The session began with the recital of the E-l Malei Rachamim memorial prayer, and Prime Minister Sharon, Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin, and Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky addressed the Knesset.
Invited guests included Holocaust survivors, Yad Vashem officials and foreign representatives.
Excerpts from PM Sharon's speech:
"The allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews. They knew and did nothing.
On April 19, 1943, the Bermuda Conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States, to discuss saving the Jews of Europe. In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem. All the suggestions for rescue operations that the Jewish organizations presented were rejected. They simply did not want to deal with it.
"The Bermuda Conference was nothing more than a continuation of the shocking story of the 'Ship of the Damned' - the Saint Louis - which set sail from Germany in 1939 with 1,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping from the Third Reich on board. The passengers knocked on the doors of Cuba and ports in the eastern United States, but were refused sanctuary and were forced to return to the shores of Europe. Most of them were murdered in the death camps.
"The leadership of the British Mandate displayed the same obtuseness and insensitivity by locking the gates to Israel to Jewish refugees who sought a haven in the Land of Israel. Thus were rejected the requests of the 769 passengers of the ship "Struma" who escaped from Europe - and all but one [of the passengers] found their death at sea.
"Throughout the war, nothing was done to stop the annihilation [of the Jewish people]. When, in the summer of 1944, the mass deportations in Hungary were carried out, the allies did not bomb the train tracks which led to Auschwitz from Hungary, nor the murder facilities in Birkenau, despite the fact that they had the ability to do so. Allied planes attacked targets near Auschwitz, but they refused to bomb the camp itself, in which 10,000 Jews were murdered daily. Thus were 618,000 Jews annihilated in a number of weeks - the Jews of Hungary.
"Mr. Speaker, the sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered...
"The State of Israel learned [the] lesson - and since its establishment, it has done its utmost to defend itself and its citizens, and provide a safe haven for any Jew, wherever he may be. We know that we can trust no one but ourselves.
"This phenomenon - of Jews defending themselves and fighting back - is an anathema in the side of the new anti-Semites. Legitimate steps of self-defense which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror - actions which any sovereign state is obligated to undertake to ensure the security of its citizens - are presented by those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps.
"...These days, the generation which was witness to the horrors is disappearing, and ignorance is increasing. Fewer people around the world have heard of the Holocaust or are aware of what happened in Auschwitz, and the manifestations of anti-Semitism are on the rise. 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the evil which gave rise to the horror still exists - and still threatens us.
"...Israel is a very small country, blessed with talented and courageous people. However, it must always be remembered that this is the only place in the world where we, the Jews, have the right and the capability to defend ourselves, by ourselves. And we will never relinquish this. It is our historic responsibility. It is my personal historic responsibility."
Backing up Sharon's claims that the Allies could have bombed the train tracks leading to Auschwitz is none other than former World War II bomber and U.S. Presidential candidate (in 1972) George McGovern. Rafael Medoff and former Rep. Stephen Solarz of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies , in an op-ed published by Knight Ridder, wrote yesterday that McGovern met with interviewers from Israel Television and the Wyman Institute, and "recalled his days as the pilot of a B-24 Liberator in the 455th Bomb Group, targeting German synthetic-oil plants in occupied Poland - many of them within a few miles of the Auschwitz gas chambers."
"After the Allies gained control of the Foggia Air Base in Italy in December 1943," they wrote, "Auschwitz was for the first time within striking distance of Allied planes. In June 1944, U.S. diplomats and Jewish leaders in Switzerland received a detailed report about Auschwitz, prepared by two escapees. The escapees described the mass-murder facilities and drew diagrams showing where the gas chambers and crematoria were located. As a result, Jewish organizations repeatedly asked the Roosevelt administration to order the bombing of Auschwitz and the railroad lines leading to the camp. The War Department rejected the proposals as 'impracticable,' saying such raids would have required 'considerable diversion' of planes needed for the war effort... Ironically, military resources were diverted for various other nonmilitary reasons... Gen. George Patton even diverted U.S. troops to rescue 150 Lipizzaner horses in Austria..."
Medoff and Solarz write that McGovern called the 'diversion' argument just "a rationalization." In the summer and fall of 1944, they write, "the Allies repeatedly bombed the oil refineries near Auschwitz - at a time when hundreds of Jews were being gassed daily in the camp. On Dec. 26, for instance, McGovern's squadron dropped 50 tons of bombs on oil facilities in Monowitz, an industrial section of Auschwitz, located less than five miles from the site where 1.6 million people were murdered from 1942 to 1944."
McGovern's conclusion: "There is no question we should have attempted... to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens... Franklin Roosevelt was a great man, and he was my political hero. But I think he made two great mistakes in World War II: [the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the decision] not to go after Auschwitz. ... G-d forgive us for that tragic miscalculation."
