Democratic Party

The Democratic Party is the political home and, ultimately, the arena of rupture for Sal Burnstein, a Jewish congressman whose campaign against the escape and rehabilitation of Nazi criminals brings him into conflict with colleagues who place Cold War priorities ahead of confronting Franco’s regime. The party’s response is not a single policy: it contains Burnstein’s effort to mobilize Democratic politicians, the resistance of senior figures who call for pragmatism, and the institutional isolation that helps drive him out of politics.

Political setting and postwar divisions

Burnstein serves as a Democratic representative in the United States Congress, in a party whose offices initially share a standard, impersonal design. The institutional furniture offers little sense of individual identity; in Burnstein’s case, what explains him is a photograph kept in his desk drawer, a family image marked on the reverse with the date and place of Korczyna in 1919. The contrast between the standardized congressional workplace and that private record introduces the personal history that informs his public politics.

After the war, Burnstein learns that his family has been destroyed in Nazi concentration camps. His grief becomes a resolve to remember and avenge his mother, siblings, and nephews. He does not return to synagogue observance, Yiddish, or the Sabbath, but the loss changes the meaning of political accommodation for him: the prospect that former Nazis might be excused or recruited is not an abstract diplomatic question. His collapse is so severe that his wife, Gloria, takes him to hospital with anemia and malnutrition after he has gone nearly three weeks without eating or sleeping. A psychotherapist helps him recover in the summer of 1945, but the recovery hardens into the organizing force of his subsequent life.

The political climate around the party is shifting as the Nuremberg trials dominate newspaper front pages. Some American officers privately object that their superiors are receptive to former Nazis’ arguments that the Soviet Union, rather than Nazism, is now the principal enemy. In Germany, former SS officers disappear from prisoner lists after being recruited by the British and Americans for work against Soviet interests. For Burnstein, this accommodation reveals a Cold War logic capable of repainting unprosecuted Hitler supporters as useful allies.

Burnstein’s campaign within the party

Burnstein is not the only Jewish member of Congress to have lost family in the camps, but his commitment draws the attention of Jewish-American business and financial leaders alarmed by the political direction of postwar Germany. He forms a group of Democratic politicians working alongside the lobby associated with Sammy Cohen. The group seeks less to remind the American public of crimes already visible in the news than to counter those arguing that any means are justified to prevent another war with Stalin’s Russia.

That effort has few reliable institutional allies. Burnstein can elicit sympathy, kind words, and even sincere tears from fellow Jews, but many are unwilling to risk their careers to advance his aims. He therefore turns his attention to tracing the networks that help Nazi war criminals of different nationalities leave their home countries and flee under false identities. He hopes that exposing those routes will compel the government in Washington to help dismantle them. The party’s formal affiliation gives him a platform, but not the power or consensus he needs.

The conflict becomes personal and public within Democratic circles. Burnstein’s insistence that his colleagues confront the consequences of their choices is experienced as an intolerable moral accusation. Although he does not explicitly call them accomplices, they read his appeals as implying that their unwillingness to act makes them complicit with murderers. His campaign against Franco likewise produces disbelief and discomfort in the Capitol. The party can acknowledge that his claim is just in principle while recoiling from the uncompromising manner in which he presses it.

The dispute over Franco and Cold War realism

Senator William Mattioli, Burnstein’s father-in-law and a veteran Democrat, repeatedly tries to persuade him to desist. He invokes realism, pragmatism, sense, threats, communism, peace, and security, arguing that action against Franco could have unjust consequences in an unstable international climate dominated by Soviet military power. Burnstein answers in ordinary moral terms—crime, dictator, victim, and murderer—rather than accepting the more distant vocabulary of diplomatic calculation.

Mattioli eventually suggests that Burnstein’s motives may be less innocent than the family photograph he carries. He argues that bringing down Franco would serve Russian interests in Europe. Burnstein leaves the senator’s office without saying goodbye; these are the last words Mattioli speaks to him. The rupture makes visible the party’s underlying divide: opposition to Franco and protection of Spanish democrats compete with the argument that weakening the Spanish dictator would benefit the Soviet Union.

Congressman Michael Morrison of Rhode Island remains beside Burnstein longer than many others, even after Sammy Cohen stops returning his calls. At Morrison’s summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, he acknowledges that Franco is a tyrant, that his regime assists Nazi war criminals in escaping, and that Spanish democrats deserve support. Yet Morrison also suggests that Burnstein might negotiate with his conscience—setting limits on it in pursuit of a greater good. Burnstein leaves the next day. The conversation shows how even a loyal ally can share the moral diagnosis while still urging compromise over its consequences.

Departure and institutional consequence

The political estrangement unfolds alongside the collapse of Burnstein’s marriage. Gloria, Mattioli’s daughter, ultimately separates from him; their arguments include the loss of social invitations, the children being called the children of a communist at school, and Burnstein’s likely loss of re-election. During their final quarrel, she throws his Bar Mitzvah photograph to the floor, and its glass breaks over the faces of the dead relatives. Burnstein sees the contrast between his mother, who continued working in Korczyna after witnessing her husband’s hanging, and the domestic grievances that now surround him. He and Gloria stop speaking and communicate through lawyers.

By the time he visits Morrison, Burnstein has already left politics. His Democratic colleagues’ estrangement does not hurt as much as the realization that the hope he invested in the party may have been a monstrous mistake. After Morrison raises the possibility of compromise, Burnstein spends a sleepless night, leaves a note of thanks, and departs quietly in a rented car, driving north along the coast without a destination. His journey takes him eventually to Rockport, where he settles after recovering the missing u in the name Saul. The correction of his name accompanies a wider withdrawal from the political identity he had tried to inhabit.

The Democratic Party’s significance in this story lies in the gap between shared principles and willingness to act on them. Burnstein’s colleagues can recognize Franco’s tyranny and the danger of Nazi escape networks while still treating intervention as a threat to Cold War priorities. The institution supplies the setting, contacts, and language for his campaign, but does not resolve the conflict it exposes. His departure leaves the party’s pragmatism intact and Burnstein alone with the cost of having demanded that political choices be measured against the people those choices abandon.