The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 / "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed," a chapter from this book, appeared in the May 1978 issue of Commentary and aroused a major controversy in the press here and in Europe. That chapter was typical not only of the stunning revelations that David Wyman makes but also of his meticulous research encompassing years of exploration in some sixty archives, many never before plumbed. As a result, The Abandonment of the Jews asks many basic questions--some of them for the first time--about this shameful episode in America's history.
Wyman's account is devastating, not least because it documents the precise degree to which all segments of the American population--including the churches and the Jewish community themselves--failed to accomplish the very least that could have been expected. It exposes the failure of the State Department to fill the existing quotas (left 90 percent unfilled) and the continuous pattern of lies and deceptions by means of which the government turned back any proposals that were made, such as transporting European Jews to Turkey or North Africa, to say nothing of the "controversial" question of allowing more immigrants into the United States.
The narrative moves through three stages: It opens with the developments that led to the realization by the Allies that a systematic annihilation of the Jews was under way. Foreshadowed by rumors through most of 1942, this news was publicly established in November of that year. The second stage deals with the ensuing struggle by Jews and non-Jews against myriad odds, including an obstructive State Department, an indifferent president and public, and inadequate press coverage, that culminated in January 1944 with President Roosevelt's creation of the War Refugee Board. The final stage examines the WRB's actions through the end of the war, actions tat were substantial but severely handicapped by their tardiness and by lack of commitment from administration officials.
It is difficult for a generation that has seen hundreds of thousands--indeed, millions--of Vietnamese, Hispanic, and other refugees absorbed into our society with relative ease to understand the full extent of the anti-Semitism that kept the government from trying to help, and kept the Jews themselves from acting effectively. Wyman's analysis , careful and utterly convincing, is a thorough account, as well as a searing indictment, of that tragic state of affairs.
In this landmark "The Abandonment of the Jews, " David S. Wyman argues that a substantial commitment to rescue European Jews on the part of the United States almost certainly could have saved several hundred thousand of the Nazis' victims. The definitive work on its subject, "The Abandonment of the Jews" is the winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Present Tense Literary Award, the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
