64 Friday, September 19, 1980
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
U. of Minnesota Volume Covers Christian Holocaust Silence
By PAUL DIENHART
University of Minnesota
The term "The Silence"
has come to stand for the
failure of organized Chris-
tianity to effectively speak
out against the Nazis'
planned extermination of
six million Jews.
The generally accepted
explanation is that Chris-
tians simply did not know
what was happening to the
Jews. With his soon-to-be-
published book, "So It Was
True," Robert Ross proves
that explanation false, rais-
ing the more disturbing
possibility that church
authorities decided not to
get involved in stopping
what they had to know was
one of the great horrors of
modern times.
Ross, an associate profes-
sor of religious studies at
the University of Min-
nesota, studied the report-
ing on the Jews' plight in 52
American Protestant mag-
azines from 1933 to 1945.
"The story was told from be-
gining to end," Ross said in
an interview. "The silence
was not a silence of ignor-
ance or lack of information."
Although the American
Protestant press re-
ported accurately on the
atrocites suffered by the
Jews, the reports were
usually couched in skep-
ticism, Ross said. The im-
pact of the reporting was
thus diminished.
Even in 1945, when the
doubting editors were able
to see the death camps with
their own eyes, the reaction
was more shock and resig-
nation than outrage, Ross
said. In the end, the editors
and writers seemed unable
to cope with something as
unreal, even unimaginable,
as the mass slaughter of
millions of people. Perhaps
the editors did not read
their own periodicals," he
writes.
As early as February
1933, reports of restrictive
laws, tear-gas bombings
and atrocities against the
German Jews began to ap-
pear in American Protes-
tant magazines. The reports
were often small items in
news digests. In articles and
editorials, the Nazis tended
to get the benefit of the
doubt, Ross found.
"We know that the Jews
control the movies, the
newspapers and the
money-market. It may not
be out of place to find out
where Hitler has received
his strange ideas," said a
story in the Lutheran Com-
panion. An editorial in the
Moody Bible Institute
Monthly asked "Christian
people to suspend their
judgment about Germany's
present dealings with Jews
until both sides have an
opportunity to be heard."
Kristallnacht — The
Night of Broken Glass —
forced the American Pro-
testant press to shed
some of its naivete in No-
vember 1938. A young
Jew's assassination of a
German embassy official
in Paris set the Nazis on a
rampage of terror.
Synagogues were
burned, Jewish homes
and bigsinesses de-
stroyed and many Jews
were arrested or killed.
After Kristallnacht, per-
secution of Jews became
increasingly direct.
"The recent brutal at-
tacks bear the earmarks of
official Nazi planning," re-
ported the Lutheran Com-
panion.
Despite increased cover-
age of the Jewish situation
in Germany, the American
Protestant press continued
to be highly skeptical of the
atrocity reports.
The coverage in the
Christian Century is repre-
sentative of the skepticism
that laced much of the re-
porting, Ross said. In 1942,
when there were six death
camps operating in Poland,
the Century's editor,
Charles Clayton Morrison,
wrote, "Beyond doubt, hor-
rible things are happening
to the Jews in Poland. It is
even possible the Nazis are
herding all the Jews of
Europe into Poland . . . with
the deliberate intention of
exterminating them there."
Then Morrison's edito-
rial began to quibble
about the actual number
of Jews killed and the
rumors — eventually
proved true — of corpses
being made into fertilizer
and soap. "It is unpleas-
antly reminiscent of the
cadaver factory lie which
was one of the prop-
aganda triumphs of the
First World War," he
wrote.
"What's important is that
Morrison bore reluctant
witness to the mass mur-
ders of Jews in Poland,"
Ross said. "There was a con-
tinual fear of propaganda
that led the editors almost
always to report what they
heard with a question mark.
There was a huge prop-
aganda effort in World War
I, and in 1925 most of the
stories were proved false.
The editors were young re-
porters at the time, and I'm
sure they took note of that
embarrassment."
