Stephanie Hinnershitz:
1941. Pearl Harbor is attacked, and America declares war against Germany and Japan. America's entrance into World War II changes the landscape at home, virtually ending the types of open pro-Hitler displays of the Bund and other groups, and the leadership of the Catholic Church ordered Father Coughlin to stop his radio commentaries. But as newspapers began reporting about Nazi Germany killing millions of European Jews, many Americans were indifferent. In this episode, we explore how two Jewish activists, Peter Bergson and Ben Hecht, created a massive musical event in America to help bring awareness to the plight of Europe's Jews and shift America's policy toward victims of the Holocaust. This event was called We Will Never Die, and it was held in the same exact location as the Bund's 1939 rally: Madison Square Garden.

Jacob Ben-Ami:
We are here to say our prayers for the two million who have been killed in Europe because they bear the name of your first children: the Jews. We are here to honor them, and to proclaim the victory of their dying. For in our Bible are written the words of Habakkuk, prophet of Israel: "They shall never die." They shall never die!

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Before he produced We Will Never Die, Peter Bergson was Hillel Kook, a Lithuanian Jew who migrated to Palestine with his family in 1925, where he began his lifelong passion for activism. Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, historian, author, curator, and archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, tells us more about Bergson.

Rebbeca Erbelding:
Peter Bergson came to the United States under his birth name. His birth name was Hillel Kook, and he came in July 1940, so after Europe had gone to war, but while the United States was still neutral. Kook, or Bergson, had been born in Lithuania, and he was raised in pre-state Israel, what everybody referred to at the time as Palestine. And while he was in Palestine, he was a member of the Irgun, which was a militant Zionist group that opposed the British mandate, or British control, of Palestine. And so he actually came to the United States in 1940 with Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was one of the leaders of the Irgun, and they came to form and raise money for an organization called the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine. Once the United States joined the war after Pearl Harbor, they changed the name of the committee from the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine to the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.

The question of how he became involved in the Jewish American activist community is a really interesting one, in part because for the first couple of years that Bergson is in the United States, there isn't a huge and vocal Jewish American activist community. There isn't a ton of open activism against the murder of Jews in 1941, in 1942, and a lot of members of the American Jewish communities were not so supportive of what Bergson and his colleagues were doing. I think many of them questioned why Bergson and his friends thought that a Jewish army was needed. Why do you need a separate army of stateless and Palestinian Jews under Allied command? Can't they fight for the country in which they were living? Can Jews in the United States, can't they fight under the American flag?

There was also the question of, is this kind of pushing going to result in a rise in antisemitism in the United States? I think there was a fear of that, and it is important to remember that in 1942, a majority of Americans, and this is clear from public opinion polling, a majority of Americans believed that Jews had too much power in the United States. And then there's the fact that Bergson and his colleagues are members of the Irgun, which specifically opposed the British. And so would participating in their activism alienate the Americans' British allies? And so it is a kind of difficult question here, to talk about how he became involved with any sort of Jewish American activist community, because I don't know that he did. [He] kind of created his own community.v

Many of the supporters of the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, their organization, were not Jewish themselves. They were celebrities or politicians, they were people that Bergson, who was incredibly charming and charismatic, convinced to join his cause. And they were influencers. They were people who either weren't aware of the tension between Bergson and his followers and his colleagues, and many members of the American Jewish community, or they were unbothered by the fact that there were tensions. They felt that Bergson and his colleagues had the right idea.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
In 1978, Bergson sat down for an interview regarding his activism during the war. Here, he discusses a turning point in his activism.

Claude Lanzmann:
What was the climate in the United States when the first news about the extermination of the Jews of Europe started to be known? What were the reactions here in America, among the Jews, among the general people?

Peter Bergson:
The general people, there was no such thing to, in a broad sense, of “started” to be known. It exploded one day, at least for me. And I presumed that the average American, average American Jew, wasn't better informed than I was. In the form of a small story in The Washington Post—I was in Washington at the time—on an inside page, about the 10th page, with a headline which nearly knocked me over, which simply said, "Rabbi Wise says two million Jews slain." And I read it again and again. I didn't believe what I was reading.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
In 1941, mobile Nazi killing units began a Jewish mass murder campaign, as part of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This was known as the Holocaust by bullets. By January 1942, top Nazi officials formed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The Nazis had developed a way to systematically murder European Jews in extermination camps. Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland, learned of the Final Solution eight months later.

Rebbeca Erbelding:
It really takes until the fall of 1942, when news comes out of Switzerland. Finally, in a very roundabout way, reaches Stephen Wise, who is the head of the World Jewish Congress, living in New York. And Wise reaches out to the State Department, gives them this telegram and says, “Is this report of two million people being murdered as part of a plan to murder all the Jews of Europe, is this true?” And the State Department, which had originally blocked the message, calling it just a war rumor, looks into it. Sumner Welles, the Under Secretary of State, was personally pretty sympathetic to this question, and did, in fact, look into it. It took him several months, but he did do it. And finally, he confirms, in November 1942, to Wise, that there is a plan, that all of this makes sense, this information makes sense. It does seem to be what people are seeing inside Europe.

