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Haven
The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America

Ruth Gruber

To my four young grandchildren

Michael Philip Evans,

Lucy Jennifer Evans,

Joel Philip Michaels, and Lila Sarah Michaels

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE
THE STRUGGLE IN WASHINGTON

PART TWO
THE VOYAGE OF THE HENRY GIBBINS

PART THREE
THE OSWEGO ADVENTURE

PART FOUR
AFTER THEY CROSSED THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Appendix

Index

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

Few people are aware, and those who knew have largely forgotten, that nearly one thousand refugees were brought to the United States as guests of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II.

Transported on an Army Transport Ship with wounded soldiers from Anzio and Cassino, hunted at sea by Nazi planes and U-boats, brought to haven in Oswego, New York, they were to know the exquisite relief of freedom from bombings and terror. Refugees from eighteen countries Hitler had overrun, they tried to rebuild their lives inside an internment camp on American soil.

As special assistant to Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the interior, I was sent by our government to escort them from war-torn Italy and help resettle them in Fort Ontario, a former army camp on Lake Ontario. Thus I became witness and participant. I experienced their joys and pain, rejoicing in their marriages and love affairs, sharing pride in their children, mourning those who died by their own hand or by acts of God.

Stowed away in the bottoms of filing cabinets were more than forty notebooks I had filled during the eighteen months my life was interwoven with theirs. These notebooks, together with copies of the reports, letters, and documents I had prepared for the government, were the major source for the events recorded in this book. Invaluable, too, were the diaries that Cabinet members frequently keep, made public by their heirs. When the Ickes family opened Secretary Ickes’s secret diaries to the world, I spent fascinated hours in the Library of Congress discovering the personal, often intimate details of his years in office, his battles, both epic and small, and his discussion of the assignments he gave me.

In Hyde Park, I dug into the voluminous diaries of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and the papers of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, all of whom played character roles, sometimes larger than life-size, on the Oswego stage.

Luck was with me. In the National Archives I uncovered the confidential log of the Henry Gibbins, the Army Transport on which I sailed with the refugees, and succeeded in persuading the government to declassify it.

Across the years, as I balanced my life as writer, wife, and mother, I continued my friendship with many of the refugees, who gave generously of their time and their memories. To all of them I give my heartfelt gratitude.

I have tried to write the story of the only group of refugees brought to America by the government during World War II with some of the humor I learned from them, with anger and passion and honesty, and with love.

PART ONE

THE STRUGGLE
IN WASHINGTON

ONE

THE WORDS LEAPED at me from The Washington Post.

“I have decided,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced, “that approximately 1,000 refugees should be immediately brought from Italy to this country.”

One thousand refugees.

Europe was burning. It was June 1944, the middle of the war.

For years, refugees knocking on the doors of American consulates abroad had been told, “You cannot enter America. The quotas are filled.” And while the quotas remained untouchable, like tablets of stone, millions died.

Suddenly, one thousand refugees were to be brought in outside the quotas, by order of the President himself. Until now I had felt helpless, frustrated, enraged. Noble speeches were made each day about saving refugees before they were swept into the fire, but the deeds belied the words. Our doors had been slammed shut. Now suddenly there was hope.

At my breakfast table, air-conditioned against Washington’s summer heat, I continued to devour the article. The thousand refugees, I read, would be selected by the War Refugee Board, transported to America by the Army, and housed in a “temporary haven,” a former army camp called Fort Ontario, in Oswego, New York. The camp would be administered by the War Relocation Authority of the Department of the Interior. Only a few months before, the President had placed WRA, soon to be disbanded, under Harold L. Ickes, the secretary of the interior. I was Ickes’s special assistant, his field representative for Alaska.

Ickes would know what lay behind this sudden humanitarian gesture.

At E Street I jumped out of a cab and looked up at the handsome gray stone Interior building with its great bronze doors and modern columns. Interior—the vast grab-bag department of Indians, wildlife, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines—would now be in charge of Europe’s refugees too.

In my office, I telephoned Ickes’s appointments secretary and arranged a meeting for 11:55 A.M.

Ickes sat behind a huge desk littered with papers. His head was lowered as I began the long walk across the huge blue-carpeted office. He was writing with the thick scratchy pen I had seen him use countless times.

“Sit down,” he said briefly, and continued to write.

I sat in the armchair at the side of his desk. Behind him was a long table carefully stacked with books, newspapers, magazines. The Nation and The New Republic, to which he frequently contributed, were on top.

He finished his writing and buzzed for his secretary, who took the papers and disappeared.

Now he turned his full attention to me. “Yes?” he asked quizzically. “I understand it’s urgent.”

“It’s about the thousand refugees that President Roosevelt is inviting to America.”

He nodded. “The President sent me a copy of his cablegram to Robert Murphy in Algiers announcing it.”

“Mr. Secretary,” I said, “it’s what we’ve been fighting for all these years. To open doors. Save lives. Circumvent the holy quotas. What’s behind it? How did it happen?”

