In conjunction with our Americans and the Holocaust exhibition, the Daniel Boone Regional Library Archives created a special collection of local news coverage between 1933 and 1945, documenting Nazi atrocities against Jews.
In February 1942, the Columbia Daily Tribune published an essay written by local sophomore Bernard Sigoloff. His winning essay spoke to the different realities of Jewish civil rights at home and in Europe. In the following years, he would serve in WWII on the US Carpelotti as a part of the Navy.
You can find a photo of Sigoloff’s article, along with the rest of this collection, in our Community History Archive, Americans and the Holocaust: Mid-Missouri Newspaper Coverage. Below you will find the text of Sigoloff’s essay.
“What Americanism Means to Me”
By Bernard Sigoloff
I am a Jew. In some countries that would be enough to send me to a concentration camp or even to place a price on my head, but in America no one mentions that my racial difference or makes me feel that he applies different standards for me than for himself. Is it any wonder I am grateful to a country which means protection, equality and a free chance to live a good live?
I go to a public school. I choose my own course of study. There is no one to say, “You must prepare to fly a bomber when you are sixteen.” There is no one to shout the doctrines of the dictator’s creed in my ears, nor is there a lurking Gestapo to report my doubts or questions to an officer. I am free—free to decide what I wish to be. I choose to be an electrical engineer. My school, through the support of the people, offers me pre-engineering courses. In a democratic classroom, aided by a sympathetic teacher, I can find whether I am fitted by natural ability to pursue this course. My father’s name, my racial features, my religious tenets, do not affect my choice. I am as free to choose as if my father were the king’s own minister. After I finish school, I shall go to a state university supported by popular taxation. Here additional training will be given, and new ideas and thoughts will be presented to me. Perhaps America is more education conscious than any nation in the world, and perhaps it is necessary that she should be. In a land where every man’s vote is equal, where any man may be a public office holder, it is necessary that education should be extended to all. America has a reputation for thrift, and there is vast economic waste in uneducated people.
The education is not limited to training for one special job only, but I am being given a general background. In history, I learn that civilizations have risen and fallen according to the wisdom of the people, or their ability to choose leadership. I am taught facts which would be as treasonous as they were startling in Germany for I am told that my nation does not always consider itself blameless in National disputes, that its leaders are not arch angels, but men with man’s frailties and virtues. The mistakes of the past are pointed out: the dangers of the future are held up as warnings, and I am free to choose my course. America is not afraid to face realities. She does not need to hide the true state of affairs from her people to keep down revolt. She does not need to indoctrinate her people with hatred, fear of a common enemy. She does not need to threaten and coerce. She is as generous as a mother, as full of loving-kindness as a mother and as strict in her justice as a wise mother.
There is assurance of protection here. I can go to sleep at night without fear of seizure and arrest on a false charge. I can listen to my radio, I can read the paper and express my opinion on public affairs. I can belong to the Democratic party today and vote for the Republican party tomorrow if I choose and I will be neither ostracized or prosecuted for it. The policemen are my friends; they are anxious to help me and to make this town a better regulated more efficient town in which to live.
My religion is not the same as many of my classmates, but in America the synagogue and the chapel sit side by side upon the hill and the people may kneel to God before either altar. This fall, three boys, a Catholic, a Jew and a Protestant spoke on religious beliefs before our high school Assembly. Perhaps in no other country in the world today could that be done, but in America.
Today, we are engaged in a war, brought on, not by our own choice, but because the two systems of government at present existing in the world cannot exist together. Either a policy of hate and force and aggression must dominate, or a system of free choice and individual rights must be supreme. This is no time to be weakly sentimental. It is no time to be undivided or uncertain in our loyalties. There may not be perfection in this country. We do not profess to live in a paradise, but we believe in it, and we believe that it is worth keeping. The soldiers and sailors have the more romantic as well as the more difficult task now of support and protection, but there are tasks for us who are too young to fight as well. Our tasks are less than picturesque, more tedious, less glorious, but they shall be done just as willingly. We will walk to save tires, we will conserve sugar and paper and wartime goods, and we will give accordingly to our ability for defense stamps and bonds.
The story of America is not finished. There is work to do! But the column of faith in God and the fire of Democratic belief will lead us out of this wilderness as surely as these beacons led my ancestors through the wilderness.
