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.