“I think that all the German Jews are searching the world today, and there is no room for them.”
- Edith Frank, 1937

By 1937, German Jews had already suffered a generational calamity. Terrorized & persecuted, almost half a million people scrambled desperately for refuge.

At best they would be allowed to flee their home, leaving behind everyone & everything they knew. At worst they'd remain trapped, in a country hellbent on driving them out.

It was a human rights catastrophe. It was a refugee crisis. That could have been the worst of it.

6 months after Anne Frank’s mother wrote the quote above, the U.S. gathered 32 nations to discuss the plight of German Jews. There was hope that President Roosevelt would ease America’s strict quotas, created to keep America as white as possible, & push other countries to do so.

If every country at the Evian Conference had allowed in just 17,000 German Jews, there would have been no one left behind.

But Roosevelt had no desire to help Jews find refuge. He, and two thirds of Americans, didn’t want to let them in; they were seen as outsiders with un-American values, who would take away jobs from American workers.

In fact, Roosevelt actually organized the Evian Conference to diffuse responsibility, and distract from America’s refusal to raise the immigration cap by even a single person. He didn’t even bother to send a government official to represent the U.S.

The Conference ended the way Roosevelt intended: 31 of the 32 countries declined to let in significantly more German Jews, allowing America to cloak itself in the cowardice of other nations.

German Jews were now trapped, and the U.S. had already barred Eastern European Jews from immigrating for decades. The Jews of Europe had nowhere to go.

he Nazi’s horrific pursuit of ethnic cleansing had always sought to persecute and oppress Jews into fleeing.

When it became clear that there was nowhere for the Jews of Europe to flee to, Hitler turned to the bureaucrat in charge of deporting Jews: a man named Adolf Eichmann. And thus, the infrastructure of deportation and ethnic cleansing became a machine of mass murder and genocide.

Today is Yom HaShoah, the Jewish day of Holocaust Remembrance. We remember our Jewish ancestors, those who survived and those taken from us. We remember the millions of other victims of the Holocaust: people persecuted for their race, religion, politics, sexuality, or disability.

And we remember the history: the events that could have turned out differently, but they didn’t.

And so we mourn.