Not So Open Door

The highlight and culmination of this year’s celebration of "50 Years of Philippine-Israel Friendship" is the unveiling of the Open Door Monument in the city of Rishon Lezion this December. The story behind this holocaust memorial started a score of years before Israel and the Philippines commenced diplomatic ties. Then President Manuel L. Quezon, lobbied by American-Jewish Community in Manila, opened our country to thirty Jewish families fleeing Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai in 1937, a rescue that would be a precedent of the saving of 1,000 Jews escaping Nazi Europe. This heroic feat would merit a posthumous title of "Righteous Person" to President Manuel Quezon.

The great honor for Quezon, however, just obscures the shadow of an adverse Philippine National Assembly that resulted to a delay of absorbing more Jews to a proposed Mindanao Resettlement Program in the plateaus of Bukidnon. The plan that could have saved 50,000 Jews ended up saving none.

Bonnie Harris in her dissertation paper "From Zbaszyn to Manila", regarded Mindanao as the last hope for the tens of thousands of Jewish refugees persecuted under Nazi Germany, only to be thwarted by anti-Jewish National Assembly. She wrote:

At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Hitler’s plan for massive Jewish deportation mutated into one of extermination, which was executed over the next three years. With the failure of the West to provide a successful mass rescue operation for Europe’s Jewish population, "thousands of Jews entered the cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, under the impression that they were being resettled in the East." The irony of the "Final Solution" lies in its mimic of the Western World’s failed attempt to rescue through resettlement. "The decision to murder followed directly from the failure to resettle." Mindanao ended a long list of resettlement schemes considered at one time by the international community that failed to rescue.

In the book "None is Too Many", we get detailed accounts of the apathy of Canada towards the Jews. Although not as thoroughly documented, the same indifference in our legislative assembly make us partly responsible for the holocaust.

Had the democratic world tried to rescue the innocent - and failed - we might find solace in the nobility of a lost cause, of a gallant crusade; but there were no rescue attempts. The nations of the world were put to the test and were found wanting; their failure was not a failure of tactics, but of will, of the human spirit.

One fact transcends all others. The Jews of Europe were not so much trapped in a whirlwind of systematic mass murder as they were abandoned to it. The Nazis planned and executed the holocaust, but it was made possible by an indifference to the suffering of the victims which sometimes bordered on contempt. Not one nation showed generosity of heart to those who are doomed, not one made the Jewish plight a national priority and not one willingly opened its doors after the war to the surviving remnant of the once thriving Jewish community. Rescue required sanctuary, and there was none. (Preface)

Measured against the millions seeking refuge who were refused, the thousand that found haven in our islands is already plenty; but set against the millions who were murdered, we did very little.