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We Were There
Southwestern Jewish Press, March 27 1947:

By Albert Hutler

The 1947 campaign dinner is now a thing of the past.  Those who were present heard a brilliant talk from Dr. Schwartz, the European Director of the Joint Distribution Committee, who told the true story of what is taking place in Europe today. Many of those who missed him, for one reason or another, will still continue to give the same old excuses for not giving.  "I don't think it is necessary to send so much money to help starving Jews overseas" or "If the United Jewish Appeal went out of existence, governments would have to take care of the Jews overseas" or "It's impossible for me to give this year.  I need at least $20,000 a year to live on" or "I don't like Blackberry Pie."

The people living in displaced persons camps and those who are supposedly free living in Warsaw or Hungary or Rumania, don't know what Blackberry Pie is.  They have been living behind barbed wire for so long they have forgotten normal living. They do not know the word impossible for many of them have been dead and reborn by liberation. We say it's impossible to give and they say nothing is impossible.

A woman, recently out of a concentration camp, walks 450 miles with a pack on her back because someone has told her that her husband might possibly be at a displaced persons camp. A man walks from Germany to Poland because he has heard that a niece may still be alive in the city of Lodz. A boy dives off a boat near Palestine to try to enter illegally.  Impossible—there is no such word in the vocabulary of a displaced person.

It seems to those of us who were there that we have become phlegmatic about other people's suffering. Perhaps we have been saturated by their stories. Perhaps we feel it cannot happen here. Perhaps we have forgotten that nothing is impossible.

Yet many Jews and many communities feel that it is very possible to raise $170,000,000 in the United States for overseas relief.  The vast majority of these people are certain that the cause is just and that the money is well spent.  The campaign dinner last night proved that there are many such people in San Diego.  You, too, have a right to choose whether Jews overseas shall live or shall die.