Religious Response to the Holocaust

A Muted Memory.

As horrific as was the Holocaust in retrospect, it is surprising how muted the response to the calamity was in the 1940s. For non-Jews the Holocaust tended to be discussed in the context of German barbarism, a manifestation of the moral bankruptcy of war, or a sign of deep-seated human depravity. Many associated it with the other catastrophes of the period—with Japanese brutality toward prisoners of war, Japanese medical experimentation in Manchuria, and the Bataan death march in the Philippines; with the Lidice massacre and the murders in Katyn Forest; with scorched-earth warfare in Russia; with carpet bombing of European cities; and with V-2 rockets and the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Refugee Policy.

As terrible as these events were, to a great extent they paled before the intentional, systematic extermination of 9 million innocent human beings (6 million of them Jewish) in the...

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