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

A Belgian paper described the conclusion of the Evian Conference as a “gloomy
experience” for the many real and potential refugees who looked towards Lake Geneva
for solace and rescue. Despite the eloquent oratory and lofty idealism and the adoption of
some “proposals devoid of all merit” nothing of “practical” significance to alleviate the
sufferings and uncertainties of unwilling refugees was enacted. The participating nations
were driven and guided by their “foreign policy needs” and not the requirements of a
persecuted people. The only true success of the meeting, the paper believed, was the
cooperation of the United States with the European democratic States. 75
Alan Dowty concluded that the Evian Conference clearly demonstrated that the
“final lifeline—the right to flee—no longer existed” while Ya’acov Liberman believed
that the failure of the democracies to allow the Jews to be “immediately resettled” (an
unlikely possibility considering the domestic economic, social and political conditions of
the time) would culminate in Jews of Central Europe being exterminated. 76 Dr. Oscar
Jászi asserted that the problem of German and Austrian political refugees (inclusive of
Jews) represented a microcosm within the greater global problem of real and potential
refugees who had or may be forced to flee from the “intolerance of the Franco
dictatorship” and the expansion of Nazi influence over the nations of Central and Eastern
Europe. Any new mass migration, he believed, would create “a problem of such
magnitude” that it would defy resolution by the “normal methods of statecraft [that had
75 Le Peuple (Brussels), July 16, 1938 cited in Katz, “Public Opinions,” 124.
76 Dowty, Closed Borders, 94; Ya’acov Liberman, My China: Jewish Life in the Orient, 1900-1950
(Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 1998), 99.
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