Bush at Yad Vashem

One of the things that is in our mind this week, as the candidates from both parties scramble for footing in the race for the presidency, is the exchange between President Bush and Secretary of State Rice at Yad Vashem. No one emerges from a visit to Israel's Holocaust memorial unshaken, and the president reportedly teared up during his visit last week and, turning to Secretary Rice at an aerial photo of Auschwitz, said "we should have bombed it." On the plane afterwards, Ms. Rice told reporters she and the president had been "talking about the often discussed 'could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks. . . .' because, you know, there are three or four different explanations about why the United States chose not to try to bomb the train tracks."

This is something to think about when we are in the midst of a great political contest in respect of a war in which vast enemies are once again maneuvering against both America and the Jews. In recent decades the question of which the president and his state secretary spoke has been explored by myriad historians, including one, David Wyman, who wrote a book, "The Abandonment of the Jews," blaming America for not doing more. It's an important book, but there is a competing view. Our own favorite essay on the topic is one written by Lucy Dawidowicz, whose portrait hangs in the editorial rooms of the Sun. Her essay was published in her book called "What is the Use of Jewish History?", which was edited by Neal Kozodoy and issued in 1992 not long after Dawidowicz's death.

Dawidowicz's essay, "Could America Have Rescued Europe's Jews?", mocks the idea that bombing the train tracks would have saved — or even helped. It quotes a standard history reporting that the Germans repaired their tracks "with admirable efficiency" and in some cases restored traffic only a few hours after tracks were bombed. In respect of bombing Auschwitz itself, Dawidowicz warned that the slaves there would have been killed in such a bombing and that if any escaped they would have likely been recaptured by the Germans. The Nazis themselves, she wrote, began dismantling Auschwitz in November of 1944 but kept killing the Jews who arrived there until January 1945 by sending them on death marches into Germany and Austria.

A more humane American refugee policy, Dawidowicz argued, would have saved tens of thousands of lives. She suggested that if the German military machine had been stopped in 1941 by Allies better prepared for war, European Jewry might have been saved. On the whole, she defended Franklin Roosevelt from Professor Wyman's criticism. And she went on to a deeper lesson from the destruction of European Jewry, one that she wrote is about political power. "Without political power Jews had no chance for survival. Had a Jewish state existed in 1939, even one as small as Israel today, but militarily as competent, the terrible story of six million dead might have had another outcome," she wrote. "A Jewish state would have made a difference."

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At the deep level, in other words, Lucy Dawidowicz, who had become quite conservative in her later years, was more radical than even the conservative critics who fault the Roosevelt administration. She was way past that argument. What history teaches, she taught us, is the importance of the State of Israel to the survival of the Jews. We don't know whether, in pondering the question of bombing Auschwitz or the rail lines to it, Mr. Bush found his way to Dawidowicz's essay, whether she became his guide for the perplexed. He is a wide reader, and it wouldn't surprise us. Mr. Bush's latest demarche in the Middle East may have left some in doubt of where he's going, but we'd like to think that his simple but eloquent inscription in the visitor's book at Yad Vashem — "God Bless Israel" — suggests he grasped the point Lucy Dawidowicz had come to understand.