Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and survivor of Auschwitz, testifies to the abandonment of which the European Jews were victims.

"The Jews were indeed abandoned. Handed over to their executioners, they had nobody they could count on for help, not even their kinsmen living freely in the United States. A sad - and revolting - observation: the great Jewish organizations and the prominent figureheads of the Jewish community were not able or were simply not willing to forge a common front and come to the rescue. Peter Bergson and his group (...) were shunted aside for reasons of politics or personality. Rabbi Stephen Wise was straining under an already unbearable workload. The other leaders, for the most part, concentrated too often on what would happen after the end of the war and the necessity of establishing a Jewish national homeland, thus disregarding the question of rescue. The Baltimore Conference barely mentioned the catastrophe overwhelming the European Jews, and it was the same for the American Jewish Conference, which devoted a single meeting, not even a plenary session, to discussion of the question.

It Was Too Late
"However, in occupied Europe, the trains were running toward Birkenau. When the United States government decided - under pressure from Bergson's group and from public opinion - to create the War Refugee Board, it was already too late. Too late for the Polish Jews. Too late for the Dutch Jews. Too late for the Hungarian Jews. "As much as we may be proud of the humanism the United States showed in fighting Nazi Germany, we are also embarrassed and desolate over its behavior toward Hitler's Jewish victims."

Elie Wiesel

Excerpt from the preface of David S. Wyman's book, L'abandon des juifs, les Américains et la solution finale, Flammarion, 1987.