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

enthusiasm for colonization schemes merely represented further attempts at the “politics
of gesture.” 79
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Museum, Hyde Park, New York, had included in its
core exhibit a panel describing the President’s response to the Holocaust:
During the 1930s, as many European Jews were looking for a safe
haven from official anti-Semitism, members of the State Department
enforced the bloodless immigration laws with cold rigidity. Yet even
Roosevelt's bitterest critics concede that nothing he could have done--
including bombing the rails leading to Auschwitz in 1944--would have
saved significant numbers from annihilation, let alone dissuaded the
Nazis from doing what they were so intent on doing.
Twenty-five Holocaust historians have criticized this statement on the grounds
that it assigns the primary responsibility for underfilling the annual immigration quota to
the State Department, essentially absolving the President of any personal accountability.
The actions of Varian Fry and his associates in France (rescued 2,000 Jews in Vichy,
1940-1941), Raoul Wallenberg (Swedish diplomat who saved thousands in Hungary
1944) and the U.S. War Refugee Board (established in January 1944, primarily funded by
American Jews and helped to end deportation of Hungarian Jews from Budapest to
Auschwitz) and others demonstrated that interventions to save lives, both before and after
the onset of hostilities, was potentially possible. Roosevelt’s critics claim he could have
offered temporary shelter in the U.S. for the duration of the war, pressured the British to
alter their restrictive stance on Jewish immigration into Palestine or could have provided
greater funding to the IGCR and the War Refugee Board. 80
79 Gurlock, America, American Jews and the Holocaust, 267.
80 “Roosevelt Museum Distorts FDR’s Holocaust Record” by Rafael Medoff, April 2005 available from
http://www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2005-08-fdr.php; Internet; accessed June 12, 2010.
337