On a recent trip home to Springfield, Missouri, I had the chance to visit a traveling exhibition titled Americans and the Holocaust at the local public library. Sponsored by the United States Holocaust Museum and the American Library Association, the exhibition is small but powerful. The exhibit includes some well-done general context about the Nazis’ rise to power and the beginnings of World War II, but that is not its focus. Instead, as its title suggests, Americans and the Holocaust considers difficult questions about what Americans could have known about the Holocaust and when, and about the motives and fears that shaped the United States’ unwillingness to do more to save Jews and others who suffered under the Nazi regime.

I was familiar with much of the material because I have spent the last few years reading, writing, and now talking about the issues the exhibit covers. And yet, some of the details were new to me, and some that I was familiar with hit me hard all over again. Here are some of the things that caught my attention in particular:

• In November, 1938, American newspapers ran front page stories and banner headlines about the violence of what became known as Kristallnacht. In a Gallup public opinion poll conducted several weeks later, ninety-four percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. In that same poll, seventy-one percent did not want the United States to admit more Jewish refugees, a position that was clearly reflected in our immigration policies at the time.

• In late 1943, officials in the Treasury Department learned that the State Department had been blocking reports about the mass murder of Jews.[1] Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau went around the State Department and took the information directly to President Roosevelt in January, 1944. Roosevelt then signed an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving some 200,000 refugees.

• More than half of all Americans heard Edward R. Morrow’s broadcast from the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1945. Before that, reporters had told Americans over and over about the brutality of Nazi oppression, against Jews, communists, political dissenters, and others, but many Americans had found it all too easy to disbelieve. Now that was impossible. As Life magazine summed it up, “Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”

• A story I am very familiar with, but think it is important to emphasize whenever possible: After the liberation of Ohdruf, General Eisenhower visited the camp. The visual evidence and verbal testimony of the brutality of the camps made him ill. But he had no doubt of the importance of his visit. “I made the visit deliberately,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall three days later,” in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”

Not an easy story to read. Too important to dismiss.

The exhibition is nearing the end of its second tour of libraries in smaller cities, but you still have six months to track it down. You can read more about the exhibit and see the tour schedule here.

[1] I have unsubstantiated thoughts about how the demographics of the State Department contributed to this.