It is a simple question.
It is a question from history.
And unfortunately it is a question today, and thus for us.
It is this: Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?
His column begins thus:
WHEN representatives from the United States and other countries gathered in Evian, France, in 1938 to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis caused by the Nazis, they exuded sympathy for Jews — and excuses about why they couldn’t admit them. Unto the breach stepped a 33-year-old woman from Massachusetts named Martha Sharp.
He then tells us about Sharp, and her husband, Unitarian minister, about whom more in a moment, because of two forthcoming events, described in this paragraph:
Their story is told in a timely and powerful new Ken Burns documentary, “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War.” The documentary will air on PBS on Tuesday evening — just as world leaders conclude two days of meetings in New York City about today’s global refugee crisis, an echo of the one in the late 1930s.
The Sharps, at the urging of the the Unitarian Church, left behind their two children in Wellesley MA to try to help Jewish refugees, at a time when although the world recognized what was happening, in fact on the whole it offered little help. They were refugees for whom there was no refuge, no sanctuary, no place to escape the forthcoming Shoah.
Kristof quotes Artemis Joukowsky, grandson of the Sharps, who inspired and worked on the film with Burns, who sees parallels with our own time:
“The vitriol in public speech, the xenophobia, the accusing of Muslims of all of our problems — these are similar to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and ’40s.”
Kristof reminds us that in that crisis our country, you know, the one with the supposedly welcoming Statue of whom Emma Lazarus wrote the message it was supposed to offer of giving us your tired your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…. the United States of America, took very few Jewish refugees. And I remind readers that so far we have from Syria taken only 10,000, being shamed in our lack of welcome by our neighbor to the North, Canada.
Consider this sentence from Kristof:
It was the Nazis who committed genocide, but the U.S. and other countries also bear moral responsibility for refusing to help desperate people.
And consider what he writes next:
That’s a thought world leaders should reflect on as they gather in New York to discuss today’s refugee crisis — and they might find inspiration from those like the Sharps who saw the humanity in refugees and are today honored because of it.
He tells us of others, even in places like Poland. He tells us of a Polish farmer and his family who hid Jews, only to be executed — including their own children — when the Nazis came. His name was Jozef Ulma and his wife’s name was Wictoria.
We learn of a Portuguese Consul General in France who disobeyed orders and issued visa requests to Jews so they could escape — he was recalled, shamed, put on trial, convicted, and after his family was forced to emigrate Kristof writes of him that he
survived by eating at soup kitchens and selling family furniture; he died in 1954 in poverty, debt and disgrace.
His name was Aristides de Sousa Mendes.
As I read of de Sousa Mendes, I thought of other examples, of an Apostolic Delegate in Turkey with some authority over Greece and Bulgaria who used his office to help the Jewish underground save lives. His name was Angelo Roncalli. Perhaps you know him better as the now canonized Pope John XXIII.
I remember an entire community in France which under the leadership of a pastor named Trocme sheltered lots of Jews, or the monastic community in Assisi, home of St Francis, which sheltered Jews within its walls.
Kristof tells us of De Sousa
By some estimates, he issued visas for 30,000 refugees.
In Israel there is recognition for people who risked themselves on behalf of Jews. They are considered Righteous Among the Nations.
There are many who are not recognized there. Ordinary people who did the decent and human thing for others in need.
Kristof writes the following:
As today’s leaders gather for their summit sessions, they should remember that history eventually sides with those who help refugees, not with those who vilify them.
In this country we have seen those who will disregard the attempts of say Governors to ban Syrian refugees from coming into their states — among those was Indiana Governor Mike Pence. In this country to disobey such a directive from a Governor does not carry the same risk as hiding Jews from the Nazis. Churches and synagogues have ignored such orders, and refugee groups have gone to court. This is still a current issue, as you can see from this New York Times editorial from earlier this week.
There are two more paragraphs to Kristof’s column after what appears in the last block quote. You should read them, but only in the context of the complete column.
My last name is Bernstein.
Two of my four grandparents were born in Europe, both in Poland.
The mother of my maternal grandmother desperately tried to get family out of Bialystok in the late 1930s, but to no avail. That family died in the liquidation of that city’s Jewish community in 1943. My grandmother and her father had been the first to get out almost 4 decades earlier, when a local policeman warned her father, the baker who had often given him coffee and a bialy to get him through the night, that there was going to be a pogrom. He warned them, and then had his brother a farmer smuggle them out in a hay wagon after the violence had died down, with the rest of the family following some weeks and months later. But the relatives left behind were killed, along with the rest of remaining community.
I have known people who survived the Shoah because families took risks despite their fears because it was the basic human thing to do.
For me, any part of our politics that ever involves turning one group of people against another is wrong, is the first step down a path that should never again be walked.
So I find Kristof’s column to be a challenge.
As of NOW, our risk is much less, but the principle starts with the first action, the first time we do not oppose oppression or discrimination, the first time we remain silent at bigotry and hatred, the first time — heaven forbid — we laugh at a joke meant to denigrate because of religion, or “race,” or gender, or sexuality, or national origin, or disability, or any other way of dividing people into “us” versus “them.”
For if we do not speak up and act now, then the question we may eventually face is a stark as that in the title of Kristof’s powerful column:
Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?
To which I would simply add the following thought — consider this, if you needed to hide from the Nazis or their equivalent, would there be someone willing to hide you?