentration camp-turned-DP camp Bergen] Belsen did not celebrate on that day. For years, I have seen a film on television showing the world’s reaction to the end of the war. In Times Square in New York, in the streets of London and Paris, people were dancing, singing, crying, embracing each other. They were filled with joy that their dear ones would soon come home. Whenever I see that film, I cry. We in Belsen did not dance on that day. We had nothing to be hopeful for. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere. We were alone and abandoned.”
It was no mere oversight that left the Jews trapped behind barbed wire in the land of their murderers, and sometimes in the very concentration camps from which they were “liberated.” It was not ignorance of the problem or the chaos of a frenzied reconstruction that left them ignored.
Even as they languished, a frenetic debate was underway in America. Many voices, including Jewish groups and many Christian denominations, called to lift the old quotas to let the last survivors into America. But a coalition of midwestern Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress adamantly refused. The Jews, it was said, were closet communists. Quotas for Eastern Europe — the nations from which the Jews hailed, and so were applied to them — remained in the immediate post-war period astonishingly low: 6,524 per year from Poland, 386 from Lithuania, 236 from Latvia, and 116 from Estonia.
Congress would finally pass a new displaced-persons bill – though still one that discriminated against Jews – in June 1948, a month after Israel had declared independence and begun to take in the DPs en masse.
The Holocaust is too large and complex to allow for only a single simple narrative of what it means. To the West, including many Western Jews, it is usually understood as a cautionary tale of the terrible results of human intolerance. Since relatively few people in the West continue their history education past their school years, this framing of the Holocaust in elementary curricula remains frozen in a kind of self-serving moral simplicity, even among Jews.
The larger significance of Auschwitz is not made visible by visits to Auschwitz. The gas chambers are not an answer, but a question.
The answer – one answer – begins to take shape only when one steps back from these immediate mental artifacts of Holocaust commemoration, from the camp incinerators and Ukrainian killing fields, from the Nazi rallies and the partisans’ resistance poems. It is unveiled by a close reading of what came before the genocide, the suffering and marginalization that are all but forgotten now, having been swallowed up in the vast shadow cast by the events that were to come.
The Nazis were less original than anyone wants to admit. The propaganda machines, the anti-Jewish legislation, the fever dream of a Jew-free Europe — in all these the Nazis were mere copiers of voices and policies of their forebears and neighbors. Where they did innovate, especially in the technologies and methods of the genocide itself, they could not have accomplished what they did without the help and eager collaboration of a great many Europeans in almost every nation and province of the continent.
For all its incomprehensible horror, the focus on the genocide alone is a salve, a way to shrink the event to a kind of mental monument — and to forget how dozens of nations, including the free Anglophone peoples of the West who are now host to most of the world’s surviving diaspora Jews, were unabashed participants in the vast, generations-long corralling of millions of helpless Jews to their ultimate destruction.
The Nazis were defeated, but not soon enough for the Jews of Europe. It’s a point that might seem monstrous at first glance but becomes unavoidable when one looks at the longer history in which the Holocaust is embedded: To the nations whose Jews were destroyed, that destruction came as a relief. In the east, the Jews were not welcomed back nor treated better than they’d been before. In the west, any meaningful sense of the larger context and culpability of the nations of Europe and the Anglophone West has been erased and replaced by a thin, unchallenging moralism.
Only the Jews are left to remember that when their brethren stood before the open furnace, no other nation or religion, class or institution reached out a hand in rescue. Seven decades of European and Western politics joined in unison to shove them in.
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