He leaned back in his chair. His eyes looked weary. “It came up in a Cabinet meeting with the President. It seems that Yugoslavian refugees and others are finding their way into Italy at the rate of about eighteen hundred a week. It’s a problem for the military in Italy.”

Was it Army pressure, then? The Allied armies were just now pushing up the boot of Italy. The papers were filled with the bloody battles of Anzio and Cassino. We had lost thousands of troops in the hills of southern Italy. I could see refugees fleeing into Italy on the heels of the Army. Clogging roads. Needing to be housed and fed.

“Someone at the meeting,” Ickes went on, “I don’t remember who, proposed that refugees be brought to this country. The President was still in favor of finding havens for them in Europe, Sicily, or parts of North Africa like Libya. I suggested, if any were brought to this country, that instead of coming to the mainland they be sent to the Virgin Islands. There’s plenty of room on the island of St. Croix, where the weather is mild, like southern Italy. Instead, they’re putting these people in New York State, near the snow belt around Lake Ontario.”

“But surely it’s not only because of the Army that we’re taking them in? It has to be more. It has to be humanitarian.”

“Of course it’s humanitarian.” His eyes blazed through his gold-rimmed glasses. “And it’s about time, too. We’ve been trying for years to open the door to refugees. Look what happened to the Alaskan Development Bill we prepared here in the department.”

I nodded. In November 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, a bill was introduced to bring ten thousand settlers to Alaska: half of them were to be Americans; the other half would be European refugees who would promise to stay in Alaska for five years. Then they would be allowed to enter the United States under the existing quotas.

The bill was to do two things at once: help open Alaska for settlers and provide a haven for refugees. But the opposition was so great, from Alaskans as well as from isolationists who wanted no refugees at all, that it died in committee.

“I’m sure there’ll be opposition again,” Ickes said, “the restrictionists on one side and the damn fools on the other who’ll scream that one thousand isn’t enough. They don’t realize, with all the opposition to immigration in general and Jews in particular, that you can’t take in more than a thousand at a time.”

I thought of the millions of Jews waiting to be rescued. There were frightening rumors that several million had already been murdered in Germany, Poland, and other countries Hitler had overrun, though most of us still did not know how. But there were millions more—in Hungary, Romania, Italy. Maybe we could rescue them, snatch them from Hitler’s jaws.

Of all the Cabinet members, Ickes, who told me he had never met a Jew until he was sixteen, was the most passionate in denouncing the Nazi atrocities against Jews and the angriest that the doors of America were sealed.

“Mr. Secretary.” I heard the urgency in my voice. “These people coming here—they must be frightened, bewildered, coming to a strange land. Somebody has to be with them. Somebody has to take their hand.”

“You’re suggesting…?” His eyes began to sparkle; the weariness was gone. “Of course. It’s a great idea. I’m going to send you. You’re the one to go over and bring them back.”

Ickes was a man of instant decisions. He called his operator. “Get Dillon Myer on the phone.”

Myer was the head of the War Relocation Authority; his agency would administer the camp.

“Myer,” I heard him say, “I want to send someone over to Italy to bring back those refugees…. What? You’ve already selected someone?…A man? You send your man, I’m sending her…. That’s right. It’s a woman. A young woman…. What’s that?” His jowls trembled with anger.

I felt my stomach knot.

“What has being young got to do with this job? Being young didn’t stop her from getting a Ph.D. in literature when she was twenty, the youngest in the world. And she took it in Germany—as an exchange student from America. I know her capabilities. She’s been working for me now”—he turned to me—“how long is it?”

“Three years.” I could hardly hear my own voice.

“Three years. With all kinds of jobs. And this one is right for her. Those refugees are from the Balkans and Central Europe. They probably speak mostly German. She speaks German and Yiddish. There’ll be a lot of women and children. She’ll know how to reach them; she’ll understand them. You better come in at two-thirty today; I want to talk to you about her.”

Midafternoon, I was summoned to Ickes’s office. “Myer has just left,” he said. “I told him I couldn’t think of a better person to send.”

I sat upright in the chair.

“I told him it’s a unique job and you’ve got unique qualifications. You can communicate with the refugees. With your background, they’ll trust you.”

I waited for him to go on.

“What’s more, I assured Myer that you could be of great help to us by writing and speaking about the refugees when you get back. I told him how you are always asked to lecture on Alaska. Also, your press contacts are important. I made certain he knew that the Herald Tribune sent you to the Soviet Arctic. I told him I have full confidence in you, that you understand these people, and you can write.”

He was still not telling me Myer’s decision.

“It’s not settled, then?” I asked.

Myer, I knew, was an old-school government official who had come up through the ranks of the Agriculture Department. Instinctively, I sensed he would be dubious about sending a woman to do this job.

“Myer says there are problems,” Ickes went on. “Interior is not in overall charge of this project. The War Refugee Board is.”

The War Refugee Board had been created by the President five months ago—to save war refugees.

“Myer will have to check with WRB to get approval for you. I told him to see you first before he checks with them. He’ll see you at eleven tomorrow morning. I have to tell you, he’s hesitant about you.”

“He’s never met me.”

“I have the feeling he thinks you’re a big buxom social worker.”

I was neither big nor buxom nor a social worker.

“It’s these bureaucrats,” Ickes said. “They get in a niche and then they’re afraid to do anything unusual, anything that takes courage and imagination. Come back tomorrow after you’ve seen him.”

That night I replayed the scenes in Ickes’s office in my head. I walked to my desk and read again the President’s message to Congress. It was dated June 12, 1944.

This nation is appalled by the systematic persecution of helpless minority groups by the Nazis. To us, the unprovoked murder of innocent people simply because of race, religion, or political creed is the blackest of all possible crimes…. The fury of their insane desire to wipe out the Jewish race in Europe continues undiminished. This is but one example. Many Christian groups are also being murdered.

I leaned my head on my desk. There had been so many false starts to save them, so many conferences, so many hopes dashed. In July 1938 the United States had convened the Evian Conference in France on the shores of Lake Geneva. Thirty-two nations had sent representatives, most of whom stood up, one by one, to explain why they could not accept refugees. All that came out of Evian was a new committee, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which did little more to save refugees than the League of Nations had done before.

Meanwhile the two world leaders we loved, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, made eloquent speeches about refugees even as they barred them. England closed the doors of Palestine, and the United States closed the doors of America. To be sure, individuals were brought into our country. Albert Einstein had been helped to escape; Thomas Mann had been invited as an honored guest. But now at last Roosevelt was inviting not famous men but a whole group of “common” people.

After World War I, America had pulled back between its two oceans, isolationist, largely antiforeign. The idea of taking in large numbers of refugees—especially Jews—was unpopular. The specter of anti-Semitism was in our country, to be evoked by any overt gesture. So FDR, along with many others, was careful not to show too much sympathy for beleaguered Jewish refugees. Besides, the time-honored distaste for Jews—if not outright hatred—was still a hallmark of the upper echelons of some government agencies, particularly the Department of State. I knew it firsthand working in Washington. Ickes was a different breed of high officialdom; there were not many like him.

That was why I was so excited, why Roosevelt’s decision to bring in even one thousand seemed to me such a triumph. One thousand, out of the millions being slaughtered and more millions without homes or refuge. It could be the beginning of a mass rescue movement. And for at least a thousand people, it would mean life, not death.

At eleven the next morning, I entered the seedy and steaming-hot Barr Building on Seventeenth Street and rode the elevator to the executive offices of the War Relocation Authority. Unlike the cool marble halls and broad corridors of Interior, the narrow halls and small offices seemed out of another era. I waited in the small room.

“Mr. Myer is free now.” His secretary pointed toward the door.

My instincts were right. There was no warmth in his greeting. A tall man with steel-rimmed glasses and steel-gray hair, he stared down at me as I entered. He looked like the engineers I had seen on construction projects in Alaska, hard-driving men who seemed closer to machines and mortar than to people.

“So,” he said coldly. “You’re even younger than I thought.”

I said nothing.

“I can’t understand why, for such an important, unprecedented mission, Ickes should want to send a young woman. Do you realize what this job means? You’ll be going over in the middle of war. You can be shot down. That’s all we need, to have a young woman from our department shot down by a Nazi plane.”

I wanted to tell him that I had been in the Aleutians when they were invaded, that I was a fatalist, that I would die when my number was up. Instead, I said, “It’s a danger I’m prepared to face.”

“Do you realize you’ll be dealing with a thousand people—with men as well as women and children? Don’t you see that after what they have gone through, they would have more respect for a man? They would pay much more attention to a man than they would to a woman.”

In a corner of my mind I thought, Maybe there is validity in his arguments. Maybe refugees would have more respect for a man who was old and wise and experienced. I pushed the thought away, opened my purse, and pulled out copies of the President’s message to Congress and the cablegram he had sent to Ambassador Murphy in Algiers. I had underlined some of the President’s phrases; I read them now to Dillon Myer:

“The Nazis are determined to complete their program of mass extermination…. We have made clear our determination to punish all participants in these acts of savagery. In the name of humanity—”

“In the name of humanity.” I repeated the words. “Mr. Myer, what have age or sex to do with humanity?”

He stood up abruptly. “It’s not up to me. I can’t make the decision. I must speak with John Pehle; he’s executive director of the War Refugee Board. I’ll call you back after I’ve talked with Pehle.”

Two hours later, my office phone rang.

“I’ve talked with Pehle.” Myer’s voice seemed a shade less cold. “He did some checking himself in Interior. You got some pretty good recommendations. Pehle agrees that you can go.”

“Thank you, Mr. Myer,” I breathed into the phone.

“You know, of course, I’m sending my own man over, Ralph Stauber. He’ll be getting the statistics we need, where the people came from, et cetera.”

I listened silently.

“You are Ickes’s personal representative. But you can help us gain insight into the makeup of the people, so that we can develop policies. You must make it clear to them that they are coming here to live inside a camp where they will have food, a place to live in, and enough to keep them warm.”

“What about leaving the camp?” I asked. “What if they have relatives? Will they be able to visit them? Will they be able to go outside to work?”

