Monday, January 9, 2012
NEW EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE ON POPE PIUS XII AND JEWISH REFUGEES
DURING WORLD WAR II
– Groundbreaking Story Published in Our January 2012 Issue!
Is much of the modern world’s prevailing scholarly thinking about Pope Pius XII and his relations with Jews
and the Jewish community just plain wrong?
It may very well be, according to remarkable new evidence discovered by researcher William Doino Jr., and
published in the latest edition of Inside the Vatican magazine.
Th e evidence shows that Pope Pius XII helped hundreds of shipwrecked Jews to avoid deportation to German
concentration camps.
Th e evidence is compelling, so compelling that some Jewish voices are now calling on the authorities of the
Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Israel to consider declaring Pope Pius XII one of the “Righteous
Among Nations” for personally intervening to save Jewish lives during World War II.
William Doino Jr., researcher and Pius XII expert, during fi ve years of painstaking research, has uncovered
and here published explicit new testimony from two Jewish witnesses—evidence either up to now unknown,
not fully known, or, for reasons diffi cult to understand, deliberately ignored by scholars and others engaged
in a fi fty-year campaign of defamation against Pius XII.
Doino’s research challenges those who hold negative views of Pius XII, and in particular, Yad Vashem, Israel’s
Holocaust Memorial, which still displays an exhibit accusing the wartime pontiff of indiff erence toward Jews
during the Holocaust.
Will this powerful evidence, revealing the Pope’s fi rm support for Jewish victims, fi nally persuade Yad
Vashem to take down its inaccurate exhibit? Might it move Yad Vashem, in fact, toward declaring Pius XII
a “Righteous Gentile”?
Th e new research may also infl uence the Catholic Church’s thinking as a decision about whether to advance
Pius XII’s cause for beatifi cation is weighed.
Th e eyewitnesses to Pius XII’s actions are two Jewish refugees: Howard Heinz Wisla (1920–2004), from
Germany; and Herman Herskovic (1921–1983), from Czechoslovakia, each of whom left behind dramatic
testimonies until now overlooked or forgotten. Doino earlier touched on some of Wisla’s testimony, which
had anonymously been published in the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post) in 1944.
Th is new January essay, “Pope Pius XII: Friend and Rescuer of Jews,” draws upon Wisla’s virtually unknown
memoir, fi rst published in German and Hebrew (1945), and then, in expanded form, in English (1966).
Th e memoir describes his astonishing audience with Pius XII at the Vatican in late 1941, when Pius embraced
the young Wisla, and told him: “Always be proud to be a Jew!”
Th e revealing article also tells the full story of the Jewish refugees shipwrecked in the Aegean Sea, who had managed to get to a deserted island, only to discover they faced slow starvation, and approaching Germans.
Th e Nazis did eventually take control of the island and commit atrocities. Before that, however, Wisla had
escaped, reaching Rome and the Pope. Alerted by Pius XII, the Italian Red Cross took the refugees to relative
safety in southern Italy.
In addition to Wisla’s fi rsthand account, there is that of his fellow refugee, Herman Herskovic. Herskovic
confi rms Wisla’s meeting with the Pope, as well as the harrowing ordeal of the Jews saved by Pius, and
declares: “I owe my life to the Pope,” adding that “several hundred Jews” also owed their lives to Pope Pius.
Th is groundbreaking journalism establishes in detail a successful rescue eff ort carried out at the personal
direction of Pius XII, enabling fi ve hundred endangered Jews to survive the deadly anti-Semitism of World
War II.
“Th is is just another example of how Pope Pius XII directly interceded to save Jewish lives when most of
the world’s religious leaders did nothing,” said Gary Krupp, a Jewish researcher on Pius XII and the Second
World War who lives in New York. “And Pius did so while being surrounded by hostile forces and mindful
of the plan to invade the Vatican to kidnap him in 1943. It is time for the world to appreciate what this man
did. We call upon the authorities at Yad Vashem to seriously look at this material, in addition to the other
evidence we have submitted to them, in order for Pope Pius XII to be called righteous among nations.” (Gary
Krupp is the founder and president of Pave the Way Foundation.)
Source: Pope Pius XII and World War II: The Documented Truth