My name is Estelle Laughlin.
I was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1929.
When the war broke out I was 10 years old.
I didn't quite understand what was really happening, except that I, as a Jewish child,
was not as safe anymore.
We had to wear armbands with the Star of David, and I remember when my mother first put the
arm band on me, she said "Wait until the world will hear about this" My mother was an optimist.
-What is to become of the remnant of Europe's dues?
How long must they continue to exist in the shadows of hate?
Whatever help these unhappy people can look for must come from the New World.
From a people always quick to act out of their abundance, on behalf of justice, decency and
humanity.
- Read all about it!
Latest football scores!
Morning paper, read all about it!
I had been taught growing up that Americans didn't know and couldn't have known about
the holocaust while it was happening.
I was curious about why and how I could be taught that Americans didn't know and it was
in the mass media.
And then I think more importantly as a journalist, I didn't understand that almost all of the
stories were inside the newspaper.
I mean that just- didn't seem to me, if you were making decisions that the idea that millions
of people had been murdered in the most horrible ways imaginable, was not a front page story.
Well the New York Times was not able to transcend, to go beyond what the thought of the needs
of it's newspaper.
The murder when on as if nothing peculiar was happening, most people were
indifferent to it.
-This was a bad decision, it was a bad judgement call, it was something that was a matter as
much as anything of news judgement.
The New York Times blew it.
-On July 29, 1942 the New York Times published on page 7 a story about the liquidation of
the Warsaw Ghetto.
Probably most striking of all is it wasn't even a stand alone story.
Warsaw fears extermination, Nazi authorities in Poland are planning to exterminate the
entire Warsaw ghetto population.
Up to now, two train loads of Jews have been departed towards their doom, without anything
further being heard from them.
This really was the statement that the Warsaw ghetto, which was housing between 500,00 and
600,000 Jews, it was the largest ghetto, was about to be liquidated, which was the somewhat
euphemistic expression for everyone living there was going to be killed.
-The only news papers that were delivered to our home was the New York Times.
-It was the newspaper record.
If it wasn't in the New York Times it didn't happen.
-When you talk in the 1930s and the 1940s, The New York Times was unquestionably the
most important newspaper.
The Roosevelt administration, beginning with FDR himself, read the Times very carefully,
specifically looking for what they reflected about what Americans were concerned about.
-Well, this is familiar!
Most of us read a paper everyday.
Sometimes it's the comics we want, can't miss the doings of our friends in the cartoons.
Then again, it's the sports page, where we all keep track of our favorite teams,.
Or possibly the ads.
-They had to counting into their coverage, what the American people wanted to hear.
It could be who won the World Series, or who won the World Cup, or an earthquake.
-They wanted to hear about baseball and they wanted to hear what their sons experiences
in Europe, they wanted to hear about D-Day.
In the paper that was going to cover the Holocaust, there were also comics, recipes, a woman getting
shot on third avenue, or a rape story in Harlem, or wherever- got much more attention.
This was a story happening to a strange people in a distant land.
-But we kept on hoping, if the world would only know, if the world would only know.
After all, all humanity is one.
-The way in which the Times reported the news of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto is
emblematic of how they treated the news of the extermination of the Jews throughout the
war, it was reported, it was reported accurately, it was reported in detail, it was reported
in a timely fashion, but it was for the most part buried inside the newspaper in a way
that would make it difficult for readers to find the information.
-To understand how the Times covered the Holocaust, you have to understand that the Times was
paranoid, with justification, about being marginalized as an institution because of
it's Jewish ownership.
-Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the publisher of The New York Times, came from a very distinguished
American Jewish family.
- He never backed away from or tried to deny that he was Jewish, but he was conscious that
he lived in a world of antisemitism.
-The majority of Americans harbored some degree or another of antisemitic images, attitudes.
-Antisemitism was a very serious factor, and it dwarfed anything that was happening in
Germany or Poland or Eastern Europe.
It was not an easy time to be a front and center American Jew.
- American's said they didn't wanna live next door to a Jew, they didn't wanna work with
a Jew, they thought Jews were sneaky, Jews were not honest.
once a week, father Coughlin from Detroit broadcast virulent diatribes against
the Jewish people.
That was something that was very much on the mind of American Jews.
