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Must Allied Indifference Match Nazi Crime?

.Aplea FOR THE RESCUE OF EUROPE'S REMAINING JEWS

By FREDA KIRCUWEY LEWIS S. GANNETT GEROLD FRANK flORIDA M~fl.~~I~E~WmJWBRARY COLLECTION Published by THE NATION ASSOCIATES 20 Vesey Street, New York 7, N. Y. A PLEA FOR THE RESCUE OF EUROPE'S REMAINING JEWS Rescue Hungarys Jews! By FREDA KIRCHWEY

EVERAL million Jews in Central and Eastern SEurope have met their death as a result of Nazi ferocity and Allied indifference. Millions of non-Jews have died, too, murdered as hostages or killed in guerilla fighting or victims of the policy of depopulation practiced in every conquered country. But the Jews have died as lews, selected for obliteration to satisfy the race mania that underlies the whole dogma of Teutonic fascism. Done in cold blood, on a scale more impressive than any battlefield can equal, in centers specially constructed for extermination, this systematic murder of a race is without example in history. It is too vast and too terrible for the normal mind to grasp; indeed this is its protection. People react with anger to individual acts of cruelty; they hardly react at all to the impersonal horror of mass murder. Perhaps this accounts in part for the indiffer­ ence in official Allied circles which permitted the Nazi terror to mount to its present almost com­ plete and perfect climax. It is untrue to say that little could have been done, once the war was started, to save the Jews of Europe. Much could have been done. At most stages Hitler was willing to permit his Jewish victims to substitute migra­ tion for deportation and death. But the other countries refused to take in refugees in sufficient 5 numbers to reduce by more than a fraction the roll of those destined to die. The planned, systematized slaughter of Jews has now been going on for two years, but not even during this period has the tempo of rescue been speeded up. Instead, our government and the British have called conferences to discuss the problem, have set up committees, have issued warnings and appeals. And the Nazis have gone on killing Jews at the rate of about 12,000 a day. Now, as Hitler nears the end of his fraying rope, a final opportunity has opened to save some of the Jews still in Hungary. How many are in­ volved nobody seems to know. Three or four hundred thousand were recently deported by the Horthy government at the demand of the Nazis, but several hundred thousand more probably sur­ vive. Through the International Red Cross, the Hungarian government has offered to release three specific categories of Jews; all children under ten years of age; all Jews who can obtain British certificates of admission to Palestine; and all who hold valid visas for other "countries of reception." In rather cautious terms, the British and American governments have accepted the offer. According to an announcement issued by the State Department, they "will make arrange­ ments for the care of such Jews leaving Hungary who have reached neutral or United Nations ter­ ritory, and also ... will find temporary havens of refuge where such people may live in safety." Nothing is said about Palestine. Nothing is said about helping the Jews from Hungary or about transporting them to the "havens of refuge" 6 promised in the statement. It is a long way from Budapest to Oswego, N. Y. But even a qualified acceptance of responsibility is welcome after years of inaction. The need of this moment is a clear understanding of the ur­ gency of the situation. We must demand of our governments all speed in putting their good inten­ tions into effect. If the Allied powers fail now to carry through a great act of rescue, their promise will have been sheer cruelty. It is known that the Hungarian offer, limited though it was, enraged the Nazi authorities. At any time the Gestapo may begin the job of exter­ mination in Hungary itself. Only swift action can prevent this. The first need is the immediate estab­ lishment of ports of asylum, if these are not al­ ready in existence. (Will the British really refuse admission to Palestine, even on a temporary basis, to a substantial proportion of the Hungarian ref­ ugees ?) The second need is means of transporta­ tion. The feeble efforts so far undertaken to rescue Jews from Rumania have all but failed through the lack of available ships. Somehow, somewhere, ships must be found for this emergency. Troopships which have delivered their loads at Mediterranean ports could be di­ verted for a single errand of mercy. Transport planes returning from India or the Eastern Medi­ terranean could carry out of Hungary the 10,000 children to whom Sweden has offered shelter. (They should be lent or leased to Sweden for the job.) The objection will be raised that such opera­ tions would upset the schedules of troop move­ ments and the delivery of supplies. This cannot 7 be denied. But the problem is one of balancing need against need. A spell of bad weather would also upset schedules. The last opportunity to save half a million or more lives cannot be treated as a matter of minor concern. If the death of these people is of sufficient importance to Hitler to war­ rant the expenditure of the men and machines and time required for their extermination, their life should be worth something to Hitler's ene­ mies. But we must hurry, hurry! To delay for even a few days or weeks is to deliver them to the fate that has all but wiped out the Jewish community of Europe.

