(2-16) His father was Hiram Bingham, a U.S. senator from Connecticut and the discoverer of Machu Picchu in Peru. His mother, born Alfreda Mitchell, was the Tiffany jewelry store heiress. Yet despite the fact that Harry and his six brothers, one of them my father Mitchell, were brought up in a veritable palace on a hill in New Haven - "We were taught that riff-raff lived beyond our fence," my father once told me - they were also taught that with their privilege came responsibility. It was important to give back to the world that had given them so much.
In a 1924
family photograph, Hiram Bingham, fourth from right, is
bracketed by his parents and his brothers. Raised amid
wealth and a tradition of privilege, Bingham later proved
himself rich in moral courage as well. His father, at
right, discovered the ruins of Peru's Machu Pichu in
1911. The author's father, Mitchell, is the suited young
man in saddle shoes.
(2-17) A few years after graduating from Yale in 1925, Harry
entered the state department, hoping for a life of glamorous
parties and political intrigue.
(2-18) He was posted to Peking and Warsaw and then as third secretary in London, where he met Rose Lawton Morrison, the beautiful niece of a U.S. senator from Georgia. She was to be presented to the Royal Court, and Harry was her embassy-appointed escort. There is a story told of how, after only four meetings, he followed her across the Atlantic, found the train on which she was traveling back to Georgia, and promptly proposed.
(2-19) Visiting them in London, my mother remembers them sweeping off to embassy parties, Rose wearing an elegant dress with a long train, swooping down to kiss her toddler twins good-night. "I never saw anyone with such casual elegance," said my mother. "There would be dust balls trailing after her long satin train and it didn't matter in the least. She carried herself like a queen."
(2-20) After London, Harry was posted as the vice consul to Marseilles, where the Nazis controlled the government. As everything got dark and strange, Rose and the, by then, four children were sent back to the United States and safety. "We went by train to Italy," their son John told me. "We got out on the last boat before Mussolini declared war." It was after his family left that Harry began to rescue Jews and other political refugees from the internment camps nearby.
"His father
rewarded good grades with money. Wood, the eldest
brother, got better grades, but Harry excelled at
athletics and always beat his brothers at tennis."
(2-21) According to documents, Consul Bingham acted independently
in his rescue efforts on behalf of refugees. He often acted
against the explicit instructions and policies of the U.S. Consul
General in Marseilles in violation of State Department regulations
and counter to U.S. immigration policies. This from a man who had
always followed the rules, who had been brought up to believe in
following a strict code of behavior.
(2-22) He broke that code for a higher good, and because he believed, as he wrote to Rose, "The whole world around us has the disease which we've feared for so long. We can only pray that the natural goodness of men will fight off the plague before it spreads too far."
(2-23) Last month, at the United Nations Building in New York, a show opened on the subject of diplomats who helped people escape from Nazi-dominated Europe. "Visas for Life: The Righteous Diplomats" honors 23 diplomats, two of them Americans, who risked their lives, their careers, their pensions and the approval of their families and superiors in an effort to provide visas for refugees, many of them Jewish, who were fleeing the terror of Nazism.
(2-24) At the press conference at the opening of the show, as the TV lights shone on the faces of four of Harry's children, I could see his redemption in the glow of their expressions. They no longer had to live with the shame of a father who had been scorned by his own mother, brothers and their wives. One of them leaned into the microphone with fierce passion, embarrassing his brothers because he called for an examination, as had his father before him, of the possible infiltration of Nazi gold into Argentina and of a corporate global conspiracy. In this TV land of bland feel-good statements, his beliefs and intensity were a true legacy of his father.
(2-25) As I wandered through the exhibit, looking at the pictures of these righteous diplomats, including my Uncle Harry, honored so late for their heroism, I was struck by a photograph of Jews being taken off to railroad cars their hands held high, their eyes directed toward an unknown photographer. Beyond them, watching, were rows of onlookers, none of them stepping forward to stop the parade of Jews toward the trains.
(2-26) I felt an uncomfortable tug at my conscience. Would I, as a lifelong observer of events have watched and done nothing? Or would I have dared to make a difference? My uncle did, and he suffered for his actions. Could I figure out why he had acted the way he had? Could I pierce the secrecy in which he lived?
(2-27) Harry was not alone in his silent suffering. To my surprise, I learned that many of the other righteous diplomats also kept secret their acts of heroism. Why did they do what they did? Why were they willing to break the rules? And then why did so many of them keep it a secret?
(2-27) Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania just before the German invasion signed thousands of visas making it possible for Jews to escape across Russia to Japan. He lost his job because of it and became a silent and morose man who never talked of what he had done. A film about his life shown at the United Nations event had many weeping, among them my cousin Abby, one of Harry's daughters.
(2-28) "It reminded me so much of Daddy," she sobbed. "Why didn't they tell us what they had done?" Indeed, why did Uncle Harry keep his actions a secret? Why did he, toward the end of his life, even deny that there had been a Holocaust at all?