“That’s a policy decision to be made later, in thirty or sixty days after they arrive. Be very careful. Don’t make any promises we can’t fulfill. We don’t want to raise their hopes too high. That happened in our other camps.”

The “other camps” were the Japanese-American internment and relocation camps, where over 100,000 Japanese were then incarcerated under Myer’s administration. After Pearl Harbor, after the “date of infamy” on December 7, 1941, the country had exploded with hysteria against the Japanese. Innocent men, women, and children were pulled from their homes, businessmen from their shops, farmers from their land. In one of his darkest hours, the President, describing them as “potential fifth columnists,” ordered the Japanese segregated in isolated camps. They were fenced in with barbed wire, patrolled by soldiers. To run the camps, Roosevelt created a special agency, the War Relocation Authority, WRA, headed by Milton Eisenhower, who recommended Dillon Myer as his successor when he resigned. Two years later, in February 1944, the President ordered WRA transferred to Interior.

Ickes recorded his reaction to his new responsibility in his secret diary. “This is something I distinctly do not want, but I told the President that I would take it and do the best I could.”

Ickes was determined to close the camps swiftly and resettle the internees as humanely as possible, a task Eisenhower and Myer had already fought to achieve. He held a press conference to announce his decision. Since he was the liveliest Cabinet officer they covered, most of the Washington corps of journalists and radio commentators filled the auditorium. They loved his quips, his sardonic wit.

Ickes revealed that 23,000 Japanese had already been resettled. He had even talked with Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia about relocating them in New York. “La Guardia,” Ickes said, “is perfectly willing to have the Japanese resettled in New York City, but not if they are still banned from the Pacific Coast.” Ickes wanted the ban “lifted right away—the sooner the better.”

Some of the reporters applauded. I joined in the applause, knowing that at last innocent people, whose only crime was the color of their skin and the slant of their eyes, were to be freed. I thought of the Jews that Hitler was murdering, whose only crime was that they were Jews.

Ickes looked up as I approached his desk. “Myer has agreed,” he said. “I can tell from your face.”

“The War Refugee Board gave the OK,” I said triumphantly, and told him that Myer had admonished me to keep the mission secret and promise the refugees nothing.

“That’s not bad advice,” Ickes said. “But I don’t want them to hamstring you. You’re to feel free to do what you want, go where you want, see what you want, and report to me. I’m giving you full rein.”

That was what I needed to hear. “Mr. Secretary, this is going to be the most important assignment you’ve ever given me—maybe the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“I’m sure you’ll do an excellent job. Myer is lucky to be getting you. You can reassure those refugees, make them feel better than some official just doing his routine duty. I know that this whole thing, saving refugees, means a lot to you, as it does to me. You’re going to be my eyes and ears. I’m depending on you.”

That evening I called my parents in Brooklyn. “I’m going to Europe,” I said.

“What?” my mother screamed into the phone. “Are you crazy? Every day I read how they sink ships and shoot down airplanes. And my daughter has to go to Europe to get her head shot off.”

“Mom, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry, she says to me. It’s enough your brother Irving is in the Army and I pray to God every night that he should come home safe. He has to go to war, he’s a captain. But you’re no soldier. What do you have to go for? What kind of mishegaas got into you now?”

“I can’t tell you, Mom. It’s a secret. But it’s very important.”

“Important. It’s always important. Ever since you were a little girl you started running. Do I know where you went? Germany. Siberia. Alaska. I never knew if you were alive. What normal girl goes to Siberia and Alaska? Now she has to go to Europe.”

“I’ll be all right, Mom. Don’t worry.”

My father, on the extension phone, said quietly, “Will you come home to say goodbye?”

I could see his handsome face—the wide-set eyes, the tall sturdy body—the father who always had faith in me.

“I’d love to come home before I go abroad, Pop,” I said, “but I won’t have time. I’ve got to go through a whole process of briefings before I go.”

“Then I’ll come to Washington to see you off,” my mother announced.

TWO

I SPENT THE NEXT WEEKS in a maze of bureaucratic briefings.

The refugees were even now being selected in southern Italy. I had to reach them before their convoy sailed.

I was completely bureaucratized—at the War Relocation Authority, where my official travel orders had to be drawn up; at the State Department, waiting interminably for a special passport; at the Public Health Service, where a battery of doctors pummeled, stethoscoped, X-rayed, and bled me and, with ominously prophetic voices, handed me a card with my blood type “in case you’re shot down and need a transfusion.”

Vaccines against typhus, typhoid, tetanus, smallpox, and plague were shot into my arms, my buttocks, my stomach. I reacted with a high fever and was told to stay in bed. I refused, hoping to speed up the briefings. It was useless. The bureaucracy in Washington moved on slow interminable wheels, each agency guarding its own authority, feeding upon its own red tape.

Marking time, I occupied myself trying to discover why Roosevelt was acting now, after all those years of a closed-door policy. I spent daylight hours in the Library of Congress reading newspapers and evenings talking with my friends in government, asking, “Why are the quotas being circumvented now?” In restaurants and in the privacy of our apartments we told one another, “It’s Congress and the State Department who bar refugees. Roosevelt can’t act alone. He can’t have his New Deal labeled the Jew Deal.”