As late as the summer of
1944, when a death camp
was liberated near Lublin,
Poland, the editor of the
Christian Century was still
peevishly writing about in-
flated estimates of people
killed and the World War I
corpse factory tale.
"Clearly, Charles Clayton
Morrison was a hard man to
convince, even though his
own periodical had been re-
porting evidence of the
existence of such death
camps for some time," Ross
writes.
In 1945, Morrison went to
see a death camp. His edito-
rial, entitled "Gazing Into
the Pit," said, "We have
found it hard to believe that
the reports from the Nazi
concentration camps could
be true. Almost desperately
we have tried to think that
they must be wildly exag-
gerated. But such puny bar-
ricades cannot stand up
against the terrible facts. It
will be a long, long time be-
fore our eyes will cease to
see those pictures of naked
corpses piled like firewood
or those mounds of carrion
flesh and bones. The thing is
well-nigh incredible. But it
happened."
A similar editorial in The
Signs of the Times carried
the appropriate headline:
"So It Was True!"
Ross said that almost
no detail of the death
camps revealed when
many camps were liber-
ated in 1945 had not been
reported by 1943. Despite
this information,
churches mounted no
campaign to force the
government to directly
help the Jews.
"I'm not ready to charge
American Protestantism
with total complicity in the
suffering of the Jews," said
Ross, who received his
undergraduate degree from
a conservative church col-
lege and once considered
entering the Protestant
ministry. "I'm more con-
vinced that there was a
built-in complacency about
the situation. There always
seemed to be the feeling
that if the situation was so
bad the government would
do something. The govern-
ment's line always was,
`The best way to help the
Jews is to win the war.' "
After the war, many
eyewitness accounts pub-
lished about the horrors of
the camps helped dispel
skepticism that remained,
Ross writes. - A young Bap-
tist minister, for example,
wrote to the Baptist Herald
about visiting Buchenwald
and seeing lampshades
made of tattooed human
skin, an ornamental mate-
rial much favored by the
commandant's wife.
"But the magazines still
do not seem to have said
what needed to be said,"
Ross writes. "There was no
indignation or words of
moral outrage at such evi-
dence of human degrada-
tion."
One group of maga-
zines preached forgive-
ness. "Vengeance be-
longs to God and not to
us," the Mennonite wrote
of the upcoming war
trials. Other magazines
kept silent. "Atrocity
stories afford some
people a chance for emo-
tional debauch. We be-
lieve that the less said
about such matters the
better," wrote the editor
of Advance. And the
same month the r' - ris-
tian Century ran •ri-
son's "Gazing Into the
Pit" editorial it ran an ar-
ticle on the death camps
which asked, "How many
of these chambers repre-
sented genuine efforts to
kill lice?" It is a question
Ross finds "startling, if
not incredible.
In fact, Ross found that
reporting on the European
Jews as Jews almost disap-
peared by late 1945.
How does one explain the
skepticism and lack of
moral outrage? "The death
of six million people — two
million of them children —
in organized death factories
is nearly beyond human
comprehension," Ross said.
"I have trouble com-
prehending it. Once you
begin studying the
Holocaust you're never the
same. In my mind I'm con-
stantly mulling over how
such a horror could have
happened."
He said he believes
churches are more sensi-
tive to correcting at-
rocities today, noting the
relief efforts for the boat
people.
Robert Ross' book, "So It
Was True," is scheduled to
be published by the Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press this
month.
,
The Dead Sea May Soon Supply Most of Israel's Electricity
By ELLEN DAVIDSON
Israel Government
Tourism Administration
EIN BOKEK — In the not
too distant future, the com-
bination of the Dead Sea
and the sun shining on it
could produce most of the
electricity needs of Israel,
which is almost totally de-
pendent on imported oil, ac-
cording to Minister of
Energy Yitzhak Modai.
