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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
January 29, 2005
Letters to the Editor
The Washington Post
letters@washpost.com
Dear editor:
In your January 28, 2005 edition, Peter Black of the U.S. Holocast Memorial Museum is quoted as justifying the Roosevelt administration's refusal to bomb the Auschwitz death camp, on the grounds that some of the Jewish prisoners might have been killed.
While Mr. Black's concern is understandable, it is worth noting the different perspective offered by former Auschwitz inmates themselves. Some years ago, in a supermarket in my old Congressional district in Brooklyn, I chanced to meet a woman who had a tattooed number on her arm. When she told me she had been in Auschwitz, I asked her what she thought of the argument that bombing the camp would have been wrong because prisoners would have been killed. She replied: “It would have been our finest hour, because we assumed we would all be killed anyway and this would at least have shown us that the world had not forgotten us and some of the Nazis would certainly have been killed as well.” Nobel Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, too, has addressed this issue. In his famous book, Night, Wiesel described how, on August 20, 1944, he and other Auschwitz inmates saw Allied planes bombing the German oil factories just a few miles from the gas chambers and crematoria: "We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it alone would have claimed hundreds of victims on the spot. But we were no longer afriad of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life." Indeed, that is what an Allied bombing of the gas chambers would have accomplished--it would have interrupted the mass-murder process and given life to at least some of the Jews who were doomed to imminent slaughter.
Sincerely,
Stephen J. Solarz
U.S. House of Representatives, 1975-1993
(Member, Advisory Committee, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies)
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