Page 25 - Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations

during much of WWII), King Mohammed V protected his Jewish citizens from deportation and certain death and refused to implement racist laws issued by the Vichy government.
Yet in far too many countries in occupied Europe, not only were the local populations indifferent to the plight of Nazi victims, but they also collaborated with Nazi Germany’s murderous policies.
THE ROLE OF THE WEST
Just before the outbreak of WWII, an elderly Jewish man walks into a German travel agency, hoping to flee Hitler’s grasp. The travel agent hands him a globe: “Where would you like to go?” he asks him gently.
But no matter where the old man points, the travel agent says the same thing: “Sorry they don’t take Jews.”
Finally, in exasperation, the man looks up at the travel agent and asks: “Excuse me, maybe you have another globe?”
Tragically, while the Nazis carried on their wholesale slaughter in occupied Europe, the Western world also turned a deaf ear. The United States and Canada shut their doors tightly, not even filling the small quotas their own immigration rules had allowed for European refugees clamoring to reach their shores.
The callous indifference had begun in the pre-war period, before the wholesale slaughter of European Jews took place, which began in earnest in the summer of 1941. In June of 1939, both Canada and the United States turned away the SS St. Louis, which was crammed with German Jewish refugees trying to escape Hitler’s viciously anti-Semitic Germany. The ship was forced to return to Europe (Britain, France, Belgium, and Holland allowed them in) where many of the passengers were subsequently murdered during the Holocaust.
Also in 1939, the United States Congress rejected the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have admitted 20,000 Jewish children from Germany. Laura Delano Houghteling, President Roosevelt’s cousin (and wife of the US Commissioner of Immigration), noted in her opposition of the bill that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”
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