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Conclusion: “The Horrible Story Was Not Told”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
Summary
It was a typical day in the war's fifth year when the anguished cry of the remnants of Polish Jewry reached the New York Times buried in a routine, page four item about a relatively inconsequential parliamentary debate. The Times editors handled the “last voice from the abyss” in Poland as they had hundreds of similar stories before and the hundreds that would come after. They dropped it inside the newspaper with a tiny headline and no follow-up, a gesture that probably went unnoticed and unchallenged by all the New York Times journalists who came in contact with the story.
The dismissive treatment of Polish Jewry's last cry reveals a seemingly incomprehensible chasm between the journalists' response and the information they received. When confronted with the facts of mass murder, journalists reacted as if they had no understanding of what those facts meant. This gap between knowing and understanding is undoubtedly unique to these particular people and that particular place, and thus is best understood through detailed narrative such as the one in the preceding pages. But the chasm so evident at the Times reflects a larger problem, one that has bedeviled scholars grappling with the role of bystanders to the Holocaust, those who watched while others murdered or were murdered. “Various recent studies dealing with the ‘terrible secret’ stress in diverse ways the simultaneity of considerable knowledge of the facts and of a no less massive inability or refusal to transform these facts into integrated understanding,” Saul Friedlander writes.
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- Buried by the TimesThe Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, pp. 330 - 358Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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