Blessed were the Jewish children

By MICHAEL VALPY

Saturday, October 29, 2005

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

A renowned Canadian scholar of the Holocaust has pulled back the veils on one of the Second World War's most painful and inflamed controversies - the role Pope Pius XII played as Jewish leaders struggled to reclaim Jewish children from Roman Catholics to whom they had been entrusted for safekeeping from the Nazi death camps.

Historian Michael Marrus's research casts startlingly fresh light on a debate that has locked academics, the Vatican and Catholic and Jewish organizations in venomous combat since the publication last year of a document purportedly containing the wartime Pope's orders that Catholic custody of the children should be retained.

How the church dealt with Europe's surviving Jewish children has been an unlanced boil on the larger polemic enveloping Pius XII, now on the road to sainthood in the church. His critics brand him an anti-Semite who stayed mute while the Nazis murdered six million Jews; his defenders laud him as a Pope who worked quietly throughout the war to save Jews from extermination: "The longest running historical controversy ever," says Prof. Marrus. "It just won't go away."

The document - apparently intended as instructions to France's Catholic bishops, but nobody knows if they ever saw it - variously has been labelled an anti-papal hoax and irrefutable evidence that Pius was, in the words of one Harvard historian, a criminal kidnapper.

Using a wealth of previously unexamined Jewish documents, Prof. Marrus reveals not an adversarial conflict between Pope and Jews, but a fascinating and deeply human story of Catholic and Jewish leaders struggling in the chaotic horror of Europe 60 years ago to reach across a chasm of mutual suspicion and alien cultures and act, haltingly but with substantial measures of goodwill, to resolve a complex and difficult issue.

The postwar importance of children to the Jewish community cannot be over-emphasized. As a 1945 World Jewish Congress position paper declared: "We have become very poor in Jewish children, and therefore the value of every Jewish child has grown manifold for us."

Of the six million European Jews killed, more than one million were children. The WJC estimated at the time that between 200,000 and 300,000 children had survived, of whom 75,000 were orphans. The number sheltered by non-Jewish institutions and families will never be known with precision.

Much of the immediate postwar focus was on France, which had the greatest number of child survivors - approximately 30,000 - because of significant wartime child-rescue efforts and because it was liberated almost a year before other Nazi-occupied countries. There probably were more secret baptisms in France than elsewhere. Yet of the estimated 1,200 children in non-Jewish care at war's end, Prof. Marrus presents evidence that only 50 might have been converted, out of the thousands saved from death.

His research brings to life the meetings about the children held by Pius XII and other top churchmen with leaders of the Jewish community: Leon Kubowitzki, secretary-general of the WJC; Gerhart Riegner, director of the WJC's Geneva office, and Isaac Herzog, the legendary chief rabbi of Palestine.

Prof. Marrus presents a portrait of Pius XII - the Italian aristocrat, Eugenio Pacelli - sitting down with the Jewish leaders and asking for detailed reports on Jewish children still in Catholic custody, reports that the leaders promise to give him but never do, because they have no idea how many children there are or where they are.

Prof. Marrus describes Rabbi Herzog being introduced to Pius XII and immediately offering a biblical analysis of a public address the Pope had given a few days before. "It was the way two rabbis would talk to each other," Prof. Marrus said.

He tells of Pius giving Rabbi Herzog permission to declare he has the Vatican's support if he runs into Catholic resistance on his child-retrieval mission.

He tells of Mr. Kubowitzki meeting Pius and being immediately struck by the Pope's resemblance to his Uncle Morris.

He presents a surprising account, viewed through the prism of today, of these wartime Jewish leaders tempering their unquestioned commitment to rescuing Jewish children with the realization that if they were to get the Vatican's help they had to acknowledge the Vatican's concerns.

