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By Root 1357 0

of some of those directing the Allied war effort in the face of so many competing tragedies. The Polish migration went ahead anyway: a British medical officer in Iran responsible for the care of the arriving refugees reported that 40 percent were suffering from malaria, and almost all from dysentery, diarrhoea, malnutrition or typhoid. Nearly two years elapsed before these Polish soldiers were medically fit to join the Allied armies fighting in Italy, where they served with distinction until the war’s end. Their dependents were shuffled from camp to camp, in humane but nonetheless unhappy British captivity. Many were shipped to India, and thence in 1945 to Britain, where most chose to spend the balance of their lives. Whatever the shortcomings of British behaviour towards these Poles, the fundamental reality was that they were victims of a murderous persecution by the Soviet Union, a power joined with the democracies in a supposed “crusade for freedom.”

In Europe, meanwhile, an estimated 20 million people were displaced from their prewar homes, often in circumstances of terrible hardship. One evening in 1940, Szmulek Goldberg, a Jew from Łódź, took his girlfriend, Rose, to the nearby sports club where they had spent many happy hours. It was now bomb damaged and shuttered. They wandered into the derelict gymnasium where Szmulek once won a dance contest, partnering his mother. “I had dressed in my flashy clothes and brown felt hat for the last time. We stopped and I turned to Rose. ‘My name is Szmulek Goldberg,’ I said in a formal, introductory tone. ‘My name is Rose,’ she replied, her eyes glistening with moisture. I bowed to her and she curtsied in return. We waltzed through the stillness to music we heard only in our hearts.” That night, amid Rose’s sobs and a long embrace, Szmulek said his farewells. He fled Łódź and survived—but spent the last years of the war in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He never saw his girl again.

A powerful sensation among hundreds of millions of people was that of injustice: they did not believe they merited the plagues of peril, privation, loneliness and horror that had swept them away from their familiar lives into alien and mortally dangerous environments. “I don’t believe I am wicked,” wrote the British gunner Lt. John Guest, “and I don’t believe the majority of people, Germans included, are either—certainly not wicked enough to have been deservedly overtaken by this war.”

The peoples of countries ruled by the Axis were in worse condition, of course: almost all found themselves at the mercy of both the enemy’s soldiers and new collaborationist administrations. A Chinese in Malaya, Chin Kee On, wrote: “The former social order was reversed. The ‘nobodies’ of yesterday became the ‘big shots’ of today. The former scum and dregs of society, such as ex-convicts, notorious gentleman-crooks, swindlers and well-known failures became the new elite, riding high in official favour and power.” On Java, two young Dutch girls travelling with their mother aboard a hopelessly overcrowded train were startled to be denied the seats to which they were accustomed. An elderly Indonesian noted their confusion. “Ya Njonja, daly Iain sekarang,” he said sardonically to the mother—“Yes madam, things are changed.”

That Dutch family soon fell victim to far worse misfortunes. Elizabeth van Kampen, the daughter of a planter, spent the years between her fifteenth and eighteenth birthdays in a Japanese internment camp with her mother and two sisters, clinging precariously to life as they suffered malnutrition, lice, beriberi, dysentery and repeated attacks of malaria. Most of Mrs. van Kampen’s teeth fell out; her husband perished at the hands of the Kempeitai police. Elizabeth tried to preserve her sanity by dreaming of her past idyllic colonial childhood, and of a world beyond walls, but “how can you dream while you are locked up in a dirty, overcrowded prison, when you are lying on a filthy mattress full of bugs? How can you dream while your stomach cries for food? How can you dream without a sound of music? I was seventeen