Does a Good Deed Make Up For Serving A Bad Cause? The Debate Over "The Righteous Diplomat"
Nefesh Yehudi:[1] Metropolis' Jewish Magazine
October 10, 1992
Martin Berman
Only in the UASR can a desire to name a school auditorium after a member of the Righteous of the Nations create a national controversy. The debate over whether or not Harold Stevens, the Americuban diplomat who saved hundreds of Jews in Fascist Romania by granting them asylum, should be honored by the students of Rego Park Technical High School despite his disreputable behavior in the Second American Civil War has forced us many Red Americans serious questions about how we interpret and recite our history.
Is it right to honor a revolutionary despite his disreputable actions? Does a heroic deed matter if one serves a reactionary despot?
The origin of this debate began simply because one young American sought to learn more of his heritage.
***
In 1991, Michael Hertzel, a young Jewish American from the Queens neighborhood of Rego Park, signed up for CominExchange [2] , eager to spend his sophomore year abroad. Instead of using CominExchange to spend time abroad in the Soviet Union or Mexico, as the majority of students do, he decided to spend his year abroad in Romania. His interest was motivated by a desire to learn about his heritage.
His grandfather, David, and his parents, Esther and Joseph, were Jewish clothing retailers who enjoyed a bourgeois life in the Romanian capital of Bucharest. But by September 10, 1939, when David was 16, the specter of fascism, which had already contaminated Italy and Germany, began to consume Romania.
That year, the reactionary Ion Antonescu, who had built his reputation crushing the peasants of Romania [3], would be appointed Prime Minister by King Carol to appease the far-right forces that had gained tremendous power throughout the decade [4]. Emulating his Nazi brethren, he passed harsh antisemitic legislation that quickly targeted the Jewish population. The Jewish bourgeoisie, however, became Antonescu's first target.
"Grandpa David told me how she watched as four fascist thugs beat up my great-grandfather and stole her luxury clothes," Hertzel said with sadness. "When he went to pray to God for mercy, he saw our rabbi being humiliated by a soldier, who cut off his beard. He said that was the day she stopped being Romania".
This pushed the Hertzel family to immigrate to the UASR in December of that year, settling in Rego Park, where many refugees from fascism had already settled, and where many survivors of the Shoah would find a home. [5]
They would be among the 20,000 lucky souls that would escape Romania before Operation Teutonic would mean the severing of diplomatic ties between the UASR and Antonescu's regime, and the end of easy escape for Eastern Europe's Jews. By the end of the war, over half of Romania's Jews [6] would perish at the hands of Antonescu's fascist thugs , and his soldiers would be responsible for some of the most brutal parts of the Shoah, including the massacres of Odessa.
When Michael Hertzel arrived in Bucharest in September of last year, however, he found a Romania that was far different than the one his grandma described, and the one he read about in books about World War II.
"There were kosher cafes, bookstores selling Hebrew literature, even a Yiddish language theater," said Michael. "It was Haifa, but with Romanian signs. Even gentile tourists were happily visiting these areas."
With the reforms of the late 1970s, and with a Jewish population of nearly 40,000 , Bucharest would become one of the hotspots of the Jewish Renaissance [7]. Romania's Premier, Petre Roman [8], also openly celebrated his Jewish heritage.
Temple Unirea Sfanta [9], the temple where Grandma Emma prayed as a child, became the center of Romania's Revival, with not only services, but a museum and a memorial to the Shoah.
"When I came home I showed a picture to my grandpa of me praying in the sanctuary where he did." Michael said, "Grandpa burst into tears and hugged me."
The synagogue also housed a movie theater that often showed films related to Jewish history and culture. Michael was surprised, however, to see a film was imported from Cuba of all places, as Cuban art is barred as per the rules of the embargo.
"I thought to myself ,'A Cuban film? Probably some kind of sludge full of anti-semitic jokes'. Until then, I thought that was the only thing fascists could produce. But the things I saw in the film were things my grandma told me about," Michael said. "Jews being bullied, beaten, and their homes vandalized with slurs by these fascist bullies. I only thought that those capitalist exiles could make shit movies, but this one nailed me to my seat."
