Bush visits memorial to Holocaust

Before leaving Israel to travel to Kuwait yesterday, Bush also retraced the steps of Jesus and his disciples in the ancient town of Capernaum and gazed out on the nearby Sea of Galilee, where the Bible says Jesus walked on water and calmed a sudden storm. The waters were crystal-blue and calm when Bush visited.

Bush's eyes twice became moist during his hourlong tour of the Holocaust museum, said Shalev, who guided the president through the exhibits.

Upon viewing an aerial shot of the Auschwitz camp in Poland, taken during the war by US forces, he said Bush called the decision not to bomb it "complex." He then called over Rice to discuss President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision, clearly pondering the options before rendering an opinion of his own, Shalev said.

Shalev quoted Bush as asking Rice, "Why didn't Roosevelt bomb it?"

He said Rice and Bush discussed the matter further and then the president delivered his verdict. "We should have bombed it," Shalev, speaking in Hebrew, quoted Bush as saying.

Briefing reporters later on Air Force One, Rice said Bush was talking about the rail lines to the camp.

Tom Segev, a leading Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, said Bush's reported comment, which appeared spontaneous, marked the first time a US president had made this acknowledgment.

"It is clear now that the US knew a lot about it," Segev said. "It's possible that bombing at least the railway to the camps may have saved the lives of the Jews of Hungary. They were the very last ones who were sent to Auschwitz at a time when everybody knew what was going on."

At the dedication of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel famously asked, "Why weren't the railways leading to Birkenau bombed by Allied bombers? As long as I live I will not understand that."

At that same dedication, President Bill Clinton said the West has to "live forever with this knowledge . . . [that] far too little was done."

John J. McCloy, Roosevelt's assistant secretary of war, laid out the American rationale for inaction in a letter on Aug. 14, 1944.