In praise of those who enabled us to know
IN EARLY September 1939, Hitler’s legions swept into Poland and the Second World War began.
The JC, of course, reported on events closely, including the terrible treatment in those early weeks of Jews in the newly conquered Nazi territories. But perhaps the first indication of the extent of horrors to come came in a small item found in the October 20, 1939 edition of the paper. It showed a picture: a reproduction of a postcard written in Yiddish which had been sent to a neutral country from Berlin.
The paper provided a translation: “I appeal to you, help, help us. Men of Polish nationality who have been taken away return home as ashes. They are all slaughtered, young healthy people. Do all you can to make it known; write to all countries, to all newspapers; help us, save us — take us out.
“People have mercy. Shout it in the streets. Quickly, quickly.”
In the years to come there were a number of people who would do all they could to make the crimes of the Holocaust known. During the war itself, individuals and groups would repeatedly risk their lives to document what was happening, not knowing whether they themselves would survive to tell the terrible tale. And then after the war, researchers worked tirelessly to uncover the terrible scope of the tragedy, for a variety of reasons — some attempting to trace the missing or dead, amass evidence in order to bring as many of the perpetrators as possible to justice, or even to develop a whole new branch of international law specifically concerned with human rights.
In its new exhibition, Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers, the Wiener Library looks in closer detail at some of these heroes. The exhibition has been produced in association with the House of the Wannsee Conference Holocaust Memorial, and funded by the German Foreign Ministry.
Barbara Warnock, the exhibition’s curator, said that among those featured are staff from the Wiener Library itself, including its founder, Alfred Wiener, who appears to have possessed an almost eerie degree of prescience. The postcard sent from Berlin appealing for help and (top) Louis de Jong, founder of the Dutch Institute for War Documentation, examining papers on the Holocaust after the war Included among the items exhibited is a 1919 pamphlet he wrote, called Before Pogroms.
Ms Warnock said: “When in Berlin in 1919, Wiener became concerned about levels of antisemitism in Germany. Before Pogroms warns that the antisemitism that existed then might lead to an orchestrated, violent attack on the Jews in Germany. “He seems to have been quite foresighted. He was gathering information about antisemitism, the activities of extremist nationalist groups, but from the mid-1920s he became specifically very focused on the Nazis as a particular threat.” As war clouds gathered on the horizon in 1939, Wiener, worried that Holland would not escape the conflict, moved his organisation, which was dedicated to gathering evidence and information about Nazi activities, to London.
Yet despite warning for so long of the threat to come, Wiener did not escape the war unscathed.
“Wiener had a visa at that point but his family didn’t,” Ms Warnock said.
“They later got visas, but by the time that the Germans invaded Holland in May 1940 they hadn’t used them yet and they got stranded. His wife and three daughters ended up in Bergen Belsen.
Müller’s evidencecollecting was close to suicidal