Invited guests included Holocaust survivors, Yad Vashem officials and foreign representatives.
Excerpts from PM Sharon's speech:
"The allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews. They knew and did nothing.
On April 19, 1943, the Bermuda Conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States, to discuss saving the Jews of Europe. In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem. All the suggestions for rescue operations that the Jewish organizations presented were rejected. They simply did not want to deal with it.
"The Bermuda Conference was nothing more than a continuation of the shocking story of the 'Ship of the Damned' - the Saint Louis - which set sail from Germany in 1939 with 1,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping from the Third Reich on board. The passengers knocked on the doors of Cuba and ports in the eastern United States, but were refused sanctuary and were forced to return to the shores of Europe. Most of them were murdered in the death camps.
"The leadership of the British Mandate displayed the same obtuseness and insensitivity by locking the gates to Israel to Jewish refugees who sought a haven in the Land of Israel. Thus were rejected the requests of the 769 passengers of the ship "Struma" who escaped from Europe - and all but one [of the passengers] found their death at sea.
"Throughout the war, nothing was done to stop the annihilation [of the Jewish people]. When, in the summer of 1944, the mass deportations in Hungary were carried out, the allies did not bomb the train tracks which led to Auschwitz from Hungary, nor the murder facilities in Birkenau, despite the fact that they had the ability to do so. Allied planes attacked targets near Auschwitz, but they refused to bomb the camp itself, in which 10,000 Jews were murdered daily. Thus were 618,000 Jews annihilated in a number of weeks - the Jews of Hungary.
"Mr. Speaker, the sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered...
"The State of Israel learned [the] lesson - and since its establishment, it has done its utmost to defend itself and its citizens, and provide a safe haven for any Jew, wherever he may be. We know that we can trust no one but ourselves.
"This phenomenon - of Jews defending themselves and fighting back - is an anathema in the side of the new anti-Semites. Legitimate steps of self-defense which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror - actions which any sovereign state is obligated to undertake to ensure the security of its citizens - are presented by those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps.
"...These days, the generation which was witness to the horrors is disappearing, and ignorance is increasing. Fewer people around the world have heard of the Holocaust or are aware of what happened in Auschwitz, and the manifestations of anti-Semitism are on the rise. 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the evil which gave rise to the horror still exists - and still threatens us.
"...Israel is a very small country, blessed with talented and courageous people. However, it must always be remembered that this is the only place in the world where we, the Jews, have the right and the capability to defend ourselves, by ourselves. And we will never relinquish this. It is our historic responsibility. It is my personal historic responsibility."
Backing up Sharon's claims that the Allies could have bombed the train tracks leading to Auschwitz is none other than former World War II bomber and U.S. Presidential candidate (in 1972) George McGovern. Rafael Medoff and former Rep. Stephen Solarz of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies , in an op-ed published by Knight Ridder, wrote yesterday that McGovern met with interviewers from Israel Television and the Wyman Institute, and "recalled his days as the pilot of a B-24 Liberator in the 455th Bomb Group, targeting German synthetic-oil plants in occupied Poland - many of them within a few miles of the Auschwitz gas chambers."
"After the Allies gained control of the Foggia Air Base in Italy in December 1943," they wrote, "Auschwitz was for the first time within striking distance of Allied planes. In June 1944, U.S. diplomats and Jewish leaders in Switzerland received a detailed report about Auschwitz, prepared by two escapees. The escapees described the mass-murder facilities and drew diagrams showing where the gas chambers and crematoria were located. As a result, Jewish organizations repeatedly asked the Roosevelt administration to order the bombing of Auschwitz and the railroad lines leading to the camp. The War Department rejected the proposals as 'impracticable,' saying such raids would have required 'considerable diversion' of planes needed for the war effort... Ironically, military resources were diverted for various other nonmilitary reasons... Gen. George Patton even diverted U.S. troops to rescue 150 Lipizzaner horses in Austria..."
Medoff and Solarz write that McGovern called the 'diversion' argument just "a rationalization." In the summer and fall of 1944, they write, "the Allies repeatedly bombed the oil refineries near Auschwitz - at a time when hundreds of Jews were being gassed daily in the camp. On Dec. 26, for instance, McGovern's squadron dropped 50 tons of bombs on oil facilities in Monowitz, an industrial section of Auschwitz, located less than five miles from the site where 1.6 million people were murdered from 1942 to 1944."
McGovern's conclusion: "There is no question we should have attempted... to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens... Franklin Roosevelt was a great man, and he was my political hero. But I think he made two great mistakes in World War II: [the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the decision] not to go after Auschwitz. ... G-d forgive us for that tragic miscalculation."