Inferno - Max Hastings [326]
In Poland, where anti-Semitism was widespread, some people cited reports that Jews had welcomed the Red Army in September 1939 as evidence of their perfidy. When Jews in the Warsaw ghetto staged a brief and doomed revolt in 1943, a Polish nationalist underground paper wrote on 5 May: “During the Soviet occupation … Jews regularly stripped our soldiers of their arms, killed them, betrayed our community leaders, and openly crossed to the side of the occupier. [In one small town] which in 1939 was momentarily in the hands of the Soviets … Jews erected a triumphal arch for the Soviet troops to pass through and all wore red armbands and cockades. That was, and is, their attitude to Poland. Everyone in Poland should remember this.” In the spring of 1944 some Jewish soldiers deserted from the Polish corps based in Scotland, citing disgust at anti-Semitism, which they said was no less apparent in the exile army than in their homeland.
Anglo-Saxons were not immune from such sentiments. The British soldier Len England expressed shock at the attitudes of many of his barrack-room comrades, of a kind later vividly portrayed in Irwin Shaw’s description of U.S. Army service in his novel The Young Lions. England wrote: “Two of the most intelligent people I have yet met are confirmed Jew-baiters. The argument usually runs like this: where are the Jews in the army? There are none because they all have managed to get the soft jobs and have wangled out of conscription. In just the same way, the Jews were always the first to leave danger areas. The Jews hold the purse-strings, the country has been taken over by them. Individual Jews may be pleasant enough, but as a race they are the root of all evil.”
Murray Mendelsohn, a U.S. 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 of the 506th Airborne cursed their hated first commander, Lieutenant Sobel, they did so as the “fucking Jew.” As late as 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 denounced 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 United States, 23 percent said yes, 77 percent no. In August 1944 some 44 percent 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 percent in favour. As late as December 1944, another survey of American opinion on the admission of Jews to the United States showed that 61 percent 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