With impressive ceremonies at which President Charles de Gaulle was officially represented by a member of his Cabinet, an exhibit proving to the world once and for all that Jews under the Hitler regime fought in organized resistance against Nazism in many places, including Berlin itself, was opened here today. The exhibit, organized by the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr and the Center for Contemporary Jewish Studies, has assembled documents, official reports and photographs from European countries occupied by the Germans during World War II, including the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. Another part of the exhibit showed Jewish resistance against the enemy in pre-Israel Palestine.
The three principal speakers at the ceremonies were Jean Saintenny, Minister for War Veterans and the Victims of War, who represented President do Gaulle; Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress; and Walter Eytan, Israel Ambassador to France.
As presidential guards in dress uniform, swords drawn, flanked him, M. Saintenny said: “The Jews, with other democrats, were the first in the world to oppose Hitler and the Nazis–first in Western Europe, then in occupied territories of the East. They fought back and, at Warsaw, managed for six weeks to hold at bay the might of the Wehrmacht. Young people of France and elsewhere–never forget those heroes!”
Dr. Goldmann, in his address, castigated the Allied Governments in power during the war for failing to react against Hitler’s holocaust aimed at the Jews. “This exhibition,” he said, “stands as an accusation against the democratic nations which did not take Nazism seriously enough. They tried nothing to save even a small remnant of the victims. An entire generation, Jews and non-Jews alike, will stand charged by history with lack of imagination, lack of foresight, and willpower and, above all, for not having reacted at a time when such reaction could have crushed the Nazi evil at its origin.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