Wise then goes to the press. And so it is in the newspapers, at the end of November 1942, that the Nazis have a plan, and that they've likely murdered two million people at that point. We now know the number to have been far higher than that, but he believes, at the time, that it was about two million people by that point. And then in December 1942, there's enough attention paid to Wise's report that the Nazis had this plan, that there's a Jewish day of mourning. A lot of Jewish communities commemorate a day of mourning, worldwide, really, in early December.

And that puts enough pressure on the Allied governments that the British, the United States, the Soviets, and a group of nations in exile issue a statement on December 17, 1942. It's a statement condemning the Nazi plan of mass murder, and promising war crimes trials after the war. So, they don't promise any sort of rescue, they just promise that after the war, there will be war crimes trials, and that is how the perpetrators will be punished. This is really what ignites Peter Bergson. He reads these reports and realizes all of this is true, and that he really needs to start reframing the work of his committee, and pushing it more towards activism for some sort of rescue.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Bergson felt that Wise and his supporters were too moderate in trying to awaken the American people. And thus, Bergson would take a different approach.

Rebbeca Erbelding:
The tension between different facets of the American Jewish community, or communities, has a very long history. In the 1930s, as Hitler's appointed chancellor, as the first rollout of anti-Jewish persecution in Germany is happening, the American Jewish communities are split over how to respond. There are those who generally represent more activist labor organizations, people who are more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, who are advocating for going out in the streets, whereas people who are kind of the old guard, these German Jews who had come in the 1850s, and maybe established their lives here, many of them are pushing for, “Let's just work behind the scenes.”

So then, in 1940, when Bergson comes along, he's not really getting along with either of these groups. His activism is much more in your face. He was a master of propaganda, and of really pulling on people's heartstrings with the different advertisements that they would put, just full page advertisements, in The New York Times, in The Washington Post, in magazines, in journals, calling on the United States to do more, and accusing people, often by name, for not doing enough. And so his activism is very targeted, it's very in your face, and that alienated, I think, a lot of members of the Jewish community, who are nervous about what they see as their precarious status in the United States.

And Bergson is saying, “No, you're pretty solid here. The people who are precarious are Jews in Europe. They are the ones, if you have any sort of platform, if you have any sort of community, you need to be raising your voice on this. You need to actually risk something.” And I think a lot of people were really nervous about that. The issue with Great Britain is really real here, too. Many members of American Jewish communities were nervous about alienating Great Britain, or joining any sort of cause that would make them seem disloyal to the Allies. And Bergson is basically utterly uninterested in going along with the American Jewish communities. He sees them as weak, he sees them as American Jews, whereas he and his colleagues are Hebrews. And he makes that distinction very clear, the difference between Jews and Hebrews. And he says that he and his group are the ones who really represent European Jews, the people who are being murdered. They too are Hebrews who are not accepted by a nation or a state, unlike American Jews.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Bergson now had a new mission in the United States: to raise awareness of the Nazi murder of Jews in Europe, and force an American rescue of refugees from Hitler's genocidal policies. But it couldn't be done alone.

Rebbeca Erbelding:
Ben Hecht was born in New York City in 1894. When he was a teenager, he moved to Chicago, and he became a journalist in the teens and ’20s, which is a pretty exciting time to be in Chicago. There's a lot of labor activism, there are Red Scares, there's a lot of mob violence in the 1920s, and this was kind of Ben Hecht's thing. He was very good at going into the gritty areas of the city, and reporting, with lots of color, about what was happening. In the 1920s, he turned towards Hollywood, and while he never really lived there permanently, he lived mostly in New York after that, but he would go to Hollywood pretty frequently, and actually won the very first Oscar in 1927 for what we would now call Best Original Screenplay. So, he became a really prolific screenwriter, and director, and story creator for early Hollywood.

According to Ben Hecht's memoir, he met Peter Bergson in the spring of 1941. So, Ben Hecht had been paying attention to what was happening to Jews in Germany, and then as Germany began to expand territorially. Hecht had never been a particularly observant Jewish man. But watching what was happening to his co-religionists made him start paying much more attention to his own Judaism, and also to taking action, and frankly, to condemning what he saw as the ineptitude of American Jews who were not speaking out, and were not using the kind of platform that Hecht had. If they had it, they were not using it to speak out, and he really wanted them to.

And so, according to his memoir, he wrote a column for PM, which was a very liberal daily newspaper in New York City, kind of criticizing American Jews for not speaking out, and this was in April 1941. And that Bergson had contacted him after that because, of course, this fit right in with what Bergson was also doing, saying: "American Jews are not doing enough, American Jews are not paying enough attention or using their platform to push for more rescue." And so they kind of collaborated off and on.

And then once the news of what we now call the Holocaust, or the Final Solution, became really publicized in the United States in late 1942, they started to collaborate much more closely together. Ben Hecht was writing ads for Bergson's committee. He wrote a famous one called “Action Not Pity.” He wrote one in February 1943 called “For Sale To Humanity 70,000 Jews,” which was about a supposed offer for the Allies to be able to buy Jews out of Transnistria. And so it's really this announcement of the Holocaust and the Final Solution that brought them inextricably together in 1943, that resulted ultimately in the We Will Never Die pageant.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Yitshaq Ben-Ami, a member of the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, wrote in his memoir, Years of Wrath, Days of Glory, “Our mission in the United States would not have attained the scope and intensity it did if not for Hecht's gifted pen.” Soon, Hecht partnered with Hollywood to craft a monumental pageant.

Rebbeca Erbelding:
The title of the pageant comes from the Book of Habakkuk. It is 1:12. That book is the eighth book of the 12 minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible. And the verse includes the phrase, "we shall never die," or "we shall not die." And it's really interesting, because apparently, Jewish scholars debate the translation of that phrase. But clearly this must have been a phrase that was known to Hecht or to Bergson, and one of them, my assumption is Hecht, suggested it as the title for his pageant.

So, just a month after the Allies had issued their statement saying, basically, "We're not going to rescue, but we are going to condemn what's happening and have war crimes trials," Ben Hecht is appalled by this, and is already writing things. He's already collaborating with Bergson on different ads, the “Action Not Pity” ad. And so they've already planned a rally at Madison Square Garden for March 9, and it was originally called the Action Not Pity Rally, with the subtitle, “An Appeal to the United Nations to Enable European Jewry to Defend its Honor and Life.” And it uses the same Arthur Szyk artwork of this fighting man, and this woman and child below him. That was the artwork that they were originally going to use for their original Action Not Pity Rally on March 9.

At the same time, Ben Hecht has this idea for a pageant, and ultimately, by mid–February 1943, they have transitioned from having this rally, this Action Not Pity Rally, to the We Will Never Die pageant. I think they probably had it as a placeholder, and then Hecht wrote fast enough, and was able to actually get it together. Because if you think about it, February to March 9 is not a long period of time. This happened really, really fast. And even more so, the fact that they are recruiting some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, some of the biggest stars on Broadway—Billy Rose is involved by the second week of February, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, really famous movie stars at the time. Kurt Weill, who was a Broadway composer. And so we know that the pageant idea was happening, and at some point, they just still had the space booked. And so they moved into this idea.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
On Tuesday March 9, 1943, the culmination of Hecht's work premiered at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, the same site where the Bund held their Pro-American Rally.

Jacob Ben-Ami:
Those who are slaughtered with no weapons in their hands, though they still fill the dark land of Europe with the smoke of their massacre, they shall never die.

Rebbeca Erbelding:
So, the pageant is really split into three parts. They called them episodes. The first one was Roll Call, the second one was Jews in War, and the third one was Remember Us. The stage was set up with two huge tablets, multistory-high tablets, representing the Ten Commandments. And the copy of the script that I have begins with the blowing of the shofar, and then a rabbi praying for the murdered two million people.

You then begin the first episode, the Roll Call, and it's a recitation of famous Jews in history. Biblical people, like Moses, but also poets and warriors: Haym Solomon, who was an American patriot during the Revolution and helped fund the American Revolution; Emma Lazarus, who wrote the poem on the Statue of Liberty; Louis Brandeis; Sigmund Freud. They listed all of the Jewish winners of the Nobel Prize. It went on and on, all of these famous Jews in history.

Then the second episode is the war section. There is an acting scene of a Jewish boy in the Pacific theater who is bravely sacrificing himself for the war effort. There is a list of various wars and battles in which Jews have fought, and then they do this call for a Jewish army. So, I think they're probably stealing some language from the rally that they were intending to have, and having this call for a Jewish army under Allied command, in that war section.

And then the final episode is the Remember Us section. And so they set up a table of judgment, and they say, "Jews will have no voice at this table. When the war is over, Jews will have no voice, in part because the people who come to a table of judgment are countries, and Jews don't have a country, and there won't be enough left in Europe to be represented by any country." And so then they start listing what is happening to Jews in Europe. They say, "Remember those of us who were in Romania, and what happened. In Ukraine, where we were shot. In Warsaw, in Kiev, in Bukovina." And it's pretty accurate, what they're saying. They talk about sexual violence. They talk about people committing suicide, rather than being murdered. It's a really powerful ending to the play, and ending to the pageant. And it clearly resonated with the audience, which, by all accounts, was very emotional.

