Too many average bureaucrats and below-average politicians got seats and desks as the crisis of the peace began. Britain's sometimes saintly Labour government struggled might and main to fob off David Ben-Gurion and keep Chaim Weizmann's softer brand of Zionism in time-consuming diplomatic play.Įstablishing UNRRA might have been an international deed of foresight and wonderfully high intentions (with FDR, as so often, in the van), but good intentions didn't run to giving the administration either the leadership or money it needed. Patton reflected a widely prevailing opinion in top US military circles (and, frankly, much of US society). Remember, Harry Truman was also the most powerful friend of Israel's creation. Shephard's strongest suit as he chronicles these and other explosions of frustration or prejudice is that he leaves in all the raw edges and profound contradictions of the shattered world of the 40s he doesn't try to smooth them into some conventionally heroic narrative. Yet when they have power, physical or political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment of the underdog." They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as long as the Jews get special treatment. "The Jews," President Truman wrote in his diary, "are very, very selfish. There was, still more surprisingly, an antipathy in the White House that would set Washington imploding today. The Jews he found and freed were, he declared, "lower than animals". There was the casual antisemitism of General George Patton as his conquering army scythed across Europe. One Fabian Society report managed half a paragraph mentioning two million Jewish deaths in 26 pages examining Europe's displaced persons. Nobody in the 40s talked about holocausts. How did UNRRA deal with the horror of the Holocaust? It didn't. In part, but only in part, Shephard charts the founding of Israel and, fascinatingly, sets it in a context few politicians (or readers) would recognise six decades on. And then, of course, there were the Jews. Germans driven from their farms in Poland and Czechoslovakia flocked to find safety in their beaten, battered fatherland. Italians, once Mussolini departed, proved neither friends nor foes, but a burden. Ukraine, then as now, was split two ways, one side looking east, the other west. Some were happy enough to go back to Poland, some would do anything to avoid living under encroaching Soviet communism. Some were forced labour, some willing volunteers. UNRRA's tally of "displaced persons" included Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Russians and many more who'd kept Hitler's factories turning as Germany ran short of infantry to hold the frontline. For not everybody wanted to go home – or even knew where their true homes were. The challenge to the embryo "world community" of allied concern and its chosen solution, UNRRA – the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration – was likewise immense and infernally complex. He can't pull every strand together: there were millions of human stories. And the question for the western allies, immersed in another world war some 25 years later and brooding on consequences long before Hitler admitted defeat, was whether they could do better second time round.īen Shephard sets out to provide the answers of formidably researched history. The fighting had ended, but its baleful, destructive legacy lingered on. No more battles, but no food, no medicine, no shelter, no resistance, either: just milling chaos. Three million perished from typhus five million Ukrainians starved to death. In the months after the end of the first world war, some 40 million people died amid a worldwide flu pandemic.
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