Concluding Observations
Failures and lack of success do not in any way detract from the merit of the good effort. Of rejections and disappointments, the Holy See experienced many, as indeed did also the many and varied Jewish organizations and men of devotion who saw their struggles reduced to saving the small minority of victims lucky enough to be in a special position, while witnessing, helplessly, the daily massacre of the vast majority.
As Professor Burkhart Schneider said in his concluding remarks to Volume 9 of the Actes, For the right understanding also of this volume of documents, it must be considered that it is impossible to reconstruct the whole picture of events from the Actes alone, even when they exist and are published in such a large number. What is preserved in writing and transmitted is often only a pale shadow of the reality. And if that is true in general, it applies all the more in the field of charitable activities, which the Church tried to develop. For charity and its initiatives pass unnoticed, to a fair extent, when it is a question of a scientific collection of data, which is necessarily dry and detached.
To that should be added one further observation on the question of the meaning of papal action. It has been said — and even recently, in a book by an American priest (Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust, 1939- 1943, by John F. Morley, KTAV Publishing House, New York, 1980) — that the Holy See was concerned only with the safety of Catholic Jews and not with the safety of other Jews. This view is certainly unhistoric and is contradicted not only in this, Volume 10 of the Actes, but in those that preceded. The close and constant collaboration of the leading world Jewish organizations with the Holy See in matters concerning the Jews, and the close relationships between the nuncios and the local leaders of the Jewish communities, are eloquent witness that the Holy See did in fact carry out its humanitarian mission without distinction of nationality, religion or race. To say otherwise is to do violence to the historical record and to perpetrate a gratuitous denigration of a great humanitarian and Pope.