The pageant sold out Madison Square Garden. It sold out twice, actually, the same night. So, they added a second show, which also sold out. And then it toured major cities in the US. It was at Boston Garden, it was at Chicago Stadium. It came to Washington DC, to Constitution Hall, where Eleanor Roosevelt saw it, and members of Congress and the Supreme Court, members of the diplomatic corps. And at the performance in DC, Ben Hecht actually rewrote part of it. He specifically called out the people in the crowd, who were in positions of political power and influence, and basically said, "You people who are in the audience, what are you doing? You are the people who could stop this. This is specifically directed at you." By the time it got to Los Angeles in July 1943, they added another scene to commemorate and celebrate the brave Jews in Warsaw who had risen up in the spring of 1943, as part of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And so they add another portion of the pageant to talk about the Ghetto Uprising. And so it is, at least in those cities, very popular when it is there.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Eleanor Roosevelt watched the pageant, and described her impression as "one of the most impressive and moving pageants I have ever seen. No one who heard each group come forward and give the story of what had happened to it at the hands of a ruthless German military will ever forget those haunting words: remember us."

Rebbeca Erbelding:
In the summer of 1943, so around the time that it stops touring, Bergson creates a new committee, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, is one of the names of the committee. Bergson liked to create committees, and so he had a lot of them. And this Emergency Committee continued activism, pushing the government towards rescue. I don't think it really influenced other American Jews, particularly, at least, the people who were members of established American Jewish organizations. Many of them really disliked the pageant, or at least disliked Bergson enough that they did not want to tolerate the pageant.

And so, one of the reasons that it only goes to these major cities is that some Jewish organizations, the local ones, actually tried to sabotage attempts to bring the pageant, or any sort of version or performance of the pageant, in their local communities. Again, seeing Bergson as somebody who can't be trusted, in some way. And so the pageant is successful in the places that it goes, and it's certainly successful in our memory as something that really drew attention to the Holocaust. But at the time, I don't know that it was that influential, in terms of getting more Jewish Americans, who were members of established communities, on board with what Bergson was doing.

It did, though, create a much closer public relationship between Bergson and Hecht. Bergson was now a person who was absolutely known in DC, known by the State Department, as both a loose cannon, but also someone who had a lot of support, and someone you just couldn't ignore anymore. Bergson went on to stage an Orthodox rabbis' march on Washington in October 1943, and he had a lot of support in Congress, enough to have members in both the House and the Senate introduce, in November 1943, what was called the Rescue Resolution, which called on Roosevelt to form a committee to investigate the possibility of rescuing Jews. And this kind of congressional action directly led, or at least influenced Roosevelt, in the creation of the War Refugee Board in January 1943. And so I think Bergson does get some credit for cultivating the right people to create an atmosphere in which the United States could announce a policy of rescue and relief later on.

I think it's important for people to understand that Jewish Americans are not a monolith. That there was a lot of argument at the time over what was the best path. The situation of what was happening in Europe was so dire, the war was so real to Americans, so many people had somebody fighting, that it was a confusing and upsetting and difficult time for people to know what to do. I think we often look back on this period in history and think, "Oh, it was so easy. Of course we should have done this. Of course we should have done that." But for people living through it, it is, like today, difficult, often, to know what to do. And I think the arguments between Bergson and other members of the American Jewish community show that people were not on the same page about this. That there was a lot of conflict on the best way to proceed. And I don't think either Bergson or they were right. I think it's probably a mix of the two. And so there's that.

I think also the We Will Never Die pageant reminds us that there was information available at the time. That you could, if you believed it, if you were paying attention, you could read, in your local newspapers, in your local magazines, coverage of what the Nazis were doing to Jews, beginning in Germany in 1933. That was often headline news, in the spring of 1933. And you could follow that story along, and it would make sense to you that, at some point, the Nazis are going to begin to murder people. And so I think it is a strong reminder that if you are paying attention, that information was out there, and that there were people pushing for a response. This isn't a story in which the United States is doing everything or doing nothing. The United States is never a monolith in these kind of difficult decisions, particularly ones that regard humanitarian concerns or humanitarian aid.

I don't know that you would have noticed the pageant at the time if you weren't in one of those major cities, but the pageant really did pave the way for a much stronger US response, an official US response of rescue. And so I think Bergson's activism is something that can be studied by activists today to see how did he push for this? What key factors did he look at, and did his committee look at? How did the partnership between he and Ben Hecht put this onto the country's radar? How did it influence people in government to move the window of opportunity, so that the US could take a different path?

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Bergson's leadership brought the fight for recognition to the steps of Congress, and We Will Never Die was a rallying point for many who wanted the United States to do more for European Jews. Join us next time for a new episode that delves into the US government's response to mounting public pressure from events like We Will Never Die.