R~print~d from Th~ Nation August 26. 1944

8 Europes Wandering jews­ and Others By LEWIS s. GANNETT

London, August 27, by Cable AN IMPOSING-LOOKING parliament of fl. thirty-two nations met in London last week as the "Intergovernmental Committee on Ref­ ugees." It heard a report from its chairman, Sir Herbert Emerson, former High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, enlarged its executive committee to include Soviet Russia, adopted a constitution,and set up a new committee of experts to deal with travel documents for hun­ dreds of thousands of refugees who will emerge from the war with neither homes nor passports nor even a recognized nationality. In the course of its discussion the word Jew was seldom heard and the word Palestine never. The fact is that despite all the hullabaloo about organization this international body will have little to do with the immediate problem of prob­ ably twenty million human beings in Europe de­ scribed in official language as "displaced persons." Set up at Evian in 1938 to help political and racial groups get out of Germany, the Intergovernment­ al Committee's first job virtually ceased upon the declaration of war. It was recognized after the 9 Bermuda conference in April, 1943, with a larger field. It has since acted as a sort of international clearing house for such official organizations as the American War Refugee Board and such vol­ untary organizations as the American Friends Service Committee and the Joint Distribution Committee, aiding the emergency rescue opera­ tions of the Jews trickling out of Hitler's Festung Europa into Spain, Switzerland, or Turkey. Reorganized again, its function is redefined as principally dealing with the third and ultimate stage of the refugee problem when those who have homes to go to have reached them, imme­ diate relief has been provided, and the residue of uncertain numbers is left to be sent no one today knows whither. Then the Intergovernmental Committee will act as successor to the old Nansen Committee, which issued papers for "stateless persons," then principally White Russians. Meanwhile the expectation in London is that some eight million people in Europe will soon start walking home and at least twelve million more will wait for official aid. "Unorganized trekkers" is the official word for the walkers, who are expected to clog the roads, go hungry, and enormously complicate the official program. The task of helping them will be primarily the army's. Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, does not approve of unorganized trekkers. It regards them as a certain interference with transportation, a probable menace to health, and a possible police problem. Its Civil Affairs Depart­ ment, headed by the able Major General Allen Gullion, U. S. A., with a joint Anglo-American

10 staff, intends to assUme immediate control of the problem; when the United Relief and Rehabilita­ ti~n Administration will get into the picture, if at all, is anybody's guess. UNRRA has liaison officers with the army but no direct authority, and it is believed that the army will retain control for a minimum of six months. The army has assembled all available studies of displacements of the population of Europe, tab­ ulated and charted them, and printed twenty-five million each of two types of registration cards­ three hundred tons of cards alone-for what, fond of alphabetic symbols, it calls "DPs"-displaced persons. According to these studies at least eight million foreigners are now in Germany doing semi-slave labor in factories and on farms. About half of these are in the eastern region, for which presum­ ably Russia will be primarily responsible. In the territory which Britain and America are likely to control there are, the army reckons, 700,000 Belgians, one-tenth of the entire population of the country and close to half the adult male popu­ lation; also about 150,000 Dutch, 650,000 French­ men, 200,000 Italians, 130,000 Yugoslavs, IIO,OOO Greeks, 700,000 Czechs, 1,5°0,000 Poles, more than 1,250,000 Russians, and small numbers of Hun­ garians, Rumanians, Bulgars, Danes, and Nor­ wegians. Also there are more millions in the satellite countries, some of whom may have been withdrawn into Germany before it collapses. Some DPs, working close to the borders, will get somewhere under their own steam. The army program, however, is not to permit mass migra-

II tions along roads which the military will need but to collect and concentrate DPs of Allied na­ tionalities into assembly centers, whence they may be transferred after screening to reception centers, where they will become the responsibility of their own governments. At the assembly centers DPs will be registered, their previous homes and desired destinations recorded. They will be medically examined, checked for military security, and, if in order, given visas for return home. They will be given pre-numbered identification cards about the size of Social Security cards, and when transportation is available will be sent to the reception centers in their own countries. A small try-out has already been made in parts of France, where the refugees were collected by our army in assembly centers and promptly trans­ ferred to dispersal centers operated by French officials. But the army differentiates such "ref­ ugees" displaced within the borders of their own countries from "DPs" who will try to cross the frontiers. The army belief is that its organization, fresh from its experience with the greatest logistics operation in history, is infinitely better prepared to deal with a gigantic movement of peoples than any civilian organization, official or unofficial, could be. UNRRA had developed a large program of its own but the army has definitely assumed the responsibility for the first stage. The Czechs have formally agreed to cooperate with the army sys­ tem of registration and transfer. The other exile

