INTRODUCTION
by Dr. Joseph L. Lichten
In the fall of 1963 I was granted an audience with His Holiness Pope Paul VI, who thanked me for a book I had presented to him as a token of my esteem. Since the book dealt with the events of the Second World War, the conversation turned quite naturally to Pope Pius XII. I lamented that the full record of the Holy See's wartime activities during the most trying period for the world Jewish communities could not be fully known until the Vatican archives were opened. Pope Paul smiled warmly and said: I hope I will be able to be of help in this.
The archives were indeed opened, undoubtedly for reasons more crucial than my own comment, and three years later I received Volume I of the Actes et Documents du Saint Siege Relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, autographed by Paul VI, dated May 26, 1966. Ten bulky volumes of the Actes have since appeared, and recently Father Robert Graham, S.J., has written a remarkable synthesis of the documents contained in Volume X, which covers the last 18 months of the war.
Father Graham's monograph, which concerns the humanitarian interventions of the Holy See, pictures the period of the war so full of tragic memories, interspersed with only a few more hopeful moments.
It was the time when Polish Jewry, three and half million strong, with a thousand-year tradition of organized communal life and renowned scholarly record, ceased to exist; it was the time when Jews from other European countries were being annihilated in Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers. Hungary, due to its unusual internal political situation, was the only country in which a majority of the Jews managed to survive, living however in constant fear of what the next day would bring.
Naturally, the tenth volume of the Actes can be fully understood and appreciated only in conjunction with the events of the previous years, described in the earlier volumes, and Father Graham in his monograph used such a retrospective method. He provides, for example, sights into the peregrinations of the children evacuated from Romania to Palestine, across Bulgaria and Turkey, in which the Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo played an influential role. Through the year 1944, Pope Pius XII provided funds to aid Romanian Jews, especially those in Transnistria. Similarly, every rescue action in Slovakia in the closing year of the war was being undertaken in the spirit of the Pope's personal message to the Slovak government, opposing the deportation of Jews to death camps. Even so, only a quarter of the Jewish community in Slovakia survived. Although the outcome was tragic, the Holy See's interventions should not be minimized. Father Graham cautiously assesses the circumstances:
Obviously, one should not suppose that whatever positive results were achieved through these initiatives were due solely, or even largely, to reputed Vatican "influence". To do so would be to underestimate the vast and intensive activity of the Jewish organizations themselves. Yet, the gratitude of the Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Safran, was no less sincere and justified.
In Hungary, there were still 750,000 Jews at the beginning of 1944. Their "dark hour" began in March of that year, immediately after the German invasion of the country. Writes Eugene Levai in his classical book on the martyrdom of the Hungarian Jewry:
From that day on, acting in accordance with the instructions of the Holy See and always in the name of Pius XII, the Nuncio never ceased from intervening against the disposition concerning Jews, and the inhuman character of the anti-Jewish Legislation.
Most impressive in that respect was the open telegram which Pius XII sent on June 25, 1944 to the Hungarian leader, Admiral Horthy. The text of the wire in included in the volume, and Father Graham extensively quotes from it.
The documents in the Actes also described in detail the Holy See's activities in Italy, paying special attention to the well-known involvement of Church institutions in hiding Jews in Rome. Much of this information has now become part of an official record. (In fact, I devoted several pages to this subject in my own monograph, A Question of Judgment: Pius XII and the Jews.) Father Graham includes in his volume many letters of appreciation from several Jewish organizations and prominent Jewish community leaders. He also notes that in some cases there was "synchronization of papal and Jewish rescue action." Volume X, he says, "provides more graphic substance to these acknowledgments in the precise narration." A watchful student of the mounting literature on this subject will undoubtedly notice that in studies critical of the Holy See's behavior these facts are somewhat bashfully shunned; they seem to upset some writers' apple carts. The new volume brings these facts back to light.
Another issue which merits additional clarification is whether, as some authors have asserted, the Holy See acted more often and more vigorously in behalf of baptized Jews than in behalf of Jewish communities. Father Graham considers this question in his monograph and concludes that the nuncio's efforts to save converted Jews did not detract from their action in defense of the haunted Jews - actions which became ever more energetic as time went on and the danger of total annihilation drew nearer. Furthermore, their pleas for the baptized were as natural as was the anxiety of the Jewish institutions over the fate of their own co-religionists. Finally, there was an element of naiveté' on the part of those who alleged that papal nuncios engaged in preferential treatment of baptized Jews, because a countless number of baptismal certificates were not genuine. When a Red Cross worker objected, saying that forged documents violated the Geneva Convention, the Apostolic Nuncio in Hungary replied:
My son, you need have no qualms of conscience because rescuing innocent men and women is a virtue. Continue your work for the glory of God.
It is beyond the scope of this brief introduction to analyze the Holy See's efforts against the background of Allied assistance — or lack of assistance — to European Jews in distress. There was a dead silence over the matter for a very long time. Only recently was the "terrible secret" of Western complacency revealed; only in the past few years have people begun to ask why Auschwitz was not bombed.
Father Graham's monograph will stimulate many more reflections.
The closing months of the war sealed the fate of world Jewry, marking a disaster, the extent of which cannot be fully assessed even today, almost 40 years later. If we are to have a balanced view of the past, it is pertinent that we should know as many facts, as many details as is possible. It is our sacred duty to establish what happened — what was not done but also what was done. It is especially important that we should know what was done, not merely for the sake of consolation but in order to understand the truth and to do justice to those who stretched a helping hand to the Jews in those tragic days. Many authors have been in a hurry to write, to accuse, to blame. Perhaps it would have been wiser to wait for the last volumes of the Actes to appear.