The Bergson Group, A Letter by Helen Freedman

Many of you must know Helen from her excellent work with AFSI. I feel privileged to be posting this excellent and informative letter.

Helen Freedman
June 18, 2007
ghfree@aol.com

Letter to the Editor
The New York Sun
Re: The Bergson Group

The Sun is to be commended for the attention it has paid, through editorials (April 16, June 14) on the Bergson Group and the lessons learned from Holocaust history, as well as reporting on the June 17 Fordham University Conference on “Jewish Activists Who Shook the World,” (Gary Shapiro – June 18, 2007).
I attended the Conference, and was struck by the overriding theme which was repeated by many of the speakers. It was the failure of leadership in the mainstream Jewish organizations during WWII that betrayed and abandoned European Jewry. In addition, it was the failure of the Roosevelt administration to come to the aid of the Jews, and the failure of the mainstream press, specifically The New York Times, to adequately publicize the horrors of the death camps.
Elie Wiesel spoke hauntingly of the fact that there were only two Nazis in Sighet, his hometown in Hungary, in May 1944, when Hungarian Jews were sent to ghettos, prior to being put on the death trains to take them to the death camps. He said there were Hungarian scouts supervising the ghettos, and it would have been easy to escape to the mountains and hide out there. But the Hungarian Jews trusted their leaders and boarded the trains, not knowing where they were going, because they had never heard of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Here in the U.S., the Bergson group was trying desperately to awaken the American public to Hitler’s atrocities. They were stopped at almost every point by people like Rabbi Stephen Wise. The result is that although some Jews were saved, the number was pitifully small compared to what was needed. What have we learned?
We should have learned NOT to trust leaders who lie to us and try to beguile the public with pacifier words like “negotiations” and “diplomacy.” Youssef Ibrahim, (Annexation of Gaza Must Be Contained- June 18, 2007) is exactly right when he says, “It will be a farce if President Bush and Prime Minister Olmert spend their meeting tomorrow discussing a two-state solution or how many millions of dollars are needed to shore up the nonexistent authority of Fatah.”
Neville Chamberlain moaned that everything would have been alright if only Hitler hadn’t lied to him. That “mistake” led to the indescribable catastrophe of WWII. If America and Israel now believe that Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s chief terrorist, can be negotiated with, and a two-state solution is possible, history will be repeating itself, and we will have proven that we have learned nothing.
Helen Freedman