Modai was here to inaugu-
rate the world's largest
solar electric power station,
This unique solar pond will provide energy for a
adjacent to the Dead Sea,
the lowest point on earth.
Dead Sea resort hotel.
Modai said that the two-
Officials of Ormat Tur- political dependencies.
acre solar pond and its
The concept of the
bines
and Solmat Ltd., the
150-kilowatt power plant
solar pond, which may
nearby demonstrates the companies which developed spell the end of petro-
commercial viability of and built the plant, pre- leum dependence in all
solar power. The Energy dicted that an expanded areas of the world where
Minister expressed the hope system of solar ponds in the water, salt and sun are
that the unique plant de- Dead Sea region could meet available, is the brain-
veloped and produced by Is- almost all of Israel's elec- child of Dr. Rudolf Bloch
raeli scientists and tricity needs by the -end of and Professor Harry Zvi
engineers was the start of a the century. For Israel this
process of converting the means a huge decrease in oil Tabor.
The pool, lined in special
Dead Sea into' a "Sea of imports, accompanied by a
black material, is made up
decrease
in
economic
and
Life."
•
11,
..•• •
vt V
of layers of water differing
in salinity. Very hot water
accumulates in the bottom
layers of the pond from
which energy may be extra-
ted. Hot water is passed
through heat exchangers
producing energy to power
turbines designed specially
to produce electricity.
, Normally, in a non-solar
pond, heat from the sun is
reradiated from the water
because of convection cur-
rents. A cycle of constant
motion between cooler and
warmer water prevents the
buildup of heat in the water,
so that even on the hottest
summer day a lake will not
usually be warmer than a
tepid bathtub.
In a solar pond, which is
specifically designed to
store heat from the sun, the
opposite is true. When a
shallow pond is layered
with salt water on the bot-
tom and fresh water on top,
the heavier salt water is
trapped below and just gets
hotter and hotter, and can
reach temperatures near
the boiling point. And once
the pond has heated up, hot
water can be pumped year
round even when the sun is
not shining.
According to Dr.
Shmuel Ofry, Coor-
dinator of Energy Re-
search and Development
at the Ministry of Fi-
nance, one of the biggest energy have been solved,
breakthroughs of the but using it to produce elec-
solar pond system is that tricity, for example, winds
it has built-in storage. up costing between 25 and
Some other solar energy 30 times more than fossil
devices are not very use- fuels.
"With improved technol-
ful when it is cloudy, and
have therefore been used ogy, the solar pond could be-
mainly together with come competitive with oil —
auxiliary energy sources. you don't need the glass, the
The solar pond could metal frames of standard
change all that, and in addi- solar collectors," he says,
tion, it is cheap. "The major "just the cost of digging and
stumbling block in the use lining the pond." Ofry is re-
of solar energy has been ferring to the flat plate col-
that the cost is prohibitive," lectors which decorate
says Dr. Ofry. "All the tech- many Israeli houses and are
nical problems of solar limited to heating water.
The Silver Platter
By NATHAN ALTERMAN
From Israel Government Press Service
"A state is not handed to a people on a silver platter." (C
Weizmann)
The earth grows still. The lurid sky slowly pales over
smoking borders. Heartsick, but still living. a people stands
by to greet the uniqueness of the miracle. Readied, they wait
beneath the moon, Wrapped in awesome joy, before the light.
Then, soon, a girl and boy step forward, and slowly
walk before the waiting nation; in work . garb and heavy-
shod they climb in stillness. Wearing yet the dress of battle,
the grime of aching day and fire-filled night unwashed,
weary unto death, not knowing rest, but wearing youth like
dewdrops in their hair.
Silently the two approach, and stand. Are they of the
quick or of the dead? Through wondering tears, the people
stare. "Who are you, the silent two?" And they reply:
"We are the silver platter upon which the Jewish state
was served to you." And speaking, fall in shadow at the
nation's feet. Let the rest in Israel's chronicles be told.