Lancaster High students learn about Holocaust

by Jeff Melcher

Just about every school child knows the heartbreaking story of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who kept a diary while in hiding with her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II. Far fewer know about James G. McDonald. But like Anne Frank, McDonald was a diarist, too. Frank's writing put a face on the more than 6 million European Jews who died in Nazi death camps; McDonald's diary is the story of an attempt to prevent those murders.

Last week at the University of Texas at Dallas, Holocaust scholar Richard Breitman, who co-edited the papers and diaries of McDonald, shared the story of this largely forgotten American diplomat. In his book, Advocate for the Doomed: the Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald 1933-35, Breitman says McDonald tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Nazis to use immigration to move German Jews out of Germany.

Breitman’s audiences included 25 Lancaster High School students. It was a stark lesson for these young people to learn. Lancaster High School student Vonkisa Baker was moved by the lecture, “It was excellent to be able to hear the quotes from the diary of somebody who had a first-person experience with the Holocaust,” she said. “It added a whole other level of interest to the lecture.”

Even with the best connections – McDonald’s diary recorded meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII, among others – earnest pleas can still fall on deaf ears. McDonald was unable to prevent genocide because, as Breitman said, “Most of us cannot take in the horror of the wanton murder of Europe’s six million Jews.”

This story was submitted by a member of the Pegasus News Community.