There were other factors too, we reminded each other. Long before Hitler, Europe was an anti-Semitic continent. In America the quota system, under the fitting racist title National Origins Quota, had become law in the early 1920s, largely to bar Orientals and immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of them Jews.

Changes in the quota were unthinkable. The labor unions were opposed, fearing that refugees would take their jobs. The isolationists in Congress rode high. All this left the American Jewish community, scarcely 3 percent of the population, powerless to save the Jews of Europe.

“Trust Roosevelt,” one faction exhorted us. “Roosevelt saved us from a Communist takeover during the Great Depression. Now he will save the world from Hitler. Don’t make waves. Silent diplomacy is the safest route to rescue Jews.”

Saying, “No, silence is the enemy” a small group denounced silent diplomacy. Their leader was Peter Bergson, a young Palestinian; only an aroused public opinion, he insisted, could save refugees. Even the Zionists, united in one goal, to open Palestine, were divided on whether this was the time to fight for a Jewish state.

Ben Hecht, the brilliant playwright and journalist, wrote full-page ads with venom in his pen. One of them, a long ballad, carried the refrain

Hang and burn, but be quiet, Jews,
The world is busy with other news.

In the end, it was clear that only the President himself had the power to break the ironclad quotas and to begin rescuing Jews. Who had reached him?

“It was the cables,” a friend in Treasury told me one day.

“What cables?”

“The ones that told everything—how Jews were being murdered.”

“Why didn’t we know about them?”

He shrugged and was silent.

“You mean they were suppressed?”

“For two years.”

Two years in which we were kept in darkness. Two years when public opinion might have galvanized our leaders into action.

Only later could I put together the pieces of the story that led from those suppressed cables to FDR’s belated announcement and then to a shipboard odyssey and a haven in America, while war and holocaust raged in Europe.

In the summer of 1942, a German industrialist visiting Switzerland on business brought shocking news. Hitler was planning to exterminate all the Jews of Europe with a new device: prussic acid, the deadly compound of Zyklon-B gas. The news was delivered to Gerhart Riegner, a thirty-one-year-old refugee from Berlin working for the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland.

Riegner, whom I was to meet two years later in Geneva, told me, “At first I wouldn’t believe it. Deportation of Jews—this we knew. Killing Jews, torturing them, shooting them in graves—this we knew.” His eyes clouded over. “But this was a whole, total, embracing plan. It was Vernichtung.”

Vernichtung. Annihilation.

“I had to verify it,” he said. “I had to find out: Were the Germans capable of total Vernichtung?”

Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, Riegner looked and sounded like the students I had known in Germany.

Riegner had promised the industrialist he would never reveal his name. He kept his promise, even though research later pointed to Eduard Schulte, a banker and industrialist from Upper Silesia who loathed the Nazis. With friends in high places in the Nazi government, Schulte was able to alert the Allies to Hitler’s plans for annihilating Jews.

“I needed eight days to investigate the German industrialist and to convince myself,” Riegner said. “Finally convinced, I wrote a cable and took it to the American and British consuls, asking them to transmit it in code. In America it was to be sent to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who was president of the American Jewish Congress and was my boss in America. In Britain it was sent to Sydney Silverman, a Member of Parliament and chairman of the British section of the World Jewish Congress.”

The cable, dated August 8, 1942, read:

RECEIVED ALARMING REPORT THAT IN FÜHRER‘S HEADQUARTERS PLAN DISCUSSED AND UNDER CONSIDERATION ACCORDING TO WHICH ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED GERMANY NUMBERING 3½—4 MILLION [excluding Jews in the Soviet Union] SHOULD AFTER DEPORTATION AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST BE EXTERMINATED AT ONE BLOW TO RESOLVE ONCE FOR ALL THE JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE STOP ACTION REPORTED PLANNED FOR AUTUMN METHODS UNDER DISCUSSION INCLUDING PRUSSIC ACID STOP WE TRANSMIT INFORMATION WITH ALL NECESSARY RESERVATION AS EXACTITUDE CANNOT BE CONFIRMED STOP INFORMANT STATED TO HAVE CLOSE CONNECTIONS WITH HIGHEST GERMAN AUTHORITIES AND HIS REPORTS GENERALLY SPEAKING RELIABLE STOP RIEGNER

The cable was never delivered to Rabbi Wise. The State Department decided the information was “unsubstantiated” and summarized the report as “a wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears.” Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, one of the few State Department officials considered friendly to Jews, signed the order to suppress the cable.

Three weeks later, Riegner was informed that Wise still knew nothing. “I went through the worst period of my life,” Riegner told me. “There I was in my office looking out at the lake and Mont Blanc, and there was such peace in those snow-capped mountains. And the Jews were trapped in Europe.”

Fortunately, the British did not suppress the cable to Silverman, in which Riegner had carefully inserted the words INFORM AND CONSULT NEW YORK. Silverman sent a copy of the August 1942 cable to Rabbi Wise by ordinary Western Union.

