A three-day international conference exploring the Allied Powers’ response to the Holocaust was held at Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Heritage Center. Co-organized by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR), which operates under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress, and in partnership with the California-based InFaith Community Foundation and the Begin Center, A roster of leading scholars from three continents convened to address issues such as 'Could the Allies have bombed Auschwitz?' 'The politics of response in Britain', 'Chinese responses to the Holocaust'; and 'US immigration and refugee policy on the eve of World War II'.
Among the conference highlights was the screening of renowned French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s 'The Karski Report' (2010), a penetrating interview with Jan Karski, who served as an emissary for the Polish underground during the war and who delivered one of the first eyewitness accounts of the annihilation of Polish Jewry to Allied officials, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lanzmann, 89, who traveled from Paris for the event and introduced the film before its screening, is best known for his nine-hour film 'Shoah'.
“The unresolved historical and moral questions surrounding the failure of the Allied powers to rescue European Jewry still resonate strongly,” said ICFR Director Laurence Weinbaum, who is a former teaching assistant of Karski's at Georgetown University Washington.
Karski, a Catholic, was honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 1982 and was also conferred with honorary citizenship of Israel.
"In the spirited Q&A that followed the lectures, the atmosphere was sometimes akin to a group therapy session in which painful memories of Jewish powerlessness were unburdened," said Weinbaum. “However, the subject of this conference resists simplistic characterizations.” A particularly heated debate arose between two American scholars, Alexander J. Groth from the University of California, Davis, and Kenneth Werrell from Radford University on the feasibility of bombing Auschwitz and the railway tracks leading to it. The record of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the topic of several presentations, many of them calling for a reevaluation of the American leader.
Winston Churchill, Britain’s legendary wartime leader, came under particular criticism in the presentations by Groth and Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University Jerusalem. The former recounted that in Churchill’s epic six-volume work on World War II, there is not a single reference to the Holocaust.
In his greetings to the conference, WJC CEO Robert Singer recounted that it was fitting that this event took place 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. The thunderous declaration by Yehuda Bauer, the doyen of Israeli Holocaust scholarship, that "We are all bystanders," was a chilling reminder of the horrifying acts of cruelty that continue to be perpetrated in various parts of the world but that remain unchallenged.
VIDEO of opening speech by Professor Alexander Groth
VIDEO of speech by Professor Robert Wistrich: 'Nazi Anti-Semitism and its Consequences During World War II'
VIDEO of speech by Professor Yehuda Bauer: 'Could the US have rescued the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust?'
