THE JEWISH NEWS
Incorporating the Detroit Jewish. Chronicle commencing with issue of July 20, 1951
Member American Association of English-Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Association, National
Editorial Association.
Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17100 West Seven Mile Road, Detroit 35,
Mich., VE 8-9364. Subscription $5 a year. Foreign $6.
Entered as second class matter Aug. 6, 1942 at Post Offict., Detroit, Mich.. under act of Congress of March
3, 1871.
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
SIDNEY SHMARAK
Advertising Manager
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Circulation Manager
FRANK SIMONS
City Editor
Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the twenty-seventh day of Tishri, 5719. the following Scriptural selections
will be read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Bereshit, Gen. 1:1-6:8. Prophetical portion, Is. 42:5-43:10.
Licht Benshen, Friday, Oct. 10, 6:08 p.m.
VOL. XXXIV. No. 6
Page Four
October 10, 1958
Remember the Auschwitz Crimes
Unless the crimes of despots and
murderers are remembered by the gen-
erations that follow them, there is always
the danger that the horrors they perpe-
trated on mankind will be repeated.
Already, only 13 years after the defeat
of the Nazis, in a horrible world conflict,
there are evidences of a return to power
of some of the associates of Adolf Hitler.
It. is an indication that the crimes are
being forgotten, that the echoes of the
victims of concentration camps and the
suffocating gas chambers are below
whispering.
It is heartening, therefore, frequently
to hear a reminder of the crimes of the
last decade — so that their repetition
should be prevented. One such reminder
was the report from Brzezinka, Poland, to
the New York Times, by its correspond-
ent, A. M. Rosenthal, who wrote under
the heading "There Is No News From
Auschwitz":
The most terrible thing of all, some-
ho•, was that at Brzezinka the sun was
bright and warm, the rows of graceful pop-
lars were lovely to look upon and 071 the
grass near the gates children played.
It all seemed frighteningly wrong, as in
a nightmare, that at Brzezinka 'the sun
should ever shine or that there should be
light and greenness and the sound of young
laughtor. It would be fitting if at Brzezinka
the sun never shone and the grass with-
ered, because this is a place of unutter-
able terror.
And yet, every day, from all over the
world, people come to Brzezinka.„ quite
possibly the most grisly tourist center on
earth. They come for a variety of reasons
—to see if it could really have been true,
to remind themselves not to forget, to pay
homage to the dead by the simple act of
looking upon their place of suffering.
Brzezinka is a couple of miles from the
better-known southern Polish town of Os-
wiecim. Oswiecim has about 12.000 inhabi-
tans, is situated about 171 miles from
Warsaw and lies in a damp, marshy urea
at the eastern end of the pass called the
Moravian Gate. Brzezinka and Oswiecim
together formed part of that minutely
organized factory of torture and death Nazis
called Kozentratianslager Auschwitz.
By now, fourteen years after the last
batch of prisoners was herded naked into
the gas chambers by dogs and guards, the
story of Auschwitz has been told a great
many times. Some of the inmates have
written of those memories, of which sane
men cannot conceive. Rudolf Franz Ferdi-
nand Hoss, the superintendent of the camp,
before he was executed, wrote his detailed
memoirs of mass extermination and the
experiments on living bodies. Four million
people died here, the Poles say.
And so there is no news to report about
Auschwitz. There is merely the compul-
sion to write something about it, a com-
pulsion that grows out of a restless feeling
that to have visited Auschwitz and then
turned away without having said or written
anything would somehow be a grievous act
of discourtesy to those who died here.
Brzezinka and Oswiecim, are very quiet
places now; the screams can no longer be
heard. The tourist walks silently, quickly
at first to get it all over and then, as his
mind peoples the barracks and the chain-
ber.s and the dungeons and flogging posts,
he walks draggingly. The guide does not
say much either, because there is nothing
much for him to say after he has pointed.
For every visitor. there is one particu-
lar bit of horror that he knows he will
never forget. For some it is seeing the
rebuilt gas chamber at Oswiecim and be-
ing told that this is the "small one." For
others it is the fact that at Brzezinka, in
the ruins of the gas chambers and the
crematoria the Germans blew up when
they retreated, there are daisies growing.
There are visitors who gaze blankly at
the gas chambers and the furnaces because
their minds simply cannot encompass them,
but stand shivering before the great
mounds of human hair behind the plate
glass window or the piles of babies' shoes
or the brick cells where men sentenced to
death by suffocation were walled up.
One visitor opened his mouth in a silent
scream simply at the sight of boxes—
great stretches of three-tiered wooden boxes
in the woman's barracks, They were about
six feet wide, about three feet high, and
into them from five to ten prisoners were
shoved for the night.
A brick building where sterilization ex-
periments were carried out on women
prisoners. The guide . tries the door—it's
locked.. The visitor is grateful he does not
have to go in, and flushes with shame.
A long corridor where rows of faces
stare from the walls. Thousands of pictures,
the photographs of prisoners. They are all
dead now, the men and women who stood
before the cameras, and they all knew they
were to die.
They all stare blank-faced, but one
picture, in the middle row, seizes the eye
and wrenches the mind. A girl, 22 years
old, plumply pretty, blonde. What was the
thought that passed through her young
mind and is now her memorial on the wall
of the dead at Auschwitz?