In New York, Rabbi Wise read the cable over and over. He knew Riegner well. He knew how cautious he was. It had to be true.

He rushed to Washington to see Sumner Welles. Had Welles seen this cable? Did he know these facts? Welles, of course, had seen the original cable weeks earlier. Now he prevailed on Wise to keep the cable secret until State Department representatives in Switzerland could confirm Riegner’s charges.

Finally, in November, Welles telephoned Wise. “Come to Washington immediately.”

Welles showed the rabbi documents and affidavits from his own men in Switzerland confirming everything Riegner had reported. He would no longer hold Wise to his promise of secrecy.

Wise released the terrible information. But three months had already elapsed. No one knew if the Nazis had begun their Vernichtung.

On January 21, 1943, Leland Harrison, our minister in Bern, ordered another cable from Riegner to Rabbi Wise coded and transmitted through the State Department.

It was Cable 482, a file number that was to become famous. In four horror-filled pages, Riegner described the terror that had been decimating Jews in two lands: in Poland, where the Germans had been killing 6,000 Jews each day; in Romania, where 130,000 Jews had been deported to Transnistria in the Romanian-occupied Ukraine. The clothes had been ripped off the refugees’ backs; everything they owned was stolen. Of the 130,000 deported to the Transnistrian “reservation” for Jews, 60,000 had already died and 70,000 were starving to death.

Welles himself forwarded Cable 482 to Rabbi Wise. Wise immediately began arranging for a Stop Hitler Now mass rally to be held at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 1, 1943.

On February 10, 1943, the State Department sent an unusual message to Harrison in Bern. It was Cable 354, and it opened by referring to Riegner’s Cable 482:

YOUR 482, JANUARY 21. IT IS SUGGESTED THAT IN FUTURE REPORTS SUBMITTED TO YOU FOR TRANSMISSION TO PRIVATE PERSONS IN THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT BE ACCEPTED UNLESS EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE SUCH ACTION ADVISABLE. IT IS FELT THAT BY SENDING SUCH PRIVATE MESSAGES WHICH CIRCUMVENT NEUTRAL COUNTRIES’ CENSORSHIP WE RISK THE POSSIBILITY THAT NEUTRAL COUNTRIES MIGHT FIND IT NECESSARY TO TAKE STEPS TO CURTAIL OR ABOLISH OUR OFFICIAL SECRET MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

In the strangulated language of diplomacy, this meant, “Stop sending any more messages about Nazi atrocities.”

Sumner Welles again signed the cable. In Welles’s defense, many people, including Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the secretary of the Treasury, believed that he was too busy to inquire what 482 referred to.

For Harrison and Riegner in Switzerland, however, Welles’s cable was an enigma. Only two months earlier, the Allies had announced that Nazis would be punished as war criminals for their atrocities against Jews. America would need eyewitness accounts from Riegner to build its case against war criminals. Why now this order from the State Department to stop all information? And why specifically the order to stop further cables disclosing Nazi atrocities, when hundreds of commercial cables for private businesses were being transmitted?

Fortunately the cable to cease and desist was sent too late to halt the Stop Hitler Now rally.

It was a blustery first day of March 1943 in New York. The streets around Madison Square Garden were clogged. The Garden held 21,000 people, but at least 75,000 more were outside, unable to enter.

We kept each other warm, no longer strangers. We belonged together, a wall of Americans—Jews and Christians—shouting with one voice, “Stop Hitler now!”

We listened to loudspeakers as our leaders pleaded with the Allied governments to act swiftly, before it was too late.

“The world can no longer believe that the ghastly facts are unknown and unconfirmed,” Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the eloquent leader of the Jewish Agency, the shadow Jewish government in Palestine, declared. “At this moment expressions of sympathy without accompanying attempts to launch acts of rescue become a hollow mockery in the ears of the dying.

“The democracies have a clear duty before them.” Weizmann’s voice rang through the night air. “Let them negotiate with Germany through the neutral countries concerning the possible release of the Jews in the occupied countries.”

Negotiate with Germany through the neutral countries to release the Jews in the occupied countries? Sweden was neutral. Switzerland was neutral. In fact, Switzerland was far more. It was a giant ear, the listening post for diplomats, provocateurs, spies, mysterious travelers. It was in Switzerland that Riegner was getting much of his information from German travelers.

“Let havens be designated,” Weizmann went on, “in the vast territories of the United Nations,* which would give sanctuary to those fleeing from imminent murder.”

Havens! The word became symbolic in my mind. America had been one great big haven since its birth. We could have hundreds of havens—if only we opened our doors.

Weizmann was pleading for a haven in Palestine. “The Jewish community of Palestine will welcome with joy and thanksgiving all delivered from Nazi hands.”

A man near me shouted, “Tell it to Churchill!”

But Britain, with a mandate from the world to turn Palestine into a homeland for Jews, was even now sending crucially needed warships to the Palestine coast, not to fight the Nazis but to prevent Jews from entering.

We heard Cardinal Hinsely, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, denouncing both England’s Foreign Office and our State Department. “We need cold deeds and speedy deeds, not the rhetoric behind which governments are still hiding.”