The 1985 Cuban film,
The Righteous Diplomat, told a story virtually unknown to Jewish communities in Comintern, but well known to Jewish communities in the capitalist world. Henry Stevens, an Americuban diplomat, played by an actor named Andy Garcia, had been MacArthur's consul in the city of Iasi (pronounce Yassi) when Antonescu began his cruel persecutions, which are painstakingly detailed. The film reveals that Stevens, born in 1890 in Maryland, had been an American banker and a MacArthur loyalist who had fled to Cuba, where his loyalties to the Cuban regime earned him a cushy diplomatic posting in the city of Iasi.
Walking through the street of Iasi, a street full of brutes and the victims, is one man, observing these horrors with a quiet sadness is Harold Stevens, the diplomat. Michael describes the man as a typical Cuban bourgeois.
"Fancy clothes, cigars, luxurious house," Michael said with disgust, "this man seemed like a stereotypical Cuban bourgies. Yet, I was surprised to see his humanity toward Iasi's Jew."
One scene showed Stevens giving a large tip to Jewish boy who was reduced to poverty shining shoes, and happily accepting an invitation from a Jewish bourgeois family for dinner.
By the middle of the film, Jews in Iasi, no longer able to escape to the UASR which was now at war with Romania, begged Stevens, and other diplomats in the area, for aid.
"One scene that stood out was Stevens coming to the gate to order the crowd of Jews away. Among the crowd is the poor boy who shined his shoes." Michael said. "And Stevens suddenly starts breaking down, and he comes to realize that human beings are on the line."
Stevens, under a pang of conscience, began writing hundreds of visas for Jewish citizens desperate for escape. When confronted by Antonescu's thugs, he pretends that the Jews are mistreated servants, which fills the thugs with a sadistic pleasure that makes them back off.
By June of 1940, with the fascist invasion of the USSR well under way, Antonescu saw the Jews of Iasi as a dangerous fifth column, and began to plot to disrupt this potentially traitorous community. On June 28-29, he would kick start the deadly Iasi pogrom, in which nearly 15,000 (one-third) of Iasi's Jews were slaughtered and killed. It is in this scene where the climax of the movie takes place, when Stevens abandons the safety of the consulate building to rescue the child of one of the Jewish men he befriended who had snuck back to his home.
"Stevens drove his car through a mob, witnessing gangs beat and torture Jews and raping the women," Michael said in an astonished tone."He saw one man getting his eyes gouged out [10]. And yet this capitalist snowflake never lost his cool."
Stevens finds the child at his home being beaten by a couple of Romanian Iron Guard thugs, who have left a revolver on the ground in front of Stevens. He interrupts the beating and insists he had given the boy asylum and demands his release. The two men laugh at him, confused by his desire to protect a Jewish child. Stevens loses his patience and pulls the revolver on the two men, who raise their rifles.
"You want to die defending this kike," cackles one of the thugs. "With our guns, we could kill you and then him."
"Maybe, but not before I get one of you," mutters Stevens in quiet defiance. The two thugs let the boy go, and storm away in an angry fluster, like bullies who been given detention.
Stevens is able to give asylum to 520 Iasi Jews, who end building new lives in Havana. However, this rescue would lead to his political downfall and financial ruin.
The relationship between MacArthur's Cuba and Jews is a very complicated one. However, MacArthur himself had never held any anger toward the Jews, and refused to restrict the rights of then 25,000 (now 43,000) [11] Jews living in Cuba, despite the urging of figures like
Virgil Effinger and William Dudley Pelley. Many Jewish capitalists, like Edward Bernays and the Rothschild family, were able to prosper in Cuba. In the modern day, Havana has become a refuge for bourgeois Jews, like George Soros and Sol Kerzner. His biographer, Manuel Perriera, credits his lack of prejudice to a kindly Jewish doctor who didn't charge the Stevens family for checkups when they lived in poverty, which was told by Stevens younger son, Brian.
