In 1939 all the children in our Jewish Sunday school in Greensboro, North Carolina, rejoiced when the national publication for Jewish children carried a story about "a very nice man" in the Caribbean who turned out to be the only national leader willing to admit Jewish refugees from Germany, literally saving their lives. I never forgot his name, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, probably the worst dictator in a region full of them.
Sure enough, at the Évian Conference (in 1938) Trujillo's Dominican Republic was the one and only country (of the 32 participating) willing to admit Jews whose only alternative was concentration and then extermination camp.
Some countries are good actors, like Finland, which gallantly manipulated signs moving the Arctic Circle a half-mile south so Eleanor Roosevelt wouldn't get her boots muddy. And, conversely, there are countries that are bad actors. What has North Korea done for the world lately?
Seldom if ever recognized, however, is the existence of countries that are very, very bad and very, very good, even at the very same time!
During World War II, for instance, Sweden supplied Nazi Germany with ball bearings and other implements of war and allowed the Nazis to transport German troops from Norway to the Russian front on Swedish trains. But, simultaneously, Sweden rebuffed German appeals to quit granting asylum to Jewish and other refugees fleeing Hitler and to American and British pilots who'd been shot down over the Baltic Sea.
That latter category – simultaneous good and bad – seems to be the majority condition.
A famous story during that war told of Switzerland's tortured neutrality. One night a fleet of American bombers was alerted via radio it was flying over neutral Swiss territory. "We know," responded the Americans. "If you don't divert immediately, we'll have to shoot," said the Swiss. Again the Americans replied, "We know." The Americans remained on course, and the Swiss began firing. "You're aiming fifteen thousand feet too low," chided the Americans, to which the Swiss replied, "We know!"
Meanwhile, Switzerland was returning refugees who'd successfully made it out of France right back to the Nazis!
Spain had just suffered a terrible civil war, and the winner was Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a notorious fascist installed thanks to German and Italian weaponry. However, 25 years after the war, papers from the Spanish Foreign Office revealed that Franco's major goal was to save as many Jews from Hitler as he could. And he did a good job. During that war Franco declared that anyone whose family had been Spanish citizens at any point over the previous 500 years was still considered to be a Spanish citizen. That meant all the descendants of victims of the Spanish Inquisition from the 1400s were free to go to any Spanish diplomatic mission and get a Spanish passport and get out of countries that had fallen to Hitler! Many thousands did so.
Vastly more spectacular was Japan's "Fugu Plan" that rescued 50,000 Jewish lives from their ally, Nazi Germany. I'll devote a whole column to that story, but meanwhile you might want to read "The Fugu Plan," a masterwork by Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, who headed Tokyo's Jewish Center for 10 years.
Equally astounding was Italy during World War II. After the Allies had liberated the toe, the instep, the heel and much of the leg of the Italian boot, Hitler re-installed his hero, Mussolini, as ruler of the "stump state" occupied by Germany. Italian police chiefs were charged with uprooting all the Jews in the new "Republic of Salò" – what was left of Axis Italy. It was a miserable failure. Those Jews under Italian occupation were, indeed, consigned to camps, but in Italian camps they gained weight and held regular services on Sabbath and Jewish Holidays.
Here's the most monumental "trivia" question of World War II. In which European country were there more Jews after the war than before? Here's a clue: That country was an Axis ally! Here's the answer: Albania! When the Germans demanded the Albanians surrender their Jews, the Albanians protected their Jews and threatened their Nazis! There were more Jews in Albania after the war than before!
Ireland would get special mention now even if it weren't so close to St. Patrick's Day. Hitler dreamed of a friendly Ireland. He knew the Irish hated the British. When Hitler proposed an alliance, not just dreaming but drooling at the thought of German submarine bases as far west as Ireland, he went wild. Ireland, however, would have nothing to do with Hitler and his ideas.
In rejecting Hitler's appeal for an alliance, tens of thousands of Irishmen joined the British armed forces.
One night, in a bombing raid over Hamburg, a British Lancaster bomber was completely staffed with Irishmen, not a Brit aboard.
Their plane was terribly shot up. The outboard starboard engine was out. The inboard port engine was smoking. Half the tail was shot off. Flak kept smashing through the plane, rendering it wobbly and likely to explode and crash at any instant.
But that didn't keep the crew from arguing Irish politics all the while.
"Who the hell is this 'de Valera,' anyhow?" complained the tail gunner. (Eamon de Valera was the prime minister of Ireland.) "His mother's an American, and his father's a bloody Spaniard."
"So what?" snapped the pilot.
"He kept us out of the war, didn't he?"
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