Failure of the 'Final Solution':

...But the Joint, which prided itself on being non-political, believed it could resettle 300,000 Jews from the congested areas of Central and Northern Russia under a land-settlement scheme in the Crimea...

...He hated the "innocent" West which had not lifted a finger to save him and the British Labor government which blockaded him from Palestine...

...There is growing concern about South Africa's 100,000 Jews...

...tragically, just as easy to document...

...In ensuing years, Germany and the occupied countries allowed Jews to leave, provided they took nothing with them—but there was nowhere to go...

...Until that day, the Joint, with its persistence, faith and idealism, will continue to serve thousands whom the world is unable or unwilling to serve...

...Reviewed by Gertrude Samuels Staff writer, The New York "Times Magazine" The coming Eichmann trial in Israel will be more than the trial of a major Nazi...

...What he describes, with deftness and a compassionate understanding of the impulse of mercy that stirs people to do good, is a half-century of philanthropy that encompassed the globe and helped to save a remnant of the Jews who survived Hitler...

...The Joint was American-born— the result of a merger in 1914 of Jewish organizations which had little in common ideologically but were united in their Jewishness, the ageold bond to help fellow Jews in trouble...

...It moved its European headquarters from Berlin to Paris and fought desperately to get countries to open their doors to Jews...

...The chances for escape [for the Jews]," writes Herbert Agar in his account of this period, "were diminishing—not because of the Germans, who still wanted to get rid of them all...

...He was referring to Germany in 1935...

...In this revealing and sensitive chronicle of one of the world's great rescue operations, the author frequently reminds the reader of the old-new question: Am I my brother's keeper...

...Chaim Weizmann wrote that "it was heartbreaking to see them pour millions into a bottomless pit when some of the money could have been directed on to the Jewish homeland...

...If Agar's book proves anything, it is that the Joint can never retire until a cure has been found for the sickness called antiSemitism...

...No one can foresee the fate of the three million who remain in Russia...

...The DP's formed a Central Committee of Liberated Jews, calling themselves the She'erit Hapletah, the Saving Remnant, and resolved to get to Palestine...

...In the post-war Jewish Displaced Persons Camps, it was the Joint to whom the survivors turned...

...Held in awe and gratitude by refugees throughout the world, it became known simply as "the Joint...

...When governments were saying no, one Jewish organization—the American Joint Distribution Committee—said yes and never gave up hope...

...The Jewish survivors puzzled the Army which had liberated them, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency which fed and clothed them...

...Somewhere in the world, each year brings new calamities to the Jews...

...This is the terrible reminder that is forced into sharp focus by Agar's book...

...The ovens at Auschwitz had smelted humility out of these Jewish folk and the "new" Jew was a very unaccommodating character...

...the book takes its name from a translation of the Biblical phrase, She'erit Hapletah...

...recent outbursts of mass hatred against Morocco's 200,000 Jews makes their future precarious in that Moslem country...

...The offer was made by Himmler's chief of staff for the killing of Jews —SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann...

...it smuggled children out of Germany, caring and paying for them in transit...

...It came to nothing, though some hopeintoxicated Jews in the underground believed that the last great concentration of Jews in Occupied Europe, the Hungarians, could be saved in this way...

...Though horrors and melodrama abounded in the Joint's history—as, for example, the Jewish graveyard which is Poland today—the author does not make this a horror story...

...One unlikely melodrama was the effort to involve the Joint, in 1944, in a German offer to sell one million Hungarian Jews for "ten thousand trucks, which were to be used only against the Russians, plus two hundred tons of tea, eight hundred tons of coffee and two million cakes of soap...

...No true historian can gloss over the culpability of the non-German world—and Herbert Agar does not...

...As the chief routes of escape were cut off, it became clear that most governments, including the American Government, had chosen not to help hundreds of thousands who were doomed by Hitler's executioners...

...After the war, the Joint began an ambitious project in Russia, which came under Zionist criticism...

...The Joint had a hard time meeting some of the demands of the Jewish camps, particularly those of the morally broken members...

...Reporters covering the DP camps heard the names of the self-effacing Joint workers uttered in tones of reverence...

...The Joint had to improvise to meet changing conditions: After it found temporary refuge for some numbers in France, it paid large sums of money to stall their being forced to "move on" (for where could they go...

...But its social workers understood its obstreperous wards...

...But Hitler was not to be cheated of his corpses...

...The author, a Pulitzer prize-winner, former editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and a non-Jew, decided to write of its deeds after seeing what the Joint had helped to accomplish in Israel...

...But what of the world that looked on—or rather away—as the executioners did their work...

...The Joint sent large sums, as the war became global, to help local organizations which were sometimes burglarized by "Aryans...

...How can one watch the Eichmann trial without remembering all the "decent" non-Germans who watched from the sidelines in revulsion, but in apathy...

...Will they not also be on trial—and forced to make a case for their inhumanity that was not so naked or primitive as Eichmann's, but...

...With the cooperation of the Soviet Union, the experiment seemed to be succeeding until, during World War II, the Germans invaded the colonies and destroyed them and the settlers...

...his stored-up antiGentilism was a passion...

...but because no nation would receive them penniless...

...By 1942, when the Nazis proclaimed a "final solution" for the Jews in the Eichmann manner, the civilized world earnestly condemned the crime against humanity, but self-righteous posturing saved few Jews...

...Out of this scorn and rage came the spirit that was to help rebuild the ancient homeland...

...As Hitler's shadow fell across Europe, the Joint poured in money, goods and encouragement to the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe...

...What of the great, civilized Western 20th century governments which pretended not to hear the cry of the doomed, and kept their doors closed to hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Jews who might have been saved...

...Agar provides some fascinating research on the principals of this episode, and suggests that Eichmann was trying to buy himself "a Jew-saving reputation in order to escape the hangman's rope" if the Allies won...

...Thus, during World War I when Eastern European Jews were in critical condition, such American Jewish leaders as Felix M. Warburg, who served as chairman of the Joint until 1932, Louis Marshall and James N. Rosenberg, channeled help and money to the suffering and reviled Jews...

...To be sure, he is being' brought before the bar of justice in the only land that can logically speak for the six million Jews whom the Germans massacred in ghettos and concentration camps and furnaces...

...They looked to the Joint to help them and the agency, as always, responded generously...