Into the suffocation dungeons the visitor
is taken for a moment and feels himself
strangling. Another visitor goes • in,
stumbles out and crosses herself. There is
no place to pray at Auschwitz.
The visitors look pleadingly at each
other and say to the guide, "Enough."
There is nothing new to report about
Auschwitz. It was a sunny day and the
trees were green and at the gates the
children played.
This is a long quotation, but it is a
necessary one, in the effort to remind
our people not to forget their kinsmen
who died as martyrs in humanity's cause,
and to admonish a forgetting world to
remember the despots in order that
bigotry and cruelty may be banished from
the earth.
The New York Times' correspondent
rendered an important service to the
cause of human decency with his deeply
moving account of a visit in Brzezinka,
with his reminder of what had transpired
in a decade when inhumanity of man to
man — especially of nearly the entire
German people to the Jews — was the
order of the day. May the reminder in
the above and the hopes of all men of
good will and common decency make a
repetition of Nazi barbarism impossible.
Southern Tensions
Jews in many Southern communities
are reported to be very "nervous" over
their status as a result of the segregation -
activities among their neighbors.
The so-called "massive resistance"
that has been instituted against the
Supreme Court rulings and the attempts
to establish private schools are creating
many difficulties for the Jewish citizens.
It is reported that there is a rise in
anti-Semitism in Virginia areas, that an
11-year-old Jewish girl in Portsmouth,
Va., was beaten and tormented and called
"Jew-face", and that hate-sheets are
doing their dirty work.
Yet, there must be no relenting in
the observance of the established law of
the land, and there can be no yielding to
blackmail. The situation is a trying one
for our coreligionists, who are suffering
economic boycotts and whose lives are
threatened. But their triumph will be
part of the over-all triumph for democ-
racy, when all discriminatory practices
are ended and there is true equality for
all citizens of our country.
5.2
.tTA
KEEPING AN OE BEYOND THE WALL
Democracy and the Challenge
of Power:' People s Enigma
How are abuses of power in a democracy to be controlled?
Can they be controlled, and what methods are to be used in
the process?
In "Democracy and the Challenge of Power." published by
Columbia University Press (2960 B'way, N.Y. 27), Prof. David
Spitz, of Ohio State University, shows how democratic ideals
have taken root but are being interferred with through depriva-
tions imposed upon the people by private powers.
Since the measures that are taken to prevent abuses of
freedoms are not strong enough, Dr. Spitz's views provide food
for thought and possible action in the eventual strengthening
of democracy.
There is this warning in Prof. Spitz's analysis:
"Two considerations only can check the despotic practices
to which oligarchical governments are prone: a fear of revolu-
tion and a compassionate heart. But tyrants aware of the
apathy and timidity that suffocate even discontented men—
especially men who are themselyes rent into factions by
divisive group and ideological allegiances—have rarely been
hindered by a fear of general rebellion; and as the history of
authoritarian regimes only too well attests, tyranny and
tenderness go ill together. Self-restraint alone is no sufficient
brake on power."
Dr. Spitz indicates "various areas of American life where
one can justifiably speak of abuses of power, to discuss the
reasons why such manifestations of oppressive rule have defied
the general extensions of political democracy."
In this connection, dealing with economic sanctions, Dr.
Spitz makes this Observation:
"Examples of economic practices that vitiate the democ-
ratic rights of citizens can be multiplied endlessly. In almost
every aspect of our economic life, members of certain minority
groups find that they are either excluded from opportunities
afforded to others or are subjected to discriminatory practices
that impair their ability to exploit the opportunities that are
open to them. In medicine, for example, to take but one of
the professions, a Negro is still excluded from medical schools
and admitted to a very few others on a highly restrictible basis;
he is denied membership in many state and county medical
associations and is not admitted to practice in many of our
hospitals. Restrictive covenants are no langer enforceable
in a court of law, but they are still written; and one who
would sell or rent his hoine t.o a Negro or an Oriental or a
Jew may find that he can do so only at. the risk of losing
his job or having his place of business boycotted."
The author of this challenging book states that "it is not
the owner but the personnel manager who refuses to employ
or, if employed; to upgrade Negroes and Jews, or who hires
guards and imports strikebreakers with a more-than-usual com-
petence in the wielding of clubs and lethal weapons. It is not
the university president or the member of the board of trustees
but the admissions office which excludes or sets rigid quotas
for members of certain minority groups."
"The problem of power," Prof. Spitz suggests. • "must be
reduced . to the problem of reducing abuses of power." Since
the problems of controlling powers remain and "since a democra-
tic government is not monolithic but distributes power among
many individuals and agencies ... we can either attempt further
to profliterate the checking powers . . . or look to public
opinion to remove the oppressive powers and replace them with
reasonable rulers."
He admits that "even if the goal of enlightment were at-
tained, it would not follow that enlightened men would act
rightly." This is why prejudice is so largely impervious t.o the
appeal to the facts, why it is so little affected by reason. It
is true that law can restrain some discriminatory practices,
some coercive restrains that limit . . . democratic liberties and
opportunities of some citizens But it cannot restrain all of them.
Thus, the author states, "for the control of private powers,
we can look to governments and to a sense of seIf-restraint
The final trust remains . . . in the intrinsic sense of decency
of a people."
His conclusion is: "Whether reason. so feeble in its per-
suasive power in the past, can yet prove equal to the task is
still an enigma of the future."