12 governments have indicated their approval. Enor­ mous supplies will be needed-if registration cards weigh three hundred tons, the tonnage of food required will be astronomic-but the army believes it has sufficient reserves. Initial supplies may be lifted by air, as has been done with the advancing armies. The army does not regard Spanish refugees who were in France before the war, and are still there, as a military responsibility; it will leave their care to the French government and to pri­ vate agencies. While millions of Germans have been "dis­ placed" to satellite countries during the war, the army belives that most of these will have been withdrawn close to the German borders before the war ends. Civilian Germans will be assembled and returned to Germany by a similar process and then will become the responsibility of whatever German authorities may exist. After six months the army believes the bulk of the job will be done and mopping-up operations can be transferred to UNRRA, which likewise has a six-mont~ relief and rehabilitation plan, presumably on a far smaller scale than that en­ visaged in the earlier stages of its existence before the army clarified its views of civilian operations in the military zone. What UNRRA can do will depend on what the army does first. Its planning problem is obviously extremely difficult. The army is likely to turn to it as soon as individual problems differentiate themselves from mass movements, as in the case of a couple whose former home in Poland was burned, whose pass- ports were lost, who cannot prove their nation­ ality, who have cousins in Palestine, children in the United States, and no jobs anywhere. The Intergovernmental Committee comes back into the picture after the army and UNRRA have done the preliminary jobs. Although the army's registration cards provide for optional re­ gistration of religion, the army does not regard Jews as a separate problem. Its job is a mass­ production one of returning people to the coun­ tries of their origin. UNRRA will do a further sifting, but there will remain a desperate residue of hundreds of thousands, possibly more, who don't want or will not be permitted to return to their pre-war homes. General assurances have been given by most exile governments that they will accept former residents regardless of nation­ ality, but some have different ideas as to what constitutes residence; also, many people who in the course of Hitler's mad careening became al­ most professional refugees, fleeing from one land to another and then still another, may be stranded without recognized homes. New frontiers will further complicate the picture, notably' for those Poles who were displaced westward during the war and may not wish to return under Russian sovereignty. Millions of Jews forcibly transferred to new ghettos by the Nazi regime and others have found temporary haven in North Africa will have nothing to return to that they can call homes. Here will be the major sphere of the Inter­ governmental Committee. Its recent plenary ses­ sion formed a technical sub-committee to study a new form of passports for "stateless" persons, a problem complicated enough but simple in com­ parison with the problem of finding homes for them. The ultimate destination of the stateless is a delicate, difficult, probably endless problem. In some circles there has been sharp criticism of the Intergovernmental Committee because it in­ cluded no representative of any Jewish group. It invited some thirty Jewish bodies, including relief committees as well as the Jewish Agency for Palestine, to attend the session without the right to participate. Nobody was asked to present the ideas of the Jews at its sessions. Palestine wasn't mentioned. The answer is that the Inter­ governmental Committee is an intergovern­ mental committee. Its success is dependent on the cooperation of member governments. It cannot have a policy of its own. It can only explore pos­ sibilities, suggest, and administer when national policies are clear. Whenever in the past the international con­ science has been outraged by the plight of the Jews, the answer has been to reorganize the Inter­ governmental Committee, thus suggesting that something is about to be done. The real answer is not a new kind of committee but havens for Jews. From a European perspective America, usually generous with money, always vocal in de­ manding a modification of the Palestine immigra­ tion policy, might show a more realistic generosity by modifying its own immigration policy. A free port for one thousand Jews, who are expected to return to devastated Europe after the war, doesn't seem a large contribution. Pressure for the liber­ alization of the Palestine policy should help, but it might be more effective if it were accompanied by the recognition of American opportunity. The present likelihood seems to be that a year hence the world, including America, will wake up to the fact that emergency measures are only emer­ gency measures and possibly a million Jews will still be homeless.

