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

persecution” but without knowing where Hitler would “strike next” how could the Jewish
victims “find certain sanctuary?” 43 The British muted acceptance of the Anschluss was
criticized as “sheer boot-licking” while the League of Nations refused to accept the
Italian seizure of Abyssinia. 44 One Jewish editorialist observed that the fate of Austrian
Jewry was clear. “Hitler’s brown-shirted executioners [were] already at work” and their
labors would not cease “until the destruction of the Jewish community in Austria is
complete.” 45
The New York Times, noting that the daily Jewish suicide rate in Vienna had
dramatically increased, commented that “death [had become to the Jews] the kindest
gift”; a means of avoiding the “great gates of the central prison” which, for many, marked
the “first stage of [perhaps the final] journey to the concentration camp. 46 Austria had
been transformed into a “vast prison from which there is no outlet and with which all
chance of a livelihood is dead.” Jewish leaders noted that the number of suicides was
“increasing by the hour” but such acts were viewed with an air of complacency by the
Gestapo. 47 The Viennese police reported that between March 12 and 21 approximately
one hundred suicides had been reported, averaging four to five per day. 48 Reportedly a
“suicide epidemic” was rampant among Jewish students and youth who were expelled
43 Prescott Evening Courier, March 12, 1938, 3.
44 Evening Post, April 6, 1938, 10.
45 Norton Belth, “The Fate of Austrian Jewry,” The Sentinel, March 24, 1938, 6.
46 G.E.R. Gedye, “Old Vienna is Dead: A Nazi Vienna is Born,” New York Times, March 20, 1938, 61.
47 Washington Post, March 17, 1938, 1.
48 The Times, March 24, 1938, 14. By the end of April 1938 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported
that at least 2,000 Jews had committed suicide. Schneiderman, ed., American Jewish Year Book Review of
the Year 5698, 214.
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