Abba Eban's Visit to Auschwitz

Shortly after his appointment as Foreign Minister in 1966, Abba Eban invited Moshe Raviv to serve as his political secretary. Upon taking office Eban decided to survey "foreign policy lines and our relationships with the nations of the world, region by region." The new Foreign Minister payed special attention to what Raviv referred to in his memoirs as, "The weakness of our relationship with the countries of Eastern Europe."

"This situation was created as a result of Moscow's dictates which were consistently anti-Israel and pro-Arab."

Bemisholei Hadiplomatia Haisraelit, Moshe Raviv (Modan, 2006)

Eban understood that an official visit to a member-state of the Soviet bloc would not be well received by Moscow, and that it was unlikely that such a visit could be arranged. Instead, he adopted the plan proposed by his political secretary. Raviv identified the Polish Foreign Secretary – Adam Rapacki – as the Eastern-European minister with whom it would be most suitable to hold a dialogue. Raviv proposed that the State of Israel hold an official diplomatic conference in Warsaw – not a meeting for the foreign ministers of Eastern Europe with Israel, but rather a meeting for all the Israeli ambassadors in Eastern Europe. That way they would be able to 'sneak' a meeting between the Israeli Foreign Minister with his Polish counterpart, in the hope of warming relations between the two countries. Once the Israeli Ambassador to Poland Dov Sattath had received approval for the conference from Foreign Minister Rapacki, the plan was put into action. The Israeli press published only short news items about the historic meeting between the Israeli and Polish Foreign Ministers in May 1966.

No Israeli visit to Poland, especially the first visit by an Israeli Foreign Minister to the country, could ignore recent history; only 21 years separated the historic visit from the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

"We went to Warsaw in 1966," wrote Raviv in his book, "Abba Eban, Gideon Rafael and I. All of our ambassadors to Eastern Europe were gathered there, awaiting us. Our first visit was to the Auschwitz concentration camp."

Even though Raviv was himself a Holocaust survivor who had survived the ghettos in Ukraine, he recalled the deep astonishment that struck him and the rest of the Israeli diplomats at the realization of, "What Man is capable to doing to Man." Led by a Polish guide who was seconded to the diplomatic delegation, they crossed the concentration camp on foot until they stood opposite the remains of the crematoria in Birkenau. There the delegation recited the Kaddish prayer in memory of the victims.

In a conversation that we held with Raviv, he spoke at greater length about the visit. He recalled the bus ride leaving the camp, "We rode in complete silence. Nobody could say a word. Every one withdrew into themselves. Later Eban and I spoke and we agreed that even in another thousand years, we would not be capable of understanding the tragedy that had befallen the Jewish people. Like all of us, Eban was full of shock, questions and pain. He asked himself how a cultured people such as the Germans could carry out such a terrible crime."

The delegation visited other Holocaust-related sites over the course of the following days. First, they visited the Umschlagplatz, the square where the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto were assembled before deportation to the camps; the delegation laid a wreath at the memorial there. Later they visited the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw where they were exposed to the complex operation that members of the institute had carried out during the war; a number of containers had been filled with documents that recorded Jewish life in Warsaw and buried nearby. After the war, only some of the containers were retrieved. The documents, collectively known as the Oneg Shabbat Archive, contained information about life in the Warsaw ghetto and also the prewar Jewish community of Warsaw, which had been one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. The documents were sorted and catalogued; their contents, which are on display in Yad Vashem's Holocaust History Museum, are still being researched to this day.

Ultimately, the visit to Eastern Europe did not lead to a significant improvement in relations between Israel and member-states of the Soviet bloc, primarily because it was not desired by the Soviet Union. Holding another such conference would not be possible until the fall of the USSR twenty-five years later. Eban, Raviv and the rest of the delegation left Poland "with the feeling that we were leaving a large cemetery behind us, one where a third of the Jewish people living in Europe had been murdered."

Following the visit, the Israeli press quoted Eban as saying, "I was very happy to be on the land of a friendly state, which is connected to us, through tragic memories of the past and with whom we have a friendly connection today."

The delegation's visit was documented in a series of photographs that have recently been donated to Yad Vashem by Moshe Raviv. They record the first visit of an Israeli Foreign minister to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest mass-murder site that the Nazis established during the Holocaust.

Our conversation ended with asking Moshe Raviv why he donated the photographs to Yad Vashem at this time. Raviv, who had been Abba Eban's political secretary and later the Israeli Ambassador to Britain and to the Philippines, responded, "My wife, of blessed memory, died five weeks ago. As a result, I started looking through and tidying our photo albums. I found the photographs of the visit to Auschwitz among all the family pictures. I told my children that there was no reason for such historic images to remain in our albums, they need to be at Yad Vashem."