Manuel Quezon: Little-known savior of Jews
Article by Michael Curtis in "The American Thinker":
A new film debuted around the world last month, an account of events during World War II in Manila: Quezon’s Game directed by Matthew Rosen, a filmmaker who began in London and lives in the Philippines.
The
film provides, using three languages, a version of a little- known
story, of which there is no definite official statement and a lack of
historical manuscripts, of the rescue organized by President Manuel L.
Quezon starting in 1938 of 1200 German and Austrian Jews, coincidentally
the same number of Jews saved by the well-known Oskar Schindler, who
found shelter from the Holocaust in the Philippines. Quezon had
proposed an “Open Door policy,” one that would admit up to 10,000 Jews,
but only 1280 made it. The ambitious and generous plan failed because of
events in World War II and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.
The
context of the story is that the country, which by the Treaty of Paris
1898 that ended the Spanish-American war was ceded to the U.S as a
territory, was trying to get full independence from the U.S. which it
finally obtained on July 4, 1946. Until then the country was a
protectorate of the U.S. The Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935
to 1946 was the administrative body governing the country, preparing for
a transition to full independence, controlled visas for entry.
Manuel
Quezon in October 1935 won the first national presidential election,
gaining 68% of the vote. As president he was determined to allow Jewish
immigrants from Europe into the country but has to contend with internal
critics and American policy on the issue. Suffering from tuberculosis,
he was fluent in English, a gifted pianist, brilliant lawyer, card
player of poker and bridge, and had been a playboy who shaved off his
moustache because it tickled the girls too much. Quezon was a
compassionate individual, a light of morality, and his story deserved to
be better known.
That
story is the effort to rescue European Jews. Quezon’s plan emerged over
nights playing poker and smoking cigars with two helpers, while Colonel
Dwight Eisenhower, then chief assistant to General Douglas Macarthur,
was sometimes present but had no role in the events. One helper was
Paul McNutt, former governor of Indiana and U.S. High Commissioner for
the Philippines, who risked his career and defied the U.S State
Department in trying to convince the U.S. government officials to issue
more visas. He was an unsuccessful presidential candidate when FDR
decided to run for a third term in 1940. McNutt had early been a critic
of the Nazi regime, a regime that failed to guarantee to its people the
right to live as human beings. In March 1933 he had asked, “Are we to
join with the traitors of brotherhood, or to enlist in the war of
justice.”
The
other, probably more significant helper was Herbert Frieder, a Jewish
businessman originally from Cincinnati, owner of the Cigar and Cigarette
Factory which he moved from NYC to Manila, who with his three sons was
active finding jobs, raising money, and setting up housing and schools
for the refugees. His relationship with and advice to Quezon is
reminiscent of that between President Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson,
his former business partner who influenced the President to support the
creation of the State of Israel.
The
U.S. sent immigration officials to the Philippines, supposedly to
assist in the revision of immigration policy in the country. This
suggested national quotas for immigration, in effect limits on Jewish
refugees, in a way similar to the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act that limited
Chinese and other persons. To counter this, Quezon struggled to
exercise executive power that allowed the president to disregard quotas
for humanitarian reasons.
Quezon’s
plan, the “Mindano plan,” was to admit Jews as settlers, 10,000 and
allow 1,000 Jews to enter annually, and to admit non-quota immigrants.
He also had offered his own lands for a large Jewish resettlement. The
plan was criticized both internally on the grounds it would add to the
unemployment situation and soon flood the country with more foreigners
than could be absorbed, and externally. Quezon countered that the Jews
would be as asset because of their knowledge and expertise in the
professions. The plan was opposed by Francis B. Sayre who had succeeded
McNutt as U.S. High Commissioner.
Quezon
also in April 1940 donated 7.5 hectares of his own country estate in
Marikina as a working farm for Jews. In it was Mariquina Hall that
housed 40 refugees. This generosity was repaid in November 2013 when
the Jews in the population helped raise funds for those affected by
Yolanda typhoon. In recent years, trees have been placed in the area by
the Israeli ambassador.
The
Philippines remained friendly to the Jewish cause, and links exist
between the two countries. It was only Asian country to vote for the UN
partition resolution in 1947, leading to the creation of Israel in 1948.
Now, the State of Israel grants visa-free travel for Philippine
tourists since 1969. One non-political link is that one of the
descendants of the refugees is the former wife of president Rodrigo
Duterte.
A
monument, the Open Doors Monument, to Quezon was unveiled in Israel in
the Rishon LeZion Memorial Park in 2009. Ten years later, the Philippine
Embassy opened the Bala Quezon, the Philippine cultural center in Tel
Aviv, that is also a museum about Quezon’s efforts to save Jews. In
August 2015 a posthumous award of the Raoul Wallenberg medal was given
to Quezon and presented by the Israeli Ambassador to the Philippines.
Quezon,
a Catholic, saw that Filipinos were subjected to racial discrimination
and bigotry, and understood the parallel of Jews suffering from Nazi
discrimination. Filmgoers may remember the end of Schindler’s List when
the protagonist ponders whether he could have rescued more Jews than he
did. Similarly, the compassionate Manuel Quezon, at the end of his
life, asked “Could I have done more?” This is still a question for the
international community.
By coincidence in the same month of January, a play titled Leopoldstadt by
the 81-year-old Tom Stoppard, arguably the greatest living playwright,
opened in London. Born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia the then-named Tomas
Straussler moved, to escape the Nazis, with his family to Singapore,
then India, and finally Britain. Stoppard’s previous plays, intelligent
and witty, have often discussed the collision of ideas and themes; his
play Arcadia dealt with tension between classicism and
romanticism, art and nature, the 19th and the 20th centuries. In these
plays and screen and TV plays he wrote Stoppard never used or explored
his Jewish background. Latterly, he said that his mother who had no
religion never talked about the past until she was 80 and only then
informed him that all his four Jewish grandparents and her sisters had
been murdered in the Holocaust.
This
revelation changed the way he saw himself and led him to think about
the Holocaust. His new play is not autobiographical, but its subject was
suggested by the experience of the Jewish people. The play Leopoldstadt,
the name is that of the former Viennese Jewish ghetto, is set in the
first half of 20th century vibrant Vienna. It deals with a number of
generations of two intermarried Jewish families, coping with what it
meant to be Jewish and living in a culture where ten percent of the
population was Jewish, that was destroyed by the Nazis. Stoppard
expresses the progress of Viennese Jews through a character: “My
grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and
I, a factory owner, have the singers to dinner.” The Jews in Vienna, as
elsewhere in Europe, were successful but they were doomed. Stoppard’s
personal feelings of grief and horror of the Holocaust made him sadly
wonder if “ordinary people would be capable of the same genocidal
actions of which we are all capable.”
The question has been considered by many writers, of whom three may be mentioned: Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners,
and in the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures. No
categorical answer to the question is possible, but it is welcoming to
reply to Stoppard by illustrating the goodness and heroism of people in
some situations.
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