The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

attendance was declined by the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Count Galeazzo
Ciano, who, while acknowledging humanitarian concerns cited political considerations.
He believed that such a meeting could foment hostility against the Italian Government
due to its own domestic problems with anti-Fascist political refugees and its close
diplomatic and economic ties with Germany. 151 Iceland and El Salvador also refused to
participate.
There were anxieties within the U.S. State Department that Eastern European
countries, such as Poland, Rumania and Hungary, were planning to expel their own
Jews. 152 Such actions, it was believed, could dissuade other nations from liberalizing their
respective immigration policies while promoting more “refugee dumping” into the
Western Hemisphere. The Polish Government noted that large numbers of Polish Jews
residing in Austria and other European countries were returning to Poland despite the
high level of domestic anti-Semitism. The Polish Government enacted a new law on
March 31, 1938 which threatened to annul passports issued to Poles living abroad but it
was directed primarily to the fifty thousand Polish Jews residing in Austria. Anti-Jewish
rioting, with the killing of two Jews and the wounding of more than one hundred along
with the looting of hundreds of Jewish businesses, occurred in Warsaw on March 19.
Crowds shouted “Down with the Jews!” and “To Madagascar with the Jews!” 153
151 Telegram from US Ambassador in Italy Phillips to Secretary of State Rome, March 24, 1938, 840.48
Refugees/5, FRUS, 1938, 741.
152 During the period 1938-1941 the Jewish population of Hungary numbered approximately 800,000.
László Kontler, A History of Hungary: Millennium in Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 374.
The Jewish population of Poland was estimated to be 3.5 million. Thompson, Refugees, 98.
153 The proposal to resettle the Jews of Europe on Madagascar, a French colonial possession off of the
southeast coast of Africa, was raised at various times following the conclusion of World War I: by the
United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Poland and Nazi Germany. During 1937 the Polish Government
105