Reprinted from The Nation September 9,1944

16 Refugee Children of Europe By GEROLD FRANK

Jerusalem, September 5 (by cable)

NE can only sit humbly before the refugee O children of Europe. Their stories are incred­ ible. It is difficult to believe that the average adult could stand what they have undergone. To this city corne hundreds of such children: the orphans and the dispossessed, the battered and beaten and starved Jewish children of the massacred popula­ tions of Germany, France, Austria, Rumania, Poland, the Ukraine-of virtually all Europe. I talked with many of them in the collective agricultural settlements where the Jewish Agency for Palestine (which negotiates their rescue) brought them. Among the many big rehabilitation problems the overwhelming one is: How are you going to implant a sense of security in a thirteen-year-old child who has seen both of his parents bludgeoned to death? How are you going to restore faith in humanity in a fourteen-year-old girl who tells you she has seen human blood seep out of the earth­ indeed, who imagines she has seen the very earth heave with the struggles of persons buried while still living-who remembers having been pur­ sued by shouting Nazis and yelping sheepdogs? How can you look into her eyes without a sense of shame for the entire human race? 17 In the gentlest of ways, in the kindest of voices, with skill, patience, and understanding, young instructors, themselves refugees from the horror of Europe, work with these children, live with them, labor to make them realize that here at last they have reached a haven and are among friends. Their wanderings for the past five years eclipse those of the children of Israel- harried and scourged from one concentration camp to an­ other, across borders, over rivers, through coun­ tries. What their experiences have done to them can be imagined. Only the resilience of youth and the extraordinarily intelligent care they are re­ ceiving accounts for the fact that they can be interviewed so soon after their ordeals. They are still inclined to keep to themselves; they are not ready to trust ad~lts; they still suspect that tomor­ row or perhaps the day after the order will come to go-and again the nightmare will begin. Some who have been here only a few weeks are still steeped in melancholia and are almost beyond reach: in them is the realization that their parents, brothers, sisters, loved ones, have all been mur­ dered, and with it the piteous, hysterical hope that somewhere in the world there is one relative to whom they might belong. Here is thirteen-year-old Joseph Roman. He is black-haired, with a thin aquiline nose, and terror still showing in his dark eyes. His nostrils quiver as he speaks. His mouth remains open at the end of every sentence. His watching eyes never leave your own. If you were to rise up suddenly and lash him with a whip, he would not be surprised. 18 Joseph's Rumanian father was a timber mer­ chant in Bucovina. The family fled on July 16, 1941. They were arrested and held for a week in a concentration camp at Trozuitza. They were then ordered to Winnica on the Bug River. After three weeks Joseph and his parents and hundreds of others were herded together and driven on foot by armed soldiers for more than ISO miles to the banks of the Dniester. Those who could not keep up were shot. The only food they had was what they carried with them. Later they tried to buy food from the Rumanian peasants, but the peasants would trade only for clothes. The ref­ ugees arrived at the river starving and semi­ naked. There they were told that two nights be­ fore 300 Jews had been driven into the water and drowned. For some reason they were spared that fate. Instead 'they were forced to march twenty miles to the town of Secureni, then thirty miles to the concentration camp of Tosn Yedentiza, where they remained a month. Then those who were still alive were driven on foot for scores of miles to another concentration camp in T ransis­ tria. Among those who died were Joseph's mother and father. Finally immigration certificates came bearing Joseph's name, and he went to Palestine. Here is Ada Fianouu, fourteen, from Katinetz Podolsky on the Rumanian-Polish-Ukraine bor­ der. She is short and blond. Her Russian features explain why she is alive today. Who would guess that she is a Jew? She has lived through five pogroms. With her family she fled from the Nazis to Winica. Hiding in a neighbor's backroom, she saw her mother and baby sister dragged from 19 lheir kilchen by the Nazis. It was she who saw blood in the forest where the Jews had been mas­ sacred, and ran screaming that she had seen the earth shake as the dead tried to rise. Later her father fled with her to Abdal, Rumania. He was kept behind barbed wire but forced her to escape to the Ukraine, then to Berlod, Bucharest, Con­ stanza, Istambul-and finally to Palestine, thanks to an immigration certificate. Now into the room come Hanna Eherenreich, fifteen, and her brother Simcha, sixteen, both slim and blond. They are Polish, born in Gorlitza near Crakow. At the outbreak of the war the family fled to Stanislova, remaining there for a year until the Russians came and then going to Siberia. After fourteen months a general amnesty was declared and the family went to Buhara in south­ ern Russia.The parents were sick for nine months. Simcha shined shoes on the street to get money for food, and Hanna stood all day long in queues waiting to buy it, but they were all slowly starv­ ing. Finally in desperation the parents sent the children to Teheran with the Polish armies. After two months they were sent from Teheran to a Polish orphan camp in Uganda, Africa, where they were interned for fifteen months. Then a Palestinian uncle sent them immigration certi­ ficates with which they went to Palestine via the Sudan.

