On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an act of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Poland undertaken to oppose the Nazis’ final effort to transport the remaining 55,000-60,000 Jews in the ghetto to extermination camps, began.
The effort to build bunkers and smuggle weapons and explosives into the ghetto had begun after the summer of 1942, when the German Nazis deported more than a quarter of a million Jews to be murdered in Treblinka.
On April 19, 1943, the ghetto refused to surrender to the Nazi police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop.
First Report
The first news of the ghetto uprising was published three days later, on April 22, on the front pages of The New York Times and the Yiddish daily Forward.
The Times transmitted a dispatch from the Associated Press in Stockholm, Sweden, which reported that, one night earlier, April 21, the secret Polish radio had appealed from Poland for help, after which “suddenly, the station went dead.”
The AP report continued, “The broadcast, as heard here, said, ‘The last 35,000 Jews at Warsaw had been condemned to execution. Warsaw is again echoing to musketry volleys. The people are murdered. Women and children defend themselves with their naked arms! Save us….’”
Appeals
On April 22, the Forward reported that the Nazis were slaughtering the last Jews in Warsaw, explaining that, on January 21, an appeal was sent by these Jews that was not received by the Jewish Labor Committee in New York until April 21.
According to the Forward, six requests were made, only a few of which could be revealed to the public. One was that 10,000 of the remaining children in the ghetto be exchanged for German prisoners of war. The Jews of the ghetto also demanded material help, including food.
The appeal ended with the warning: “Brothers, the remaining Jews in Poland believe that in these most frightening days of our history, you didn’t help us. Answer now, at least in these last days of our lives; this is our last appeal to you.”
“In the Name of All That Is Sacred”
On April 23, the Times’ story was headlined, “Warsaw’s Ghetto Fights Deportation—Tanks Reported Used in Battle to Oust 35,000 Jews.”
The article reported that the American representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union (the Bund) had sent a telegram to President Franklin D. Roosevelt imploring him “in the name of all that is sacred, to do your utmost to speed up the rescue of the doomed victims of the Nazi beasts.”
The Bund’s demands were included in their statement to the Anglo-American Conference on Refugees, which was held in Hamilton, Bermuda, from April 19 to April 30, 1943, ostensibly to examine the problem of Jewish refugees and to suggest solutions.
Bermuda Conference
One of the first articles to discuss the failure of the Bermuda Conference in light of the Ghetto Uprising appeared in the Forward on April 24, in which the paper noted that an entire week had passed, leaving the Jews in England and the US still waiting for a sign that something would be done.
The only sound was the hopeless cry for help emanating from the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, a voice that would never be heard again. While most of the press neglected the Warsaw Ghetto and only sporadically condemned the Bermuda Conference’s lack of progress, the delegates in Hamilton continued to declare their inability to solve the refugee crisis.
At a Passover Seder, held on April 25, 1943, under the auspices of the National Labor Committee for Palestine, some delegates to the Bermuda Conference declared that the only solution to the tragedy was immigration. The speakers did not mention the Warsaw Ghetto or the need to accelerate the rescue of the Jews.
Mourning and Pleading
On April 27, The New York Times reported that a tentative arrangement, a compromise, was being considered “on a plan to relocate European refugees temporarily in French North Africa, the Cyrenaica portion of Libya, and the Diredawa region of Ethiopia.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported that the chairman of the American delegation to the Bermuda Conference, Harris Willis Dodds, a conservative Republican who served as president of Princeton University, assured the press that the rescue proposals had been thoroughly examined. However, he refused to comment on whether any had been acted upon favorably.
These news reports prompted many Jews to initiate six weeks of mourning and pleading for aid to the victims of Nazi terror. The Synagogue Council of America, then the umbrella organization representing the three major Jewish religious movements, demanded that, at the very least, efforts had to be expended to save the children.
“Cruel Mockery”
The final communiqué from the Bermuda Conference, released on April 29, dispelled any hope for immediate rescue. Given wide press coverage, the report made clear that the only agreement reached was that the war against Germany had to be won. US immigration quotas were not raised, nor was the British prohibition on Jewish refugees seeking refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine lifted.
On April 30, The New York Times headlined its piece on the end of the conference with the suggestion that “Hopeful Hint Ends Bermuda Sessions.” The article reported that the delegates had rejected recommendations that they said were incapable of being accomplished under war conditions and would most likely delay the war effort.
On May 3, the JTA reported that then-Assistant Secretary of State A.A. Berl, Jr., re-emphasized that there would be no changes to official US government policy. He warned Germany and her satellite states that they would be held responsible for crimes against the Jewish people, but he admitted there would be no immediate relief for those still trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. “Nothing can be done to save these helpless unfortunates except through the invasion of Europe, the defeat of the German army, and the breaking of the German power. There was no other way,” he said.
