Evian set the stage for tragedy

PAT JOHNSON

As the Vancouver community and the world marked the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht Sunday, another anniversary, of another cataclysmic event in 1938, went almost unnoticed.

This year also marks the 70th anniversary of the Evian Conference, which took place in the resort of Evian-les-bains, in France, in July 1938. While Kristallnacht is remembered as the moment when the theory of Mein Kampf turned to the practice of the Final Solution, the Evian Conference is perhaps more illustrative of how the Holocaust was able to have its catastrophic breadth of impact.

Kristallnacht, an orchestrated attack on Jews and Jewish property across Germany and Austria, may arguably have never happened in November had the Evian Conference not preceded it in July. From July 6-15, 1938, delegates from 32 countries assembled at Evian-les-bains ostensibly to determine which countries among them would open their refugee or immigration policies to accommodate the endangered Jews of Europe.

The conference was convened, at the urging of U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, to address the fate of the Jews in Germany and the recently annexed Austria, since the scope of Hitler's continental ambitions would not be realized until September 1939. Germany and Austria represented a tiny fraction of Europe's Jews, since the bulk of the Jewish population lived to the east, in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Hungary and Romania, a numerical fact that makes the failure of Evian to protect even this small number of Jews that much more despicable.

"Under pressure from his liberal supporters to do something for the Jews," the Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer has written, "Roosevelt called the conference to allow the refugees burden to be shared by many countries, and thus not alienate conservative and isolationist sentiment."

Present at Evian were representatives of most of the countries of Western Europe and the Americas, as well as New Zealand and Australia. In many cases, including those of Canada and the United States, delegates were low-level diplomats or bureaucrats, telegraphing the insignificance many governments invested in the event.

Present as observers were nongovernmental organizations, including refugee aid groups and Jewish groups, who were able only to watch from the bleachers as the world opted to do nothing.

Also present were the leading media outlets of Europe, including the Times of London, as well as two Chicago papers and three New York papers. The world was kept well abreast of developments.

Every single nation, save only the Dominican Republic, offered only excuses for not receiving more refugees. Most tempered their negligence with congenial expressions toward the Jews.

Golda Meir was one of the observers at Evian and, after the conference's failure, said: "There is only one thing I hope to see before I die and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore." Decades later, she would write of "the ludicrous capacity of the observer from Palestine, not even seated with the delegates, although the refugees under discussion were my own people...."

Chaim Weizmann, later to be Israel's first president, told the Manchester Guardian, "The world seemed to be divided into two parts – those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter."

The danger facing Jews in Nazi-occupied territories had been evident since at least 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws stripped them of German citizenship, eliminated legal protections and put in place punishing and degrading limitations on Jewish life and freedom. Despite this, Evian concluded not as a humanitarian rescue effort but, as historians have called it, "Hitler's green light for genocide." In fact, Hitler made direct reference to the refusal of the world to accept Jewish refugees, explicitly taking the world's insouciance toward the fate of Jews as a carte blanche to begin the Final Solution, with Kristallnacht, just weeks later, the de facto beginning of the Holocaust.

History has little point beyond informing the present. So what lessons does Evian hold for the contemporary world? The most obvious is the awesome and lethal power of the silence of good people.

Irving Abella, co-author of the definitive study of Canada's complicity, contends that this country was among the worst offenders in the lead-up to the Holocaust. His book's title, None is too Many, comes from the reported response of Canada's head of immigration at the time, Frederick Charles Blair, to the question of how many Jews Canada should welcome. History records that Blair equated the Jewish frenzy to find safe haven with hogs clamoring for the trough. However, Blair should not be uniquely scapegoated, since evidence supports the view that his superiors, all the way up to the prime minister and Canada's high commissioner to Britain, shared his prejudices.

A tight immigration policy inspired by the economic downturn after the First World War made the once-welcoming destinations of North America almost completely closed to refugees. But entrenched anti-Semitism was as much a factor.

Anti-Jewish attitudes of the time were exemplified by A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president from 1909-'33, whose position was that the presence of anti-Semitism could best be addressed by reducing the number of Jews admitted to colleges; in other words, the victims invite their own repression – as if Jews, by their very presence, were the cause of prejudice, rather than its victims. This attitude justified limitations on Jews admitted to universities, and was basically identical to the excuses used by countries to keep Jews out, to far more catastrophic ends. The Australian delegate to the Evian conference said, "As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one."

It is a peculiar characteristic of anti-Semitism to blame the victim, in the oblique way Harvard's president did, or in the explicit way we see today every time a bomb goes off in Israel and the world reminds us that Israeli policies are at least partially to blame for the exploding jihadis and their nail- and projectile-filled explosives. But the lessons of Kristallnacht are clear: do not underestimate the genocidal threats of a madman, no matter how ludicrous his ramblings may sound; stand up to prejudice and inequality in its infancy because, as it grows, it becomes more uncontrollable; and do not misjudge the human capability for evil.

The lessons of the Evian Conference are probably even more important and heeded even less than those of Kristallnacht. Perhaps the message was expressed most succinctly, albeit in an entirely different context, by Dr. Martin Luther King, who warned that the world "will have to repent ... not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

The lesson of Kristallnacht is the terrible potential in the hateful words and deeds of bad people. The lesson of Evian is the tragic potential of silence.

We have no shortage today of evil words, deeds or bad people. There are forces of evil and darkness and, in their shadows, there is silence where we would hope for voices of reason. Even as we confront the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hezbollah and countless like-minded parties, it is not so much the potential for another Kristallnacht that justifiably animates our anxieties, as the possibility of another Evian.

Pat Johnson is, among other things, managing director, programs and communications, for the Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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