All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [324]
Murray Mendelsohn, a US Army engineer who had emigrated from Warsaw as a child with his family, was conscious of latent, if not active, anti-Semitism in his barrack room. His education and intelligence incurred the suspicion of his comrades, many of them former miners and construction workers. They nicknamed him ‘brain’ without admiration, ‘Not because I was that smart, but by comparison. I learned to be very inconspicuous.’ When the men of Easy Company 506th Airborne cursed their hated first commander, Lt. Sobel, they did so as the ‘fucking Jew’. Even in June 1945, when the concentration camps had been exposed to the world, an increasingly deranged Gen. George Patton denounced liberals who ‘believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applied particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals’.
Though Churchill decried in the most passionate terms reports of the Nazi extermination programme, his government – like that of Franklin Roosevelt – was unwilling to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees, even if the Germans could be persuaded to release or trade them. When Americans were polled in November 1938 about whether they believed Jewish fugitives from Hitler should be granted special immigration rights to enter the US, 23 per cent said yes, 77 per cent no. In August 1944 some 44 per cent of Australians who were asked if they would accept a settlement of Jewish refugees in the empty north of their country rejected the notion, against 37 per cent in favour. As late as December 1944, another survey of American opinion on the admission of Jews to the US showed that 61 per cent thought they should be given no greater priority than other applicants. A British Colonial Office official commented cynically on a December 1942 report about the death camps: ‘Familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.’ A Foreign Office official likewise deplored special pleading by ‘these wailing Jews’.
The Polish underground worker Jan Karski made his way to London in the autumn of 1942 after a fantastic odyssey across Europe, to provide an eyewitness account not only of his country’s sufferings, but explicitly of conditions in the Jewish ghettos, and of the extraordinary achievement he claimed, in having penetrated the Nazi death camp at Bełec. While he was received courteously enough by Polish exile prime minister Gen. Sikorski, by foreign secretary Anthony Eden and later in Washington by President Roosevelt, he was afflicted by a dismal sense of awareness that the horrors he described somehow lost their force and magnitude in safe, unoccupied Allied capitals. ‘In London these things bulked small,’ he wrote. ‘London was the hub of a vast military wheel, the spokes of which were made up of billions of dollars, armadas of bombers and ships and staggering armies that had suffered great loss. Then, too, people asked where did Polish sacrifice rank next to the immeasurable heroism, sacrifice and sufferings of the Russian people? What was the share of Poland in this titanic undertaking? Who were the Poles? … We Poles had no luck in this war.’ Karski was discouraged by his own leaders from over-emphasising the Jewish persecution, lest it should detract from the force of his account of the plight of Poland as a whole.
Arthur Schlesinger, relatively highly informed by his work for the Office of Strategic Services, wrote of his own state of knowledge about the fate of Europe’s Jews in 1944: ‘Most of us were still thinking of an increase in persecution rather than a new and barbaric policy of genocide … I cannot find colleagues