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In March
1942, Bertrand Jacobson (for two years the JDC’s main agent in its
relief efforts in Eastern Europe) held a press conference that
provided information for newspapers around the world. Jacobson
estimated that the Nazis had already murdered 240,000 Jews in the
Ukraine alone and asserted that the killings in Eastern Europe were
continuing in full fury.
One of the
most horrifying disclosures made in the United States to that point
was an account by a Hungarian soldier who had observed a large mass
grave near Kiev. Seven thousand Jews, some dead but others wounded
and alive, had been thrown into the shallow grave and covered with a
thin layer of soil. The spectacle of this field, "heaving like
a living sea," was etched into the soldier’s memory.
Although we
know today that these figures underestimated the extent of the
Nazis’ genocide among the Jews through March 1942, the press
coverage had the important effect of revealing the reports on the
murders to the free world. |
