Abstract
Hugo Gryn was a teenage Auschwitz survivor who came to Britain in a scheme to help young victims of the Nazi camps recuperate after the war. Subsequently, he became a reform rabbi working in the United States and India, before becoming a much loved religious leader inside and outside the Jewish community in Britain.1 In his last speech, proclaiming that ‘asylum issues are an index of our spiritual and moral civilization’, Hugo Gryn stated:
How you are with the one to whom you owe nothing, that is a grave test and not only as an index of our tragic past. I always think that the real offenders at the half-way mark of the century were the bystanders, all those people who let things happen because it didn’t really affect them directly.2
Hugo Gryn particularly had in mind the historical example of the SS St Louis, the German cruise ship, which set off from Hamburg in the summer of 1939 carrying over 1,000 German Jews. The story has subsequently become infamous. Those on board held Cuban visas but when arriving there all but a tiny fraction were refused entry. The captain of the ship deliberately sailed close to the coast of Miami, but the US authorities refused to give the passengers permission to land, as did several South American countries. The ship returned to Europe. Britain, Holland, Belgium and France took the majority of the St Louis refugees, but only a handful outside Britain survived the war, caught up in the whirlwind that was the Holocaust.
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Notes
H. Gryn with N. Gryn, Chasing Shadows (London: Viking, 2000); obituaries in the national British press, 20 August 1996.
Rabbi H. Gryn, ‘A Moral and Spiritual Index’ (London: Refugee Council, 1996).
The film was directed by Stuart Rosenberg and based on G. Thomas and M. Morgan-Witts, Voyage of the Damned (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974). In 1996 an awardwinning documentary, The Voyage of the St. Louis, was directed by Maziar Bahari.
M. Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 59.
Ibid., p. 58.
E. Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (London: Little, Brown, 2001).
See D. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 99. See also T. Kushner, ‘The Memory of Belsen’, in Belsen in History and Memory, ed. J. Reilly et al. (London: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 190.
R.R. Whitty of the Custodian of Enemy Property Office, to Gregory of the Trading with the Enemy Department, 9 October 1947, PRO T 236/4312 quoted in History Notes: British policy towards enemy property during and after the Second World War, ed. G. Bennett etal. (London: Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 1998), p. 37. For a more critical appraisal, see The Holocaust Educational Trust, ‘Ex-Enemy Jews’: The Fate of the Assets in Britain of Holocaust Victims and Survivors (London: Holocaust Educational Trust, 1997).
Ibid.
T. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); H. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
E. Klee, W. Dressen and V. Riess, ‘Those were the Days’: The Holocaust through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991); C.R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).
Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, introduction and chapter 7; idem, ‘Holocaust Survivors in Britain: An Overview and Research Agenda’, Journal of Holocaust Education, 4, 2 (1995), 147–66.
Among the limited literature examining the nature of Holocaust testimony from ordinary survivors, mainly relating to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, see G. Hartman, ‘Learning from Survivors: the Yale Testimony Project’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 9, 2 (1995), 192–207; L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) and S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992). A less systematic but much more dynamic and sensitive account is provided by H. Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); T. Kushner, ‘Oral History at the Extremes of Human Experience: Holocaust Testimony in a Museum Setting’, Oral History, 29, 2 (2001), 83–94.
R. Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); it should be added that Hilberg does explore the complexity of and slippage between all these categories.
An early example was H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). From the late 1980s there has been a flood of books using the Holocaust to explore the nature of humanity and morality in the modern world written by those with both expertise and little knowledge of the subject matter. See, for example, R.C. Baum, ‘Holocaust: Moral Indifference as the Form of Modern Evil’, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. A. Rosenberg and G. Meyers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 53–90; Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989); B. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); S. Friedländer, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993); O. Bartov, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); M. Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); N. Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1998); J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); D. Blumenthal, The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and the Jewish Tradition (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999); and for an overview R. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
E. Rathbone, Rescue the Perishing (London: National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror, 1943); V. Gollancz, Let My People Go (London: Gollancz, 1943). See Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, Part II, and T. Kushner and K. Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1999), chapter 6 for an analysis of these activists, their writings and their impact on state and society.
Ben-Gurion, quoted by J. Adams, Tony Benn (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 122.