The wind grew stronger. More people kept thronging the streets around us, pushing, shouting, shoving, while police sought to keep some semblance of order.

Now at last the voice we were waiting for swept over us. The President was talking from Washington. I could see the patrician face, the strong jaw exuding optimism and strength. The night air grew warm again, embraced by his words.

“The Nazis will not succeed in exterminating their victims….”

He’s talking now about the Jews, I told myself, he’s going to tell us how he’ll save them.

“The American people will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.”

Was that it? Were we to wait until the war ended? Why couldn’t he act now? Why not open havens in the empty valleys, the hilltops, and the deserts of America?

This was March 1943. Our soldiers were battling in North Africa. The Russians had driven the German Sixth Army back from Stalingrad, but Hitler still controlled most of Europe. I knew the argument; it was implicit in the President’s words: First we must win the war. Then we will take care of the refugees.

But how many, I thought in despair, would still be alive?

“We have adopted a resolution”—Rabbi Wise’s voice rolled through the loudspeakers like the music of an organ—“a resolution which we will forward to Secretary of State Cordell Hull to protest against the continuing failure to act against the strange indifference to the fate of five million human beings.”

I clutched my arms, shivering in anger and frustration. We were 75,000 people—and all we could do was send a protest to Cordell Hull.

No havens were suggested. The doors to America and Palestine remained tightly sealed.

As the clamor in the country to save refugees grew into a groundswell, the State Department called a conference in Bermuda specifically to discuss rescue. The conference opened on the day the Nazis launched their final attack on the Warsaw Ghetto. It was also the week of Passover.

The Bermuda conference was a fiasco. “Palliatives,” The New York Times described it, “designed to assuage the conscience of the reluctant rescuers rather than to aid the victims.”

Not one country offered to take in a single refugee.

Months passed. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered, and still no havens were provided.

Then, late in 1943, the suppressed cables were discovered.

The World Jewish Congress in Switzerland had cabled Washington that they could ransom the lives of thousands of Jews in Romania and France. They could raise the money themselves; they knew the officials to be bribed; all they needed was the license to send dollars abroad.

Both Treasury and State had to approve the license. Treasury agreed to issue the license immediately. State did nothing. Half a year was lost.

Outraged, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau called in Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., a young assistant general counsel working with Treasury’s Foreign Funds Control. “I want you to investigate the whole thing. Get to the bottom of it.”

Joe DuBois was a large canvas of a man with a generous spirit, disheveled eyebrows, and tousled hair. He went through all the files in the Treasury Department to dig up correspondence with State and found a copy of the cable from Harrison in Bern dated April 20, 1943, which opened by referring to Cable 354 (the cable of suppression). He telephoned the State Department. “Please send over a copy of your Cable 354.”

“Sorry,” he was told. “This cable does not relate to Treasury. Only a few people have seen it even in State. We cannot furnish it to Treasury.”

“Knowing the State Department as I did,” Joe told me later, “I became very suspicious. If State said it was none of Treasury’s business, I was pretty sure it was our business. I decided I had to see it.”

Joe knew the head of Foreign Funds Control at the State Department, Donald Hiss. He telephoned Hiss asking for a copy of Cable 354. Briefly he told Hiss of Morgenthau’s determination to get the license issued so the rescue from France and Romania could begin.

Hiss, sympathetic, promised to look for the mysterious cable.

Several times Joe called Hiss’s office, only to be told, “Joe, I’m having a hard time getting that cable.”

Finally, in desperation, Joe called Hiss at home; the cable was still missing.

On the morning of December 18, 1943, Hiss’s secretary called Joe’s secretary. “Please ask Mr. DuBois to be at our office at two-thirty this afternoon.” No reason. No explanation.

Before two-thirty Joe was in Hiss’s office. On the desk were two cables. “I’ve been warned,” Hiss confided to Joe, “that under no circumstances should these cables be shown to Treasury. If anyone finds out that I’m showing them to you, I might lose my job.”

Courageous and fearless himself, Joe knew that Hiss was risking his career to save thousands of lives.

“I can’t let them out of my office, Joe,” Hiss said. “I can’t even give you copies.”

Joe read of the terror in Poland and Romania since 1941. “Can I copy these cables?” he asked.

Hiss nodded silently.

Joe pulled several small slips of paper from his pocket, copied the full text of the cable of suppression, and made notes of the longer horror cable.

Back in his office, he dictated a “memorandum for the files” and marked it confidential. For the first time it told the full story of the cables, “so shocking and so tragic that it is difficult to believe.”

“I am physically ill,” Morgenthau said when he read the memorandum. He then asked Randolph E. Paul, his counsel, to prepare a complete background paper describing the State Department’s delays, subterfuges, and suppression.

Paul turned the writing over to Joe DuBois. With the help of Paul and John Pehle, head of Foreign Funds Control at the Treasury—both, like Joe, non-Jews—he began working on the report. He dictated drafts to his secretary during the day and worked evenings at home. He spent Christmas morning with his wife and family, then went back to his desk and continued writing. Finally, on January 13, 1944, he submitted his report to Morgenthau. Though it was signed R.E.P. (Randolph E. Paul), Joe had written it out of his guts. He called it “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”

It began with an impassioned denunciation of the State Department. “One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe is continuing unabated.” Officials in the State Department

have not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews.

