"We Are Wanderers"

This week the No. 1 question in the world was what to do to help the Jews. Irish Catholic Joseph Patrick Kennedy, U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, got credit for having activated Neville Chamberlain's negotiations in Paris which found a partial answer to the question. Nowhere were people more horrified at Adolf Hitler's pogrom than in Britain. A poll showed that more than seven Britons out of ten, while sympathetic to Chamberlain, considered the Nazi terror a bar to Chamberlain's "appeasing" relations with the Reich.

In Paris Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier agreed to open their colonies at once to 10,000 German Jews apiece. In both London and Paris, banking houses were ready to lend to help the Jews get started there, in Ethiopia or elsewhere, and they wanted U. S. bankers to chip in. The U. S. Department of Labor was considering the possibility of hypothecating its German-Austrian immigration quota for the next three years to admit up to 81,000 refugees into the country. Secretary of the Interior Ickes suggested that as his Matanuska colony of dust-bowl refugees grew, it would open up a frontier where Jewish professional people would be needed and welcome. This was long-range stuff, however, and the Secretary was emphatic on the point that other U. S. territories like the Hawaiian Islands and Puerto Rico were already overpopulated.

Pending some sweeping total solution of finding a home for 500,000 persecuted and unwanted German Jews, last week some few shiploads of Jewish refugees continued to arrive in Manhattan, bringing such few Jews as can manage to escape from Naziland under present harsh conditions. Each Jew who came in last week on the S. S. Westernland, for example, was a human story of almost every overtone from courage to despair, or grief to joy.

Happiest of the lot was a handsome Viennese youth. Two years ago he began to correspond with then 14-year-old Lillian Wolfram, member of "The Pen Pals," a Glenside, Pa., high-school club which encourages boys & girls of different countries to write to each other. When Lillian's distant Pen Pal found himself getting into trouble with the Nazis, Father Wolfram undertook to get him out of the Reich and last week he arrived, a robust 18 to Lillian's sweet 16. "I am a Jew and just call me Harry," he smilingly told ship-newscameramen for whom he readily posed. "I am afraid that, if I told you my family name, harm might come to my mother."

Some other incidents of the week precipitated by the great World Question:

>Some of the Irish wanted to help some of the Jews. A committee of Catholics and Jews was formed in Dublin under Frank Fahy, Speaker of the Dail, to make a public appeal for funds to rescue and house 20 families of German and Austrian refugees.

>Some Afrikanders were not prepared to be hospitable to Jews. In Johannesburg a meeting of Boers turned into an anti-Jewish demonstration. There were shouts of "Down With the Jews!" and 30 were injured in a disgraceful exhibition of South African hooliganism.

>Commented the Berliner Boersen-Zeitung on a letter in the New York Daily News signed by Reader Max Rosenberg, who proposed that "professional killers" be freed from U. S. jails and sent to Germany to assassinate the Fuehrer:

"This confirms 100% everything that has been said in Germany in these days concerning the criminal character of World Jewry and the existence of a Jewish mass conspiracy against National-Socialist Germany."

>Nobody knew how many Jews in Germany, Austria or the rest of the world have committed suicide for no reason except intolerable sadness. But typical was the case of a Mrs. Julia Glus, 28-year-old Austrian Catholic refugee who turned on the gas in her apartment. This happened not in Vienna or Berlin but in Brooklyn, N. Y. Said Widower Glus afterward: "We are Christians, but we do not approve of the Jewish martyrdom."

>Jewish retailers 30,000 strong closed their delicatessen, kosher butcher shops and pharmacies in Jewish sections of Metropolitan New York for 60 minutes last week. Some of them hung out signs: PEOPLE OF AMERICA, STOP HITLER NOW, AND SAVE CIVILIZATION! Bigger retail establishments like R. H. Macy & Co. made formal denials of rumors that they would fire their Aryan employes, replace them with refugee Jews.

>Modernist Sculptor Alexander Archipenko, who excites his following by making his concave surfaces convex and his convex surfaces concave, proposed to erect a great statue of great Jew Moses. Said he: "Ever since the Nazis inaugurated their reign of terror, I have been thinking of a figure that would represent justice. . . . In Moses, I believe we have that figure! He changed the laws of life for the Jews, and through the Jews for humanity! In my figure of Moses, the distressed of all religions may find a reaffirmation of their faith!"*

>In the New York Herald Tribune Walter Lippmann, most statesmanly Jewish pundit in the U. S., took a sober and broad-gauge view of the situation. Said he:

"It would be a grave misunderstanding of the problem to think that the only question is how to find a refuge for a tormented minority, or that even this problem can be solved by removing a half million Jews from the Reich. If any one doubts that this is not the problem let him look to Poland, where the Poles are beginning to ask whether the great powers are going to assist Hitler by caring for his victims while they fail to provide an outlet for the surplus population of a nation that does not resort to such violence. . . .

"It is obviously no accident that the end of a century of free migration from Europe should have been followed immediately by a wave of revolutionary imperialism in the very region of Europe where the pressure of surplus population is the greatest and the post-war impoverishment the most acute. It is no accident, surely, that with the non-European world closed to European migration and in large part to European trade, there should have followed so quickly a fierce movement toward empire and a ruthless spoliation of the more defenseless minorities. . . .

"The problem is utterly insoluble, except in a small number of individual cases, if it is looked upon as requiring no more than the finding of a haven of refuge for the immediate victims of the most calculated cruelty. . . ."

Pundit Lippmann, having no specific solution for his German fellow-Jews, did have a solution, by which German Jews would benefit, for easing Europe's desperate population pressure: Let great Africa be colonized with about a million Europeans of all nations every year for years to come.

>But Walter Lippmann's analysis and recommendations to colonize German Jews and other Europeans in Africa found no favor in one area of Jewish sentiment. Some Jews were beginning to resent as a blow to Jewish dignity the world's scramble to find some frontier on which Jews could be settled. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress expressed this sentiment most violently when, speaking out for the first time on the pogrom, he stormed:

"We are not a race of beggars though we are wanderers. We are resolved that we are not to become nor to be dealt with as a refugee people because the German-speaking people are forcing our brother Jews into exile.

"We raise our voice against every proposal and program which deals with Jewish emigrants or exiles as if they were to be further penalized by being settled in uninhabited lands of doubtful title, lands of uncertain capacity for colonization and re-settlement."

*In 1516, Michelangelo sculpted a great bearded Moses, which, sitting in a church in Rome, is likely to outlast the works of both Sculptor Archipenko and Politician Hitler.

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