JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Meyer Levin (1905-1981, journalist, editor of Esquire from 1933-39, and author of numerous books and articles) encountered and confronted the Holocaust in-person at the end of WWII in Europe and wrote about it in the pages of The Nation. His article, "What's Left of the Jews", bluntly confronts the millions of murdered Jews, and then locates where the remaining populations were. And then he discusses the improbable and incredible rise in anti-Semitism that survivors faced. His piece was published July 28, 1945, two months after VE Day. I reprint the article below.
Levin writes:
"Before the war there were sixteen million Jews in the world. Little more than half are left. Nobody really believes in the annihilation of the Jews of Europe. There are certain facts so massive that the human mind for a long time rejects them, and this has happened with the story of European Jewry. The survivors themselves, after living these years within the massacre, don’t believe their own knowledge of its completeness..."
"In a village near Weimar I met a man who had escaped from one of the last columns marched out of Buchenwald. For three hours, sitting on his pallet on a factory floor, he told me about the two years he had worked on the Auschwitz train platform, where Jews had arrived for extermination. He estimated that he had seen four million arrive; he knew that only one in ten was selected for slavery, the rest went to the gas chambers. He knew that the chosen slaves had about one chance in a thousand of living more than a year. Two years ago he had seen his own sister arrive on a death train. And yet, after speaking to me only of death—death in Auschwitz, death on the icy trains, death on the road marches, death in the work camps—this man seized my arm and said, “You go to all the concentration camps, you see all who remain alive—write down the name of my sister, Perhaps you will find her. Perhaps she has survived.”
Of the remaining Jews Levin finds that half are in Rumania (600,000), with Poland next (with 200,000-300,000), though "They are scattered, starved, and in constant fear of pogroms...In Belgium, where the Jewish population shrank from 90,000 to 23,000, the community leaders told me that though they were making the most energetic attempts at readjustment, the Jews were encountering an anti-Semitism that had not existed before. “What can we expect? The population was subjected to years of concentrated propaganda. Victory does not erase this.”
“The heart, of Jewish culture, it seems to me, is now definitely in Palestine; the greatest population is in the United States. Jewish casualties in the war—not in proportion but in actual numbers—are as large as those of the great nations. Seven million Jews were slaughtered for being Jews, and added to this number are the Jewish casualties in all the Allied armies."
He ends: "It is common knowledge that anti-Semitism is rising in this country [USA]. In a large sense, the fate of the Jewish people will be decided here.”
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