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Mar. 30--In May 2003, a Washington lawyer was cleaning her basement when she came upon fragments of an old diary. On the yellowed pages were descriptions of a plebiscite in the Saar region of Europe, Jewish refugees, and references to a Cardinal P.
The entries, dated 1934, stopped as abruptly as they had begun, and prompted the question: Where was the rest of the journal?
It would take an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., months to find the answer. When Stephen Mize did, he discovered a treasure trove: more than 10,000 pages of meticulous entries chronicling one man's desperate attempts to help Europe's Jews escape the Nazis.
On Wednesday, Mize was invited by Beth Emet Synagogue in Evanston and the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago to talk about the role the diaries of James G. McDonald have played in helping historians reconstruct the events of World War II.
"This treasure was so close to historical annihilation," said Mize, who found the diaries in the home of McDonald's daughter. "It would have been completely lost."
Instead, the McDonald diaries, which chronicle the diplomat's service as high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations and as America's first ambassador to Israel, are on display at the Holocaust museum.
"We're trying to impress on people that their recollection, their memories, their diaries are important to preserving the memory of the Holocaust as well as the war," Mize said.
The presentations were part of a series on the legacy of Nuremberg, sponsored by the museum, the Chicago Bar Association and the Chicago Public Library.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Morton Denlow, an organizer, said he brought the talks to the synagogue because "this seemed like it had appeal beyond just lawyers--the inside story of how Jews were being saved."
McDonald details meetings with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well as with Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the man who would become Pope Pius XII, Mize said. McDonald writes that he feared the Nazis were planning as early as 1933 to annihilate the Jews of Europe.
And he chronicles his attempts to find refuge for Jews in countries outside of Europe.
"You really hear McDonald's frustration," Mize said. "He's going country to country trying to find safe haven for Jews and others who were persecuted by the Nazis. Time and time again he runs into leaders willing to offer sympathy but not action."
McDonald pleads with Hitler himself to let the Jews emigrate, writing that he had appealed to the Fuhrer's sense of political survival, Mize said.
"Hitler responds by saying, look, other countries including the U.S. have shut Jews out of their country," Mize said.
McDonald also recounts entreaties he made to Pacelli, then the Vatican's secretary of state. The journal recounts a quid pro quo McDonald said he offered the cardinal: He would help the Catholic Church in Mexico, which was suffering under a left-wing government, if the cardinal would help secure safe passage to Argentina for Jews from the Saar region. That area had voted to become part of Germany, causing Jews to flee.
McDonald began his post as high commissioner for refugees in 1933, just as Hitler was coming to power. He resigned two years later after offering a "scathing collective indictment of the world for their indifference to the extirpation of the Jews from Europe," Mize said.
In 1949, President Harry S. Truman appointed McDonald the first U.S. ambassador to the new state of Israel. It was a territory McDonald knew well. In his diary, he recounts a moving event that occurred during Israel's 1948 war of independence.
McDonald had gone to a symphony in Tel Aviv with Israel's first president, Haim Weizman. The conductor Leonard Bernstein was standing onstage when the sudden thud of artillery brought the performance to a stop.
Bernstein looked at Weizman, who nodded for the famous conductor to resume playing, McDonald wrote. At that moment, McDonald said he had wanted to reach over and touch his daughter's hand to comfort her, but a security guard sat in the way.
"It contrasted the horror of outside to the sheer beauty of what's going on inside," Mize said of the diary entry. "It's a lovely moment."
Years later, McDonald hired a ghostwriter to help him write his memoirs and sent him a fragment of his diary. McDonald's daughter took possession of the rest of the journal after McDonald died in 1964.
The series in Chicago will feature a re-enactment of parts of the Nuremberg war-crimes trial at 4 p.m. Thursday at Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St. Surviving prosecutors will speak at 6 p.m. at the Standard Club, 320 S. Plymouth Ct.
dhoran@tribune.com
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