The refugee crisis is Europe's moral obligation
While some see the Syrian refugee crisis as a human need to be answered and others see as an existential threat to security, the American poet and essayist Katha Pollitt views it in an entirely different light. In a column in The Nation magazine, Ms. Pollitt says the flood of refugees presents Europe with an opportunity to redeem itself for its treatment of Jews in the Holocaust. She proposes that countries should admit the same number of refugees, as the number of Jews they shipped off to the death camps in World War II. That would be Hungary -- 55,000; Poland -- 3 million; France -- 77,000; Austria -- 50,000.
It is a chance, she says, to demonstrate that the world has learned the lessons of history.
Ms. Pollitt is spending a year in Austria, one of the many European countries struggling to cope with the massive numbers of refugees trudging across the continent.
