Jeanette Friedman

Save the Date: A note from Pierre Sauvage

Sep 08

Jeanette Friedmanhistory, Holocaust, Jews, survivors No Comments

New York, Wednesday, November 16, 6:30 pm
On November 24, 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise held a press conference announcing State Department confirmation that the Jews of Europe were being mass murdered. How did American Jews and their leaders respond to the crisis? Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, an award-winning new documentary by Pierre Sauvage (56 min.), presents the challenging testimony of Peter Bergson, a Palestinian Jew who led a determined and controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Sauvage, historians Richard Breitman and Jonathan Karp, and other distinguished scholars, Sponsored by the Center for Jewish History, the American Jewish Historical Society and the Varian Fry Institute.
Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust—click here to view 4 min. excerpt from the documentary

Most Americans—even many American Jews—believe that we didn’t know. Many assume that we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known. Meet Peter Bergson! A Palestinian Jew who had served with the nationalist Irgun organization in pre-Israel Palestine, Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook, 1915-2001), had come to the U.S. in 1940. In America, this firebrand led what came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose strenuous efforts from 1941 to 1945 underscore just how much was known—and how much could have been attempted during those difficult years. Sometimes vilified at the time, Bergson remains a controversial yet relatively obscure figure in the history of America and the Holocaust.

The only documentary to draw on both existing filmed interviews with Peter Bergson, Not Idly By provides the riveting first-hand testimony of the charismatic and eloquent Bergson, who comments on the response to the crisis by non-European Jews and describes the Bergson Group’s determined efforts to fight the Holocaust. This notably included the fiery 1943 production We Will Never Die by Ben Hecht and Kurt Weill (Madison Square Garden, Hollywood Bowl), presented extensively for the first time in the documentary. Yes, this is a one-sided view of those times: Peter Bergson’s. Isn’t it about time we gave further though to that side?

Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-294-8301
Ticket Sales $15 general, $10 CJH, AJHS members, seniors, students
Further information: Not Idly By – Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust

Timely?

Fresh Headlines From the Crypt: ‘Bomb Auschwitz,’ Says Golda; FDR: No Way, by J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Daily Forward, Sept. 5, 2011
Pierre Sauvage’s response to the attack on the Bergson Group that is at the heart of the article:

Yes, Roosevelt was good for the Jews—the Jews of America. And yes, bringing a reluctant country into the war was a major Roosevelt accomplishment. And yes, to be sure, American Jews then did not have the power and self-confidence we acquired later.

But let’s start by being candid about the American response—and the American Jewish response—to the massacre of the Jews of Europe: we here all have skin in the game. We are talking, after all, about what our families did and didn’t do during that long crisis. The widespread and persistent eagerness to assert that “we didn’t know” and “we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known” is one measure of how powerful the taboo continues to be about the unacknowledged American experience of the Holocaust. J. J. Goldberg’s trivializing of the Bergson Group’s amazing determination to get the word out and to do something about it strikes me as merely a new attempt to keep the taboos in place.

As Peter Bergson puts it my documentary Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, “We couldn’t have stopped the Holocaust, we could have slowed the Holocaust, we could have made it an inefficient Holocaust. The people who made it efficient were the Allies who didn’t interfere. And the people who didn’t urge them to interfere were the [American] Jews.”

The fact is that we will never never know what might have been accomplished to rescue Jews in Europe since so little was attempted or even considered. For my part, I was born and sheltered in a tiny Christian area of France that defied the Nazis and turned itself into the very haven of refuge that America refused to be. My own life has thus taught me that collective will and action can be startlingly imaginative and dynamic even under the most trying circumstances. Where there’s a will, there is indeed often a way.

What the article also completely misses is that at this point, the discussion should be as much about us as it is about them. So many years later, are we at last willing to probe not only what happened here then, but our many evasions today about that experience? If we do not fully and forthrightly—and without smugness—acknowledge and dissect our share in past failures, are we not limiting our ability to act effectively in meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow?

Belatedly Recognizing Heroes of the Holocaust, The New York Times, Sunday, Aug. 7 (on the Bergson Group)
Bergson Group Activists Recognized At Yad Vashem-Wyman Conference, The Jewish Press, July 27, 2011
Historians Debate: Could More Jews Have Been Saved?, Jerusalem Post, July 17, 2011, on the Bergson Group conference at Yad Vashem on July 15 (excerpts from Not Idly By were shown)

Pierre Sauvage also draws on Not Idly By and the work-in-progress And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille in his illustrated lectures Learning Hope From the Holocaust: The Challenge To Us Of Holocaust Rescuers, and Did We Fight the Holocaust? Varian Fry and Peter Bergson.
Upcoming: Syracuse University, NY; York College, PA; Memphis, TN; Denver, CO.