-Arthur Hays Sulzberger was very plugged into that world and the antisemites, frankly, at
the state department, were downplaying the reports that were coming out of Europe that
Jews were being singled out, Jews were being systematically murdered.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger chose to believe those reports rather than the other ones that said
'No, this is happening'.
And I think was no question that it was skewed by his desire not to put the New York Times
in a situation where it would be considered a special pleader for Jews.
- I did a lot of my research in the New York Times company archives, which were, at the
time, were in the New York Times building where Arthur Sulzberger had worked and all
of the coverage had been done.
This is a folder called Judaism and these are all from Sulzberger to various people
who wrote to him and he's doing two things in these letters.
One of which is explaining that, while he is Jewish and he identifies as a Jew, he doesn't
think Judaism is anything more than a religious category and therefore, he didn't relate to
these people because they were part of the same people or the same race.
And the only hope is to sort of believe in a greater faith which is the faith of the United
States and the faith of democracy.
-Arthur Hays Sulzberger never denied that he was a Jew, but he viewed himself also as an
American.
-He resented always being defined as Jewish above all and that was the only or most important
thing.
-There was a certain insecurity that was built into the American Jew.
They were very privately Jewish, publicly they were completely American.
-Arthur Hays Sulzberger knew the paper would be discredited to the extent possible because
of it's Jewish ownerships.
That's why the coverage was undramatic, un-passionate, and framed often in general terms instead
of ones that really got to the issue there was an effort to exterminate Jews going on
in Europe.
The New York Times' voice was very important, it was the leader and that was why it made
it made it so damaging.
-They saw stories that were- that should have been big news that were big news and they
downplayed it.
They had to decide, is this true, is it accurate, have we told the story already, does it advance
what we know, are there other things happening in the world?
-They didn't put it on front page coverage, they should have, it turned out it was an
important story.
But that still does not tell us whether that would have made a difference.
-Had the Times taken a more prominent stand, had the lead article everyday been 'Jews Endangered",
"Jews Being Killed"
-How would much information have helped?
Suppression of the story by The New York Times, is not a myth, but it's a little fragment
of a story about why didn't the public care?
There were many papers that missed the story- that downplayed the story.
What makes the New York Times different is that it is a very influential newspaper and
it was a very influential newspaper.
So, had the New York Times told the story in a more dramatic way, in a public way, would
it have influenced the government to intervene?
To take actions to stop the Holocaust?
Perhaps.
On the other hand, there many other things going on at that same time.
Americans had concerns about their economy, just like today.
There are genocides going on today, are people moved to stop them or to rally around them?
Or are they focused on their next paycheck or are they focused on the recession?
American Jews faced a reality where they had no good options, where the public, the government
was on a totally different page than they were and that they had no precedent for that
kind of reality to deal with.
-There were ways to save some Jews, no all Jews, not most Jews.
And then I really think you need to say that, they were never talking about stopping the
Holocaust, we're not talking about saving 6 million people.
But if you are talking about if the U.S. government detected more public sentiment, it at least
would have explored more seriously the possibility of doing something.
I think the only hope for there being that kind of public pressure, pushing for this, would
have been if there had been more press coverage of it, and more attention to it.
-You assign a responsibility to a single instrument-- the New York Times.
It could have done much more, how much difference it would have made is really an open question.
It still is hard for me to imagine that you could get these stories and be the editor
who gets it and just says 'Oh, okay, that'll go on page four and we'll put it in the middle
of this stack of stories.
-I was the dismayed that while I was- my only hope was the free world.
How could such horror not be questioned?
how could they have closed their ears and- like the monkey who hears nothing, sees nothing,
says nothing.
They said a little bit.
It's incomprehensible to me.
-As we go into the archives and open the newspapers of that time, you say 'how come they weren't
covering this story?'
It's easy to say now because today we know it was the Holocaust and 6 million Jews died.
I don't think it's productive to blame the New York Time, but I think it's productive
to study and understand what happened in this situation and understand that the New York
times did make a mistake and use that as a mechanism for trying to avoid similar mistakes
in the future.
-This is the first draft of history, every day journalists try to do the best they can
and tell the story as best they can.
How history will judge them, we won't know.
-You know, it's the old story, as the banister says "All the News That's Fit to Print".