The Wyman Aliyah

Moshe Gadaf had never before seen an actual airplane. Neither had his friend, Ami Farradah. The wide-eyed eight-year-olds stared in awe at the enormous Trans-European Belgian plane that the IAF had brought to the desolate stretch of the Sudanese-Ethiopian border. The date was January 6, 1985, and the Gadaf and Farradah families were among the thousands of Ethiopian Jews who had made the perilous journey, by foot, to the site across the border from which they were to be airlifted to Israel. They had no way of knowing that leaks to the news media had just prompted the Sudanese government to suspend the operation.

In their frantic rush to fill one last plane and depart before the Sudanese military could interfere, the Israelis shut the doors to the aircraft after Moshe and Ami's parents and siblings had boarded - but before the two boys themselves got on. The stunned children watched in horror as the plane carrying their families disappeared over the dusky East African horizon, not knowing when - or if - they would ever see them again.

But that very week, halfway across the world, a guest on NBC Television's Today program was discussing a book that would change Moshe and Ami's lives forever. GROWING UP in New England in the 1930s and 1940s, David S. Wyman knew only a few Jews and very little about Judaism, aside from what he learned in Sunday School about the Israelites of biblical times. The son of a milkman and grandson of two Protestant ministers, Wyman earned his PhD in history at Harvard. His dissertation examined the Roosevelt administration's policies toward German Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, a radical topic for the time. In those days, most Americans still regarded FDR as an icon and assumed he must have done whatever was possible to aid Europe's Jews. Wyman was going where no scholar had gone before.

"I didn't have any personal reason to choose that topic," he remarked later. "I was looking for something that nobody had yet written about. I guess it was what you call bashert ["meant"]. Considering where it led me, sometimes I think that I didn't choose the subject, it chose me."

It led him to more than four decades of researching, writing and teaching about America's response to the Holocaust and the lessons to be learned from it. To his surprise, it would also lead him into the heart of a struggle to ensure that another persecuted Jewish community would not be abandoned.

His dissertation was published in 1968 as Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941. It described how a combination of anti-foreigner sentiment, anti-Semitism, the Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration's tight immigration policies kept most European Jewish refugees far from America's shores. Paper Walls led to an offer from a major publisher, Pantheon, to publish a sequel that would cover the Holocaust years. More than a decade of research and writing ensued, culminating in the publication, in late 1984, of The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945.

By that time, it was not the first scholarly study of the subject, but reviewers agreed it was by far the best. Wyman had accessed many archives that had not been open to earlier researchers, and the result was a series of significant new discoveries about the Roosevelt administration's behavior. One was the revelation that the State Department actively obstructed rescue of Jews and immigration to the United States. In his public lectures, Wyman would often unfurl, accordion-like, the 120-cm.-long form that a would-be immigrant was required to fill out just to be considered for a quota space.

Abandonment also revealed not only that US planes could have reached Auschwitz and bombed it, but that they actually did repeatedly hit oil factories adjacent to the gas-chamber area. He showed how the State Department not only ignored Europe's Jews, but actually sabotaged opportunities to rescue them. He documented the role of the Bergson Group, the Jewish activists whose rallies, newspaper ads and lobbying in Washington helped pressure FDR to create the War Refugee Board. Most of all, he demonstrated that many more Jews could have been saved, by showing how the board, despite its late creation (January 1944), did save more than 200,000 lives.

Published in November 1984, The Abandonment of the Jews immediately attracted widespread attention from the news media. The New York Times alone published a feature story, a profile of Wyman and two reviews of the book, all within the first seven weeks after its release. Appearances on major talk shows followed. In early January, the same week that the airlifts of Ethiopian Jews were halted, Wyman was interviewed by Jane Pauley on the Today show. Later that month, it was Nightline with Ted Koppel, and not long after that, he appeared on Larry King Live.

Wyman's impeccable scholarship, dignified manner and genuine anguish at the plight of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust left a deep impression on those who heard or met him. "I am convinced that had there been more Christians like [David Wyman] in the 1930s and 1940s, the history of this period would have been very different," Prof. Deborah Lipstadt wrote to a friend at the time. "He strikes me as one of the tzadikei umot ha'olam [righteous of the nations]."

MEANWHILE, CONDITIONS were deteriorating in the makeshift refugee camp in Sudan where Moshe, Ami and the others were stranded. "There was very little food and no doctors," Moshe recalls. "Many people became sick, and some died. The few people who had money were victimized by local robbers. As the weeks dragged on, we began to fear that we were going to die there."

In early February 1985, Jewish activists arrived in Washington to lobby for US intervention on behalf of the refugees.

Los Angeles Jewish publisher Phil Blazer, his assistant Hal Sloane and Nate Shapiro, head of the American Association for Ethiopian Jews, met with State Department officials who told them that an American airlift was not feasible. "Reminds me of the excuses that the Bergson Group ran into when they asked the State Department to help the Jews in Europe," says author and editor Miriam Chaikin, who worked in Bergson's Manhattan headquarters from 1940 to 1948...

Read more