Kushner, ‘The Memory of Belsen’, pp. 181–205; E. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (London and New York: Viking, 1995), pp. 90–1; Berenbaum, The World Must Know, pp. 8–9; Philip Gourevitch, ‘Nightmare on 15th Street’, The Guardian, 4 December 1999.
G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1953), pp. 406–7, 463–9.
L. Poliakov, HarvestofHate (London: Elek Books, 1956 [orig. in French, 1951]), p. 245.
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, p. 193; Berenbaum, The World Must Know; Gourevitch, ‘Nightmare on 15th Street’; on the Imperial War Museum see D. Bloxham and T. Kushner, ‘Exhibiting Racism: Cultural Imperialism, Genocide and Representation’, RethinkingHistory, 2, 3 (1998), 353–6; and Kushner, ‘Oral History’.
For example, A. Morse, While Six Million Died (New York: Random House, 1968) and A. Sharf, The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule (London: Institute of Race Relations/Oxford University Press, 1964).
D. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938–1941 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968) represented the first account based on detailed, scholarly research; Sharf, The British Press and Jews Under Nazi Rule.
Morse, While Six Million Died (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), front cover.
For recent British press coverage, see D. Staunton, ‘Whitehall Sat on 1942 Goebbels Genocide Speech’, Observer, 21 November 1993; M. Dynes, ‘Nazis Wanted British Troops as Guards at Death Camps’, The Times, 27 November 1993, partly relating to the release of material in PRO HW 1/929; T. Rayment, ‘Britain Barred Rescue Plan for Doomed Jews’, Sunday Times, 8 May 1994; on The Times, 23 and 30 January 1995 relating to French-Jewish orphans and the British government, relating to Public Record Office papers released many years before; B. Josephs, ‘War Papers Show Britain Knew of Mass Slaughter’, Jewish Chronicle, 15 November 1996; R. Norton-Taylor, ‘Code Breakers Reported Slaughter of Jews in 1941’, The Guardian, 20 May 1997 and similar reports in the national press on the same day; R. Norton-Taylor, ‘Britain Stymied Help for Jews in Nazi Camps’, The Guardian, 21 July 1999; B. Rogers, ‘Auschwitz and the British’, History Today, 49, 10 (1999), 2–3.
H. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust 1938–1945, 2nd edition (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980 [first published 1970]), P. ix.
A.J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich 1933–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 267.
M. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 157.
R. Breitman and A. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
L. London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy towards Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 14, which rejects Morse’s ‘simplistic impression that rampant antisemitism among Washington officials always explained inaction’; Wyman, Paper Walls, pp. 14–23 and 210–11 gives more weight to antisemitism.
B. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1979), pp. 344, 350–2.
See C. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society 1876–1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979).
T. Kushner, ‘The Fascist as “Other”? Racism and neo-Nazism in Contemporary Britain’, Patterns of Prejudice, 28, 1 (1994), 27–45; P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987); P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
More generally, see B. Williams, ‘The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance: Middle-Class Manchester and the Jews, 1870–1900’, in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, ed. A.J. Kidd and K.W. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 74–102.
F. Israel, ed., The War Diary of Breckinridge Long: Selections from the Years 1939–1944 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 128, diary entry for 9 September 1940.
N.J. Crowson, Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–1940 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 32–3.
Ibid., pp. 233–5; A. Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary 1945–1951 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 164; see also pp. 165, 182, 277–8. A. Podet, ‘The Unwilling Midwife: Ernest Bevin and the Birth of Israel’, European Judaism, 11, 2 (1977), 35–42 and especially 38 dismisses the charge of antisemitism as ‘a spurious issue’. More nuanced is J. Gorny, The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1983), p. 219 who in analysing Bevin and Attlee concludes that ‘If we take antisemitism to imply denial of the rights of Jews to live as equal citizens in non-Jewish society, they were not antisemitic. But if we are speaking of prejudices against Jewish culture, conduct, economic acumen and social “pushiness”, they were not innocent.’ Nevertheless, Gorny still wants to analyse their ‘cool malice’ through the prism of the term. Ian Mikardo, a Jewish Labour MP who confronted Bevin in 1947 over Palestine, believed that the Foreign Secretary was a straightforward antisemite and that it related to earlier episodes in his life: I. Mikardo, Back-Bencher (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), pp. 97–9.
