JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I have posted on this blog many times on the Holocaust, and in my reading travels in that area I do not often see contemporary reporting using massive numbers to describe what was happening to the Jews. I own a part of the archive of Alexander Uhl, a superior reporter who had seen fighting in the Spanish Civil War while covering the war there for Associated Press, and who had also covered WWII in Europe, reporting for the great PM newspaper and for which he was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal. As I was looking through a collection of his snipped articles from PM for 1943 and 1944 I came upon this, on coming to the rescue of 400,000 Jews who could "still be saved", which for some reason appeared on page nine of the old-line Leftie newspaper.
Uhl opens the July 31, 1944 article talking about having covered the Bermuda Conference ("a most unhappy conference if there ever was one", in late April, 1943), where U.S. and U.K. representatives (of not particularly high standing) met to discus how to save the remaining Jews of Europe. Uhl reports that affairs were no closer to a solution 14 months later than at Bermuda, where the conduct of the war was of primary importance and the "refugee problem" not. (There are many variations and interpretations of the Allied response at this conference, though from my reading the majority approach a withering appraisal of the thing.1)
Uhl then goes on to cite the Jewish Agency for Palestine that two-thirds of the 6.5 million Jews of Europe (in 1939) have disappeared, "either killed by the Nazis or died of suffering and privation". That is a big number. (I am in no way saying that this is an historic assessment, as there were numerous other reports on the murder/disappearance of millions of Jews, examples of which can be found in contemporary newspaper accounts relating to the Bermuda Conference. I am stopping here today because it still seems to me to be a rare-enough discussion of a large number of murdered Jews to make notice of it.)
Uhl gets to the point of his story, which is to say that there were 400,000 Jews in Hungary can still be saved if there were enough ships to transport them and enough places to accept them. "If not, they will be doomed to the same fate as the rest of Europe's Jewry". Uhl makes note of the 1500 entry permits allowed for Jews into Palestine as dictated by the government of Great Britain, which as Uhl reported showed no inclination to change anything.
I reprint the article below for the rest of the story. (I ma told by someone who knows that PM is a rarely-held newspaper in institutions and does not often show up online.)
Notes:
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