A short response to Alan Dershowitz

In his Huffington Post piece, “Suppressing Ugly Truth for Beautiful Art” (May 1, 2012), Alan Dershowitz writes: 

Stein, a “racial” Jew according to Nazi ideology, managed to survive the Holocaust, while the vast majority of her co-religionists were deported and slaughtered. The [Metropolitan Museum of Art] exhibit says “remarkably, the two women [Stein and her companion Alice Toklas] survived the war with their possessions intact.” It adds that “Bernard Fay, a close friend … and influential Vichy collaborator is thought to have protected them.” That is an incomplete and distorted account of what actually happened. Stein and Toklas survived the Holocaust for one simple reason: Gertrude Stein was herself a major collaborator with the Vichy regime and a supporter of its pro-Nazi leadership.

Dershowitz seems to have forgotten that, unlike her “co-religionists [who] were deported or slaughtered,” Stein was an American citizen and the US was not yet at war with Germany. Indeed, when the war broke out in September 1939, the United States immediately recognized the Vichy Government and sent an Ambassador — William D. Leahy — to Vichy: the idea, originally, was to pry the Maréchal away from the Germans. At the time that Stein and Toklas settled in the small village of Belley, near Bilignin, where Stein first bought a house in the early twenties, they were not yet in physical danger.  The US declared war on Germany on December 11, 1941 — two years and three months later. After that point, of course — think 1942 — American citizens were the enemy and were rounded up and imprisoned, and Stein makes clear that she and Alice were deeply afraid. Nothing happened, not because Stein was a “major collaborator with the Vichy regime” — an assertion that is simply absurd —  but because, as two old American ladies more or less hiding in the village where they were on good terms with their neighbors, they were left alone.  

Myself an Austrian Jewish refugee from Hitler in 1938 and knowing how complex the situation was in wartime France, I find Dershowitz’s blanket accusations appalling. Maybe he now wants to pronounce Roosevelt a “collaborator” because he sent an ambassador to Vichy; our embassy there, incidentally, was open until the spring of 1942.