Why wasn’t Auschwitz bombed?

“Why wasn’t Auschwitz bombed, really?” (February 4), Rich Brownstein’s response to my op-ed, ignores many facts and points of view regarding this controversy – some even dispelled in Yad Vashem itself. However, his main point, that America didn’t bomb Auschwitz because it was a racist country, not because no Americans were being killed there, is a distinction without a difference.

Brownstein wrote a book about the Holocaust and its betrayal in film, which I look forward to reading, yet he ignores three films that counter his arguments that I suggest he watch if he is interested in an open-minded approach to this issue:

1) The entire interview of Jan Karski conducted by Claude Lanzmann where Karski entreated FDR to bomb Auschwitz in 1943

2) An interview with George McGovern conducted in 1994 where McGovern talks about his mission to bomb “a factory in Oswiecim,” most likely Auschwitz III, during which interview he states that America had the technology to destroy the railroad bridges and railroads leading into Auschwitz and a moral obligation to do so, and,

3) The video on this subject in the Yad Vashem museum, which in part shows American fighter planes destroying German trains.

However, what is most disturbing to me, is that unlike my opinions, which are entirely my own, Brownstein identifies himself as a lecturer at Yad Vashem and he implies in his article that destroying the Nazis’ ability to use Auschwitz as a murder factory was not important because most Jews were already murdered by 1944. The issue has never been whether bombing Auschwitz would have stopped the Holocaust, the issue was whether thousands of lives would have been saved and that was clearly the case.

As far as the role of Jewish leadership both in Israel and the US, I defer to Rafael Medoff, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein and others, but my point, as expressed by Karski in his Lanzmann interview, was that FDR had no reason to bomb Auschwitz and save Jewish lives because the State of Israel did not exist at that time. This was eerily reminiscent of the famous response by Napoleon when told the Pope was displeased with his actions: “How many divisions does he have?”

ANDERSON HARKOV Modi’in