On May 4, the American Zionist Committee for a Jewish Army ran an advertisement in The New York Times condemning the efforts in Bermuda as a mockery of past promises to the Jewish people and of Jewish suffering under Nazi-German occupation: “To 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death-Trap, Bermuda was a Cruel Mockery.”
Jewish Powerlessness
Throughout the Bermuda Conference, many American Jews were disturbed by the absence of any concrete plans for rescue and distressed at their own inability to present their case in a forceful manner that might have resulted in a different outcome.
Many believe such feelings are not without merit. According to Ghetto Speaks, the monthly magazine of the General Workers Union of Poland, for an entire year before his suicide on May 11, 1943, Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish-Jewish socialist politician, Bundist trade union activist, and member of the London-based National Council of the Polish Government in exile, had received “appeal upon appeal, cry upon cry, from the tortured Jews of Poland.”
In May 1942, the Bund issued a report informing readers that the German Nazis had “embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil.” The Bund stressed that “it is estimated that the Germans have already killed 700,000 Polish Jews.”
Protests and Meetings
On July 21, 1942, the American Jewish Congress, in cooperation with the American Jewish Labor Committee and B’nai B’rith, held a demonstration in Madison Square Garden, attended by a crowd of 22,000, to denounce the atrocities committed by the Nazis. In messages sent to the demonstrators by FDR and then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, neither mentioned the possibility of rescuing European Jewry.
According to historian Yehuda Bauer, the most American Jews were demanding was to threaten Germany with retaliatory air raids.
The 1942 edition of the American Jewish Yearbook found that while there had been a paucity of productive results for their attempts to save the Jews of Europe, there was no lack of effort by American Jews in registering their disapproval of Nazi horrors. There had been worldwide demonstrations of sympathy, including a “Voice of Washington” rally. There had been work stoppages, mass meetings, protests, a day of fasting, memorial services, and periods of silence in memory of the dead.
On December 8, 1942, a prominent delegation met with FDR at the White House to appeal for action to stop the Nazi massacres.
On March 1, 1943, barely six weeks before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 300,000 demonstrators filled Madison Square Garden in a “Stop Hitler Now” protest. At least 75,000 others tried to enter the Garden and, along with more than 10,000 others remaining in the streets, heard the speeches over loudspeakers.
Nevertheless, historians consider the resolution adopted at the demonstration too moderate to prompt any government action.
No Illusions
Shortly before he committed suicide, Zygielbojm received a message from the Warsaw Ghetto delivered by a Gentile leader of the Polish underground, Jaczynski, who had been told by ghetto leaders, “Jewish leaders abroad won’t be interested. At 11 in the morning, you will begin telling them about the anguish of the Jews in Poland, but by 1pm, they will ask you to halt the narrative so they can have lunch. This is a difference that can’t be bridged. They will go on lunching at the regular hours at their favorite restaurant. So they cannot understand what is happening in Poland.”
The Jews of Warsaw urged the Jews of London to go to the American Embassy and the British Foreign Office and remain until the government was changed. If imprisoned, they should fast until death.
The Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto had no illusion that any of this would happen. In fact, they knew from the beginning that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was doomed and their survival unlikely. Marek Edelman, the only surviving commander of the ghetto’s Jewish Combat Organization, said the motivation for the fighting was “to pick the time and place of our deaths.”
Cry “to Jolt the Indifference”
In desperation, on May 11, Zygielbojm, who had just learned that his wife, Manya, and 16-year-old son, Tuvia, had been killed in the ghetto, took his life with an overdose of sodium amytal in “an energetic cry of protest against the indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people.”
In a long suicide note, he said that while the Nazis were responsible for the murder of Polish Jews, “the whole of humanity” was indirectly culpable. He accused the Western allies of “looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions of tortured children, women, and men,” and no one doing enough.”
“I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw Ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people,” he wrote.
He asked Polish-in-exile officials, including President Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz and Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski, to “embark immediately on diplomatic action…in order to save the living remnant of the Polish Jews from destruction.”
His suicide provoked a significant reaction in the press to what was happening in Poland, but it was too late. By May 16, 1943, the Germans had succeeded in quelling the Ghetto Uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto was liquidated and destroyed; its Jewish residents were either murdered or captured and sent to Majdanek or Treblinka.
A Final Note
The Bermuda Conference was not the first attempt to find a solution to the refugees frantically in search of a haven. From July 6-15, 1938, the US organized the Évian Conference from July 6-15, 1938, at Évian-les-Bains, France.
At a news conference following the failure of the delegates to solve the problem of stateless refugee Jews, historian Martin Gilbert quotes a journalist from a Swiss newspaper who asked Golda Myerson (Meir), the Jewish observer from Palestine, for her assessment. “There is one ideal I have in mind,” she answered, “one thing I want to see before I die—that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”
*Portions originally published in The Wiener Library Bulletin Volume XXIX, New Series Numbers 37/38, 1976.
** Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.