M. Shefftz in AJS Review, 21, 2 (1996), 421–3 and A. Glees in Journal of Holocaust Education, 6, 1 (1997), 112–14. For an alternative perspective on the thesis of the book, see S. Beller, “‘Your Mark is Our Disgrace”: Liberalism and the Holocaust’, Contemporary European History, 4, 2 (1995), 209–21.
Bevin’s comments are in PRO LAB 8/99; D. Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (London: Heinemann, 1992).
B. Donoughie and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
B. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and more generally G. Dench, Minorities in the Open Society: Prisoners of Ambivalence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). For an insistence on an ‘either for or against us’ approach to British attitudes towards Jews, limiting antisemitism to extremists, see W. Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
W. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997), chapter 5, especially pp.196–7.
M. Hindley, ‘Constructing Allied Humanitarian Policy’, in ‘Bystanders’ to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation, ed. D. Cesarani and P. Levine (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 86.
Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy, chapters 9 and 10 provide a positive assessment of the Board. See also D. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), part IV and Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, chapter 9.
W. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), pp. 3, 197 and ‘Hitler’s Holocaust: Who Knew What, When and How?’, Encounter, 55 (July 1980), 24.
Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, D. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986). For an alternative approach, see Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, chapter 4.
M. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Michael Joseph, 1981), p. 92 and elsewhere repeats the phrase. The television documentary version directed by Rex Bloomstein in 1982 stresses the elusive nature of Auschwitz even further, and B. Rogers, ‘Auschwitz and the British’ continues this tradition. For a critique see D. Engel, In the Shadow ofAuschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
Sharf and Lipstadt, for example, relied on press cuttings. For a social history approach, see T. Kushner, ‘Different Worlds: British Perceptions of the Final Solution during the Second World War’, in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. D. Cesarani (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 246–67.
Beller, ‘“Your Mark is Our Disgrace”#x2019;, 218–21; M. Burleigh, ‘Synonymous with Murder’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 March 1995.
M. Smith, Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), the paperback edition of which announced that it was ‘the book that uncovered Britain’s Schindler’. The phrase was used earlier on ‘Today’, BBC Radio 4, 26 February 1999. On the book’s immense success, see Jewish Chronicle, 23 July and 19 November 1999. Foley was later granted status by Yad Vashem as a ‘Righteous Among Nations’. See Jewish Chronicle, 22 October 1999. On Nicholas Winton, see ‘Britain’s Schindler’, BBC Radio 4, 7 June 1999, written and presented by myself. Both the producer and I objected to the title, which was overruled by the BBC. The account of Winton and of British refugee policy was more complex than the title suggested; A. Karpf, ‘The Future Prospects for Remembering the Past’, Jewish Chronicle, 2 July 1999. Winton was subsequently knighted. See The Guardian, 1 January 2003.
D. Cesarani, ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Towards a Taxonomy of Rescuers in a “Bystander” Country: Britain 1933–45’, in ‘Bystanders’ to the Holocaust, ed. Cesarani and Levine, pp. 28–56.
N. Stone, ‘Could the Allies Have Saved Them?’, The Guardian, 3 July 1997.
For the increasing fascination in relation to the historiography of the Allies and the Holocaust, see R. Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), a book that has received widespread attention and popular success. See also the second edition of Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999) which includes newly available intelligence material.
M. Neufeld and M. Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
B.-A. Zucker, In Search of Refuge: Jews and US Consuls in Nazi Germany 1933–1941 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001) reviewed by Feingold in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 16, 2 (2002), 296–8.
See, for example, J. Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); J. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987); A. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); M. Rawlinson, ‘This Other War: British Culture and the Holocaust’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 25, 1 (1996), 1–25; T. Kushner, ‘The Impact of the Holocaust on British Society and Culture’, Contemporary Record, 5, 2 (1991), 349–75; A. Parry, “#x2018;Lost in the Multiplicity of Impersonations?” The Jew and the Holocaust in PostWar British Fiction’, Journal ofHolocaustEducation, 8, 3 (1999), 1–22.
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Kushner, T. (2004). Britain, the United States and the Holocaust: In Search of a Historiography. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_12
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