Hanna and Simcha rise and go out, and I Shulamith Mizrachi, fourteen, a dark girl with thick, black hair and brows, takes a seat. She is a Greek from Larisa. In August, 1942, her father, mother, six brothers, and two sisters fled to

20 Athens as the Germans were approaGhing. Then when the news came of the Jewish massacres in Salonika, the father, brothers, and eldest sister went to the hills to join the Partisans. Shulamith and the other sister stayed with friends in Athens until it became too dangerous. Then the two girls fled. They walked day and night to the town of Evia on the sea and boarded a ship for Samos in the Aegean. The day they arrived in Samos, the island was conquered by the Nazis. The girls waited for darkness and then fled again. The cap­ tain of a freighter took pity on them and trans­ ported them to the Turkish shore, whence they made their way into the hills. They slept there for two nights and then walked, they do not know how many days, till they arrived in Istan­ bul. There they were given immigration certifi­ cates for Palestine. Now we see George Hermann, seventeen, slim, dark-eyed, with a thin mustache. He is German­ born, from Berlin. At the age of four he was taken by his parents to Belgium. At the outbreak of the war the family fled into France. From Paris they were shunted to Toulouse, which was crowded with refugees. From Toulouse they went to Bordeaux, where the same prevailed. Finally they arrived in Montpellier. After the fall of Paris they were arrested in Montpellier and sent south to a concentration camp on the Gulf of the Lion. In July, 1942, the Nazis began the depopulation of the camp, sending out trainloads of women and children in box cars for extermination. George saw his mother herded into a box car, then his father. A French camp nurse declared that

21 George was sick, put him in an ambulance, gave him a boy scout uniform and a thousand francs, and sent him to a scout camp at Perpignan, thirty miles to the south. He crossed the Spanish border at night, walked for three days to Barcelona, was arrested for illegal entry and taken to a concentra­ tion camp at Miranda via one prison after an­ other. He spent a half year at Miranda, where conditions were appalling. Finally, under Y. O. T. C. auspices, he received a certificate for Pales­ tine. Now Aviva Spitzer, fourteen, dark hair, high forehead, somber eyes, speaking a schoolgirl's slow, precise German. Aviva is a Yugoslav, from Zagreb. Her wanderings? From Zagreb to Split to Castelnova; five months in Turin, eighteen months in Fiermonte; in a concentration camp for a year; finally to Palestine. Samuel Abulaffia, fifteen, from Italy: Paris, Bordeaux, Bayonne, across the border of occupied France to Marseilles, Algiers, back to Marseilles, Monteaux on the Italian border, then to Turkey and Palestine. And Rose Cohen, fifteen, from Prague, and Gershon Smayor from Belgrade.... So the stories go. You listen to them. The chil­ dren are polite yet speak only when spoken to. They are uncomfortable but will blossom out. A few weeks ago when they first arrived they re­ fused to relinquish their pathetic cardboard boxes in which they were carrying a few rags of clothes. The other children surrounded them and said, "Don't be afraid-you'll get better clothes. Every­ thing is very safe here." One day, like magic, un­ derstanding comes and a first sense of well-being.

22 Those here for three months .already show the difference. Now they are pioneers, tilling the soil, making the earth produce, creating not destroying, doing things with their hands. They are too busy to re­ member and are losing themselves in the warmth of the collectives, where all work is for the com­ mon good. You cannot help wondering what they think of their experiences, to what conclusions they have come. Old before their time, their eyes somber, steady, accusing, they make you feel your philosophical questions are stupid, you are con­ fused before then; yet you ask. The questions are fused before them; yet you ask. The questions are not easy for them. George Herman says, "It's good to hate people-people in concentration camps become animals. And those who beat them, the jailers, are even worse." Black-browed Shulamith shakes her head: "It's good to remember," she says. "It's not good to for­ get. We will remember." And you think how Shulamith's voice must sound today in thousands and thousands of hearts throughout the length and breadth of Europe, a thundering voice to rock heaven itself: "We will remember."

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