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

concrete proposals…” 67 Haganah historian Dr. Yehuda Slutsky described the “highsounding,
emotional declarations” of the conference delegates but noted that when faced
with the need to create a rational and workable plan to resettle refugees the
representatives became universally “evasive.” 68 Solomon Adler-Rudel concluded that the
sole accomplishment of the international meeting was the creation of the
Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees based in London that ultimately
proved to be totally ineffectual. “It offered small comfort to the refugees, the potential
refugees and the Jews in general, and was a cruel disappointment to the Jewish
representatives who came to Evian.” 69
Conference:
One Jewish delegate summed up the sense of futility represented by the
“When the old trees of Evian cast their evening shadows over Lake
Geneva and the bright lights of the Casino shone across the serene
waters, I was overcome with grief and despair over the situation….All
our work would soon be ended by a policy of sauve-qui peut [“Every
man for himself”]. The course which the Evian Conference was
taking...was a tragedy whose certain end was destruction. The gates had
been closed before us.” 70
Editorialist William Zukerman observed (two weeks prior to the opening
session) that the fate of the Jewish people appeared to hang in the balance at Evian but
reports emanating from the Jewish European press were, for a variety of reasons, “almost
[too] pathetic” to read and were the potential harbinger of possible failure. The Evian
67 Tenenbaum, “The Crucial Year,” 46.
68 Yehuda Slutsky, History of the Haganah, vol. 2, 283 cited in Beit-Zvi, Post-Uganda Zionism, 139.
69 Adler-Rudel, “The Evian Conference,” 259.
70 Nora Levin. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 (NY: The Schocken
Books, 1973), 77.
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