They have not only failed to cooperate with private organizations in the efforts of these organizations to work out individual programs of their own, but have taken steps designed to prevent these programs from being put into effect.

They have not only failed to facilitate the obtaining of information concerning Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe, but in their official capacity have gone so far as to surreptitiously attempt to stop the obtaining of information concerning the murder of the Jewish population of Europe.

They have tried to cover up their guilt by:

(a) concealment and misrepresentation;

(b) the giving of false and misleading explanations for their failures to act and their attempts to prevent action; and

DuBois pointed the finger directly at Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state who was in charge of the Visa Division, which decided who could enter the United States—in effect, choosing who would live and who would die.

Breckinridge Long, in DuBois’s report, was the archvillain in our government’s “acquiescence in the murder of Jews.” The report quoted a speech by Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn. “Frankly, Breckinridge Long, in my humble opinion,” Celler had told Congress, “is the least sympathetic to refugees in all the State Department. I attribute to him the tragic bottleneck in the granting of visas…. It takes months and months to grant a visa, and then it usually applies to a corpse.”

Congressman Celler blasted the misleading and fraudulent statements Long had made in testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “We have taken into this country,” Long had told the Committee, “since the beginning of the Hitler regime [1933] and the persecution of the Jews until today, approximately 580,000 refugees. The whole thing has been under the quota—except the generous gesture we made of visitors’ and transit visas during an awful period.”

Celler nailed Long’s lie:

In the first place these 580,000 refugees were in the main ordinary quota immigrants coming in from all countries. The majority were not Jews. His statement drips with sympathy for the persecuted Jews, but the tears he sheds are crocodile. I would like to ask him how many Jews were admitted during the last three years in comparison with the number seeking entrance to preserve life and dignity…. One gets the impression from Long’s statement that the United States has gone out of its way to help refugees fleeing death at the hands of the Nazis. I deny this. On the contrary, the State Department has turned its back on the time-honored principle of granting havens to refugees. The tempest-tossed get little comfort from men like Breckinridge Long…. Long says that the door to the oppressed is open but that it “has been carefully screened.” What he should have said is “barlocked and bolted.” By the act of 1924, we are permitted to admit approximately 150,000 immigrants each year. During the last fiscal year only 23,725 came as immigrants. Of these, only 4,750 were Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.

If men of the temperament and philosophy of Long continue in control of immigration administration, we may as well take down that plaque from the Statue of Liberty and black out the “lamp beside the golden door.”

Morgenthau read DuBois’s eighteen-page report with mounting rage. He changed the title to the simpler “Personal Report to the President” and cut the document to nine pages, but kept most of its evidence and accusations, even adding his own charges:

There is a growing number of responsible people and organizations today who have ceased to view our failure as the product of simple incompetence on the part of those officials in the State Department charged with handling this problem. They see plain anti-Semitism motivating the actions of these State Department officials and, rightly or wrongly, it will require little more in the way of proof for this suspicion to explode into nasty scandal.

On a rainy Sunday morning on January 16, 1944, Morgenthau went to the White House with his young assistant, John Pehle. Morgenthau had easy access to the President, who affectionately called him “Henny-Penny.” On this Sunday morning, Morgenthau was no Henny-Penny. He had become a committed, anguished, passionate Jew. The suppressed cables had touched ancient roots. He told his friend the President that if these cables became public the whole world would know of the anti-Semitism in his State Department. The scandal, he said, could reach into the White House itself.

Six days later Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, WRB, composed of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War—Hull, Morgenthau, and Henry Stimson. Of the three, neither Hull at State nor Stimson of the Army was enthusiastic.

Rescuing Jews was withdrawn from the sabotaging hands of Breckinridge Long and given to the War Refugee Board. Pehle, a slim, circumspect thirty-five-year-old lawyer, became its executive director. Cables would no longer be suppressed. Ships would be leased in Sweden to smuggle refugees out of the Balkans. Ira Hirschmann, an executive of Bloomingdale’s department store in New York, would be sent to Istanbul to rescue, if he could, the sixty thousand still alive in the Romanian concentration camp in Transnistria. Raoul Wallenberg, a young Swede of a distinguished family, would be sent to Hungary and single-handedly save seventy or eighty thousand.

But time was running out for nearly 1 million Jews in Hungary and another 800,000 in Romania. Letters flooded the White House. “Mr. President,” a man in Los Angeles who signed himself “Not a Jew” pleaded, “do all you can to save the Jewish people of Europe. Establish rescue centers for temporary detention and care until we’ve knocked the hell out of Hitler.”

On March 6, 1944, Joe DuBois drafted a memorandum for the President urgently recommending temporary havens of refuge. Under his proposal the refugees would be treated “in effect as prisoners of war,” for whom no quotas were required.

LIVES: WHICH SHALL IT BE