Thus, knowing the significance to the church of baptism (the Catholic sacrament membership in the Christian community), they don't ask for the return of Jewish children whose parents, to save their lives, voluntarily allowed them to be baptized. They don't press Pius to issue a papal communication to the entire church - although they're disappointed that he doesn't - ordering Catholic convents and families to give up the Jewish children they sheltered.

Mr. Kubowitzki, in his diary, even says he told the Pope that the Jews were not asking for the baptized children back, a passage curiously excised when the diary was published several years later.

"They seemed to realize Pacelli came from a different world and they realized that if they're to make any headway they had to meet the Vatican on its own wavelength," Prof. Marrus said in an interview this week in his office at University of Toronto's Massey College where he is a senior fellow.

"We knew they didn't emerge from the meetings [with the Pope] saying that son-of-a-bitch Pacelli. They didn't have a sense that Pacelli was trying to subvert their cause. Now I know a little more why."
What may well set off the biggest shock waves in the dispute over Pius and the children are Prof. Marrus's revelations that the Jewish leaders most intimately engaged with retrieving children labelled their efforts largely a success and acknowledged the Vatican's considerable help.

"None of these discoveries turn our views 180 degrees," Prof. Marrus said. "They just deepen our knowledge."

His discoveries - he is to make them public in a lecture in Edmonton tonight, the day after the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the statement produced by the Second Vatican Council that initiated the rapprochement between the Catholic Church and Jews - will hardly go unnoticed.

Prof. Marrus was a member of the international commission of Catholic and Jewish scholars appointed by the Vatican to examine the church's wartime record. (The commission voluntarily disbanded in 2001, claiming it could go no further until the Vatican fully opened its archives.) He holds the chair in Holocaust studies at the University of Toronto.

How he uncovered what he did is in several respects as interesting as what he found.

He was at his cottage on Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto, in December when he got a call from an Associated Press reporter in Rome, asking for his comments on the just-published document dealing with Catholic custody of Jewish children.

To expert scholars of the wartime and immediate postwar church, said Prof. Marrus, nothing in the document was particularly new or surprising, especially on the highly sensitive subject of baptism.
"Children who have been baptized," said the document, dated Oct. 23, 1946, "must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing."
It also said that children who no longer have their parents and are in the church's care cannot be "entrusted to any persons who have no rights to them, at least until they are in a position to choose themselves." It concluded by saying that children who have not been baptized can be given back to their parents.

Shortly thereafter, a second document mysteriously popped up, this one in Italian, signed by Domenico Tardini, a top papal aide.

The story pieced together by historical researchers is that the papal nuncio (ambassador) in France asked the Vatican what instructions he should give French bishops on restitution of Jewish children and the Tardini memo was the response, from which the nuncio then presumably drafted a summary - the French document that surfaced first.

The identity of the nuncio, says Prof. Marrus, is "one of the least explained pieces in the puzzle of this entire issue." He is Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, who during the war when he was papal nuncio in Greece and Turkey had shown great sympathy for Jews and had actively assisted Jewish refugees across Europe.

The Tardini document - in most respects the same as the French summary - makes clear that what was at issue were requests from Jewish institutions for the return of children, not from Jewish parents. It contained the statement that "there should be no response to the Grand Rabbi of Palestine" about reclaiming Jewish children.

It was the reference to Rabbi Herzog that intrigued Michael Marrus.

He knew Rabbi Herzog met with Pius XII on March 10, 1946. "It [the Tardini memo] prompted me to ask what remained of that encounter. You don't see the Pope and leave with nothing. We've all been obsessed with the Vatican archives. No one is asking about the Jewish side of the story. It was so obvious - why didn't I think about this before?"

Assisted by a researcher, Prof. Marrus painstakingly retrieved records from Israel's Central Zionist Archives until he had a satisfactory narrative of what Catholic and Jewish authorities were thinking and doing about the children.

"I always felt it a mistake to see these issues in black and white," he said. "It's not that I see Pacelli as exemplary. He's just not that interested in Jews. His interest is in bringing the church through the war intact."