Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

The genocide convention was far from perfect. But whatever its ambiguities, its ratification in the U.S. Senate would have signaled to the world and the American people that the United States believed genocide was an international crime that should be prevented and punished, wherever it occurred. It would have required the United States to prosecute genocide suspects who wandered onto American shores. And it would have empowered and obligated American policymakers “to undertake” to stop future genocide.

The Home Front

Just as he had earlier tried to drum up international support, Lemkin here tried to create a U.S. constituency for ratification with speaking tours, op-eds, and mass mailings. Hoping to get Eisenhower to reverse his position, Lemkin borrowed stationery from supportive community organizations, applied for grants to pay for postage, and sent thousands of letters to absolutely anybody whose moral heartstrings he felt he might tug or on whose connections he might prey to get the ear of a U.S. senator. Although most of his letters contained a mix of flattery and moral prodding, he sometimes slipped into bluntly bullying his contacts and demanding that they acquire a conscience. Thelma Stevens, a volunteer at the Methodist Women’s Council, was probably startled one summer to read this portion of an otherwise grateful letter from Lemkin urging her to coordinate a campaign on behalf of Senate passage:

This Convention is a matter of our conscience and is a test of our personal relationship to evil. I know it is very hot in July and August for work and planning, but without becoming sentimental or trying to use colorful speech, let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915. 17

Humorless though he was, Lemkin knew it was essential for him to win over elite opinion. He struck up his most fruitful correspondence with Gertrude Samuels of the New York Times editorial board. Samuels’s editorials, which appeared in the paper throughout the ratification fight, often seemed to flow right from Lemkin’s pen. At first they echoed his conviction; later they reflected his frustration. One editorial termed the criminalization of genocide “one of the greatest civilizing ideas of our century” and lambasted the Senate for its “indifference and delay.” Another used the same words that Lemkin had penned to Samuels in a letter dated June 6, 1950: “Humanity is our client,” the editorial proclaimed. “Every day of delay is concession to crime.” 18Lemkin was eager to be plagiarized.

Lemkin also attempted to mobilize American grassroots groups. The international human rights organizations familiar to us today did not yet exist. Amnesty International was not founded until 1961, and Helsinki Watch, which later grew into Human Rights Watch, was set up only in 1978. But four decades ahead of the dramatic power shift toward nongovernmental organizations that occurred in the 1990s, Lemkin enlisted a panoply of American civic organizations, churches, and synagogues. 19The U.S. Committee for a United Nations Genocide Convention was formed, made up of representatives and leaders from a wide range of organizations, from the Federal Council of Churches of Christ and the American Association for the UN to the National Council of Women and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). 20The American Jewish Committee, the American Zionist Council, and B’nai B’rith gave some financial support to Lemkin as he tried to chip away at U.S. opposition.

Lemkin was at a disadvantage in the immediate postwar period because the singular genocide so well known today was barely discussed. 21American Jews who would later became a potent force in promoting Holocaust commemoration and education were reticent, eager to assimilate, leery of fueling further anti-Semitism, and determined not to be depicted as victims. Other Americans were uncomfortable with the topic of extermination.

In the rare instances when Hitler’s genocide was mentioned, American television and film revealed a desire to inform viewers without alienating them. In one example, a May 1953 episode of This Is Your Life introduced many American television viewers to a Holocaust survivor for the first time. Host Ralph Edwards profiled Hanna Bloch Kohner, a woman in her thirties who had survived Auschwitz. “Looking at you it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a life-time of fear, terror and tragedy,” Edwards declared, telling her she looked “like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” Never mentioning that 6 million Jews had been murdered, Edwards adopted a tone of renewal that characterized the optimistic age: “This is your life, Hanna Bloch Kohner. To you in your darkest hour, America held out a friendly hand.Your gratitude is reflected in your unwavering devotion and loyalty to the land of your adoption.” 22

The dramatization of the Diary of Anne Frank, which began running in 1955, garnered huge crowds, rave reviews, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Tony Award for best play, but as both critics and fans of the play have noted, young Anne embodied the American mood by refusing to lose her faith in humanity. 23The film version of the Diary, which premiered in 1959 and won three Academy Awards, largely omitted the Holocaust from the narrative. Director George Stevens, who had served in the U.S. Army and entered Dachau with the American liberators, screened an early version of the film in San Francisco. The last shot depicted Anne in a concentration camp uniform swaying in the fog, but after the preview he cut the scene because he thought it was “too tough in audience impact.” 24Instead, the film adopted the hopeful ending of the play, in which Anne declares, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Anne actually went on to write in her diary: “I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.” But this was omitted, as it was far too somber a tone for Stevens or play director Garson Kanin, who said that he did not consider the infliction of depression on an audience “a legitimate theatrical end.” 25

Hollywood eased into more realistic accounts of the horrors. The 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy, jarred millions of viewers by including actual graphic footage from the camps, but the film contained few references to the specific victim groups. 26When a major network sponsor, the American Gas Association, objected to the mention of gas chambers in the 1959 teleplay version of the film, CBS caved in to pressure and blanked out the references. 27The word “holocaust” did not appear in the New York Times until 1959. 28

Only in the late 1960s did people who had spoken of a holocaust and then the holocaust begin to use the capital letter to specify the German destruction of Europe’s Jews. The references to the Holocaust had become sufficiently widespread that by 1968 the Library of Congress had to create a class of work called “Holocaust: Jewish 1939–1945.” 29The Readers’Guide to Periodical Literature did not include the subject heading until 1971. American memorials to Hitler’s crimes against the Jews did not exist. Even such celebrated works as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz had trouble finding publishers. 30It was not really until the 1970s that Americans became prepared to discuss the horrors.

With America unwilling in the 1950s to confront Hitler’s Final Solution, it is not surprising that Lemkin, with his briefcase bulging with gruesome parables and his indefatigable, in-your-face manner, earned few friends on Capitol Hill.