MacArthur's American and Cuban adminstration, as well the native Cuban elite who collaborated with MacArthur, had many antisemites, and encouraged good relations with the fascist powers of Europe until 1942. Among these figures was Breckinridge Long, MacArthur's Secretary of State, who while working with the Entente to fight Integralism, advised MacArthur against allowing large numbers Jewish refugees from reaching the shores of Cuba under the guise of preventing communist infiltration [12]. Long was quick to punish Steven's disobedience. Upon his return to Cuba in 1941, Long fired him from the State Department, and had him expelled from the Council of National Salvation. This ultimately turned him into a persona non grata, costing him his banking job and destroying his marriage. While the Jewish community of Havana helped him by offering him work as a clerk, Stevens would never recover from the professional and personal humiliation caused by the loss of his bourgeois life, and in 1943, he put on a gun to his head.
Stevens remained an obscure figure until 1979 when Manuel Perriera, a former Cuban dissident who had become a part of Cuba's cultural renaissance, was contacted by Itzhak Verlescu, the Jewish boy who was rescued by Stevens, now living in Havana as the manager of a shoe store. In 1980,
The Righteous Diplomat was published, becoming a best seller in Havana. In 1985, a Cuban director named Rafael Vidalas turned
The Righteous General into a major hit. Through a British film company, the movie reached Romania in 1988.
The film turned Stevens into a national hero both in Cuba and Romania. In 1988, the Cuban Congress passed a resolution which apologized for turning Stevens into a pariah, and in 1990, the Havana University School of Foreign Affairs was renamed in honor of Stevens, to promote an image of integrity. In 1990, the Jews of Iasi, now numbering 2,500 but still energetic, built a statue of him near the old Iasi synagogue. The year Michael traveled to Romania, Stevens became a member of the Righteous Among the Nations.
"I went to this museum, and saw the statue. I felt that the capitalists and the communists could honor him, why couldn't we," said Michael.
Upon his return to the UASR in August, he went to Rego Park Technical's student Soviet with a proposal: to rename the auditorium "The Henry Stevens Memorial Auditorium." Many of the school's students, like Michael, are the descendants of Jews who escaped fascism. Michael figured it would be simple. But many students were put off by the naming a school after a MacArthurite stooge.
Regina Perlman, an active member of the student body, was opposed to giving a member of MacArthur's clique any name recognition., getting into a fierce debate with Michael over it.
"Putting a MacArthurite's name on an American school would be like an East German school naming something after Hitler [13]," she said.
Michael's argument, however, retorted that many "great figures" of liberation have done far worst things, and that honoring a diplomat who risked his career would not be honoring MacArthur.
"Mao killed landlords without trial, and Lenin suspended Democracy, yet we still honor this men for their contribution to the march of history," retorted Michael.
The debate itself has created controversy over the ethics of historical revisionism and memory. In Debs, a school has had a similar debate over the removal of streets named for J. Edgar Hoover for his notorious violations of civil liberties, vs. those who wish to keep recognition of an important warrior against counter-revolution.
Stevens, like many people, cannot be easily defined. But do we honor his heroics? Do we remember his disreputable actions? It is possible to respect someones heroics, while acknowledging his fallings?
Esther Gotbaum, the director of the Jewish Museum of Iasi, answered this question as such:"yes this man may have served capitalists, but we Reds pride ourselves on defending lives of vicious exploitation and slaughter. Comrade Stevens saved 520 members of this proud community, whose descendants now number in the thousands, and who can contribute to this community's resurrection. I believe that this must be the measure of a man, more than his money and his affiliations. "
[1] A line from Hatikvah, meaning "Jewish Soul"/
[2] ITTL version of AFS, but probably with government funding to encourage inter-Comintern relations.
[3] I imagine Reds would emphasize moments like this in the history of disreputable figures (He loved fascism because he already enjoyed crushing the peasants).
[4] OTL, this didn't happen til 1940, but I imagine the rise of Communism in America speeding this process up a bit.
[5] OTL, Art Spiegelman grew up in Rego Park.\
[6] While Antonescu unleashed pogroms in his own country and his forces were brutal toward Jews in the occupied Soviet Union, he refused to be a part of the Final Solution.
[7] An ITTL resurrection of Judaism in Eastern Europe that I will write about in a later contribution.
[8] OTL, he was Romania's first post-Communist leader.
[9] Means "Holy United".
[10] Those pogroms were incredibly nightmarish I tell you.
[11] Without Castro, I believe Cuba's Jewish community might actually grow.
[12] OTL, Long used this excuse to deliberately prevent Jewish refugees from gaining asylum.
[13] Godwin's Law.
