When did we know?

I don't remember the date, but it seems to me that Life magazine published this story either at the very end of World War II, or else after the war had ended. At Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away, a breath-taking exhibition of artifacts, news stories, posters, and photographs from Hitler's most famous death camp, a copy of this story was placed near the end of the exhibit, with the explanation that this story, being published as late as it had been, was actually the very first note and notice in national media of death camps.  

In retrospect, I'm not sure whether this story--or the commentary--was an indictment of the national media's inability to get at the story of the Holocaust, or if its inability wasn't, in fact, a matter of will: America simply didn't want to know. 

We've been watching Ken Burns' new documentary series on PBS, America and the Holocaust lately, and while there has, as yet, been scant mention of the death camps, it's very, very clear that America--way over here, an ocean away--didn't lack knowledge of the evil perpetuated on European Jewry. We knew. We just didn't care enough about the evil to do anything substantive about it, including taking in an entire ship full of Jewish children (the SS St.Louis, a story every American schoolkid should know). 

I know from the testimony of now-departed GIs who, on the road to Berlin, spread out into a woods to be sure the Nazis were out, and then and there discovered horrifying encampments of men, women, and children like the ones pictured on the page above, skeletal, desiccated victims, barely hanging on to life--not to mention flat cars stacked with naked human flesh. They were surprised--horrified!!--by what they unwittingly discovered. 

But Americans knew about anti-Semitism in Germany as early as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Hitler sent his thugs into German cities to destroy synagogues. We knew, but lots of people, lots of praying Christians, would much rather have kept the whole Jewish business in Germany, Poland, anywhere in Europe. 

Isolationist rhetoric was understandable. I'm sure the streets of the nation were still full of shell-shocked doughboys from "the war to end all wars." The Atlantic seemed a broad winter quilt over our anxieties--if we could avoid the horror, of course we should. And German-Americans, I'm sure, could not easily scour their own ethnic sympathies. Their Nazi sympathies are abhorrent but somehow understandable.

But I can't help but wonder how it is that Protestant Christians--my people-- always, always, always are a driving force in conservative politics, Christians who would rather look away from Jews than sin, Christians who simply cannot spread their loving arms wide enough to accept change? Christians who, on January 6th, carried Christian flags into the Capital. Christians who pray with Qanon? Christians who believe the most horrible problem in America is immigration?

There are lots of things I just do not understand.