246

THE TIMES LITERA

DISPLACED PERSONS

KATHRYN HULME: *The Wild Place*. Muller. 12s. 6d.

In July, 1945, an Unrra "field team" of twelve people speaking five different languages arrived at Wildflecken, a remote and concealed SS training centre in the Bavarian woods. It was then occupied by 20,000 Polish displaced persons, and the Unrra group had come to administer the camp. Miss Hulme, an American, was deputy director. She stayed until 1947, seeing transports of more displaced persons come in and a few go out. Then she was made director of a centre at Aschaffenburg for Estonians and Ukrainians. Unrra came to a slow end: the International Refugee Organization took its place. Russia spread over eastern Europe so that the displaced persons could not go home. There was despair for a time; 1947 was the worst year. Then slowly countries all over the world, Belgium leading, offered to take satisfactory displaced persons. Miss Hulme brings her story down to the end of 1950, when emigration to the United States was in full swing. But she ends on a note of hopelessness, for many of the displaced persons had been kept waiting for too long. Their health had suffered; they were not now acceptable.

Miss Hulme writes as an American for an American public. Britain is hardly mentioned, though Sir Winston Churchill's pronouncements occasionally stir the world of the displaced persons. It is a story of the American zone and finally of emigration to America. But the lack of British interest makes no difference to the readable quality of the book. Nor, incidentally, do some odd mistakes in German. It is told vividly, with reported conversations, amusing and touching incidents and a host of personalities. Miss Hulme may slightly over-colour the picture. Drab routine is omitted to such an extent that the reader cannot quite picture how ordinary days went by. But the incidents selected have a high entertainment value and they do illuminate the displaced-persons problem. The book has the merit of

showing both the general and the particular. The vast dilemma is seen as a whole, and then its effect on individuals.

It might have been a tale of unmitigated evil. No nation shows up well and the displaced persons themselves are panicky, revengeful and aggressive. The gloomy picture is lightened—indeed made more light than dark—by individuals. Nearly everyone Miss Hulme meets personally she likes; she finally identifies herself entirely with her protégés who are trying to get to America. There is a devoted chauffeur, a gracious Countess interpreter, a Polish committee president whom they called "Tak Tak Schön" (Yes, Yes, Fine) because of his obliging exclamations, a Polish woman aristocrat who has rescued a band of forty camp women and rehabilitated them by finding them jobs, and a Jewish woman who escaped from the doomed Warsaw ghetto by making her way through flooded sewers. Individual people are pathetic, obliging, staunch. They make the book cheerful in spite of the horrors.

Odd facets of camp life appear. The Poles do not at first plant gardens; they have hope of return. The Balts and Ukrainians have no hope and therefore garden. An enormous number of babies are produced by the camps—the fruit of boredom and lack of responsibility. When emigration begins suicide begins, too—among the older ones who cannot hope to go. Denunciation flourishes, one displaced person, disappointed, poisoning the atmosphere for another. Some who reach America break down mentally; they cannot stand a relaxation of the strain.

The book is a plea for sympathy; an attempt to make readers far away realize the suffering. It is of its age, in almost entirely ignoring religion. It won the Atlantic Non-fiction Prize Award for 1953 and, incidentally, the dust-cover description is a model of inaccuracy.

245

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT FRIDAY APRIL 16 1954

Kale: Nice going ... Jareh

## DISPLACED PERSONS

In July, 1945, an Unrra "field team" of twelve people speaking five different languages arrived at Wildflecken, a remote and concealed SS training centre in the Bavarian woods. It was then occupied by 20,000 Polish displaced persons, and the Unrra group had come to administer the camp. Miss Hulme, an American, was deputy director. She stayed until 1947, seeing transports of more displaced persons come in and a few go out. Then she was made director of a centre at Aschaffenburg for Estonians and Ukrainians. Unrra came to a slow end; the International Refugee Organization took its place. Russia spread over eastern Europe so that the displaced persons could not go home. There was despair for a time; 1947 was the worst year. Then slowly countries all over the world, Belgium leading, offered to take satisfactory displaced persons. Miss Hulme brings her story down to the end of 1950, when emigration to the United States was in full swing. But she ends on a note of hopelessness for many of the displaced persons had been kept waiting for too long. Their health had suffered; they were not now acceptable.

It might have been a tale of unmitigated evil. No nation shows up well and the displaced persons themselves are piecrack, revengeful and aggressive. The gloomy picture is lightened—indeed made more light than dark—by individuals. Nearly everyone Miss Hulme meets personally she likes; she finally identifies herself entirely with her protégés who are trying to get to America. There is a devoted chauffeur, a gracious Countess interpreter, a Polish committee president whom they called "Tak Tak Schon" (Yes, Yes, Fine) because of his obliging explanations, a Polish woman aristocrat who has rescued a band of forty camp women and rehabilitated them by finding them jobs, and a Jewish woman who escaped from the doomed Warsaw ghetto by making her way through flooded sewers. Individual people are severs. Individuel people make the book cheerful in spite of the horrors.

The book is a plea for sympathy; an attempt to make readers of

## LEADER OF ISRAEL

DAVID BEN GURION: *Rebirth and Destiny of Israel*. New York: Philosophical Library. $10.

If Chaim Weizmann's stature as Israel's first President was enhanced by his eminence as a natural scientist, Mr. Ben Gurion is noteworthy as a Prime Minister who retired to a desert settlement in order to do manual labour and study Sanskrit. These two men, indeed, personify contrasting aspects both of the Jewish character and of the Zionist movement: Weizmann, the sceptical humanism of the Diaspora, in which the demand for a Jewish State emerged; Mr. Ben Gurion, the Weltanschauung of the men and women whose labours actually built it.

This collection of essays and addresses, delivered or written by Mr. Ben Gurion over the years 1915 to 1920, gives an admirable picture of his mental development, and Mr. Nurock, the Israeli Minister in Australia, who has edited and translated it, is to be congratulated on accomplishing a difficult task supremely well. As he observes in his introduction, Mr. Ben Gurion

uses a Hebrew Hebrew grandly repetitive and of mounting parallels, iridescent, ringing and exact. In very truth, there is in his speech and writings, as in the bold imagination and faith of his leadership, not a little of the stuff of prophecy. So I have striven always towards an English akin to that of Bible versions.

The result is a book which gives the English-speaking public for the first time a chance of assessing the quality of Mr. Ben Gurion's mind. Mr. Nurock need not apologise for his efforts. This is exactly the kind of English Mr. Ben Gurion would employ if English were his mother tongue, and it is sincerely to be hoped that a publisher will be found to produce a British edition of a book which must become essential reading to any student either of Zionism or of Middle Eastern politics.

The first section provides a selection, all too brief, from the author's speeches and writings before the Declaration of Independence in May, 1948. Here we meet the young Labour leader arguing the case for

now, we can easily realize why Baron de Rothschild's costly experiments in colonization failed. They were an attempt to settle Jewish farmers in a Palestine, who would rely on Arab labour, as the white settler relies on native labour in so many overseas colonies. Mr. Ben Gurion led the Labour Party, which preached the paradoxical doctrine that a high-wage Jewish working class must be established in the midst of Palestine's low-wage economy. The Jew must not merely own the land, he must work it, too, even if Arab labour was available at a quarter of the price. And, for this purpose, elite settlers must be recruited among the Diaspora, who deliberately chose manual labour in Palestine in preference to commercial or academic success in their countries of birth. When this doctrine was first promulgated, it seemed like a Utopian dogma, not only to many Zionists in the West but to a majority of the Jews settled in Palestine. Yet, when the testing time came, it was these dedicated Zionist workers, whether in factories or in cooperatives or in collective farms, who first defeated the Arab armies and, since the declaration of the State, have provided the socialist cadres to train the hordes of conscript immigrants from eastern Europe and the Arab countries. In the fierce controversies on Zionist politics, Weizmann sided with the Jewish Labour Party. Intellectually, he saw the need for this kind of pioneering, but he tended to laugh at the dogmatic Socialism and cult of proletarian discomfort in the settlements. Mr. Ben Gurion, on the other hand, was a manual worker with the gift of tongues, and the selection from his speeches here reprented shows clearly how inevitable it was that, once the State was founded, he should become its natural leader, whereas Weizmann could only represent it to the outside world.

The last two-thirds of this book are devoted to examples of Mr. Ben Gurion's writing since he became

an agnostic Labour Party, he left Biblical quotation to the rabbis. But since 1948 Jewish history has increasingly dominated his thought, and sharp-edged polemic now gives place to the rotund phrases of the national leader. Mr. Ben Gurion's social dynamic has been overlaid by a preoccupation with the purely national problems of defence and immigration. Even when he makes a speech on the Israeli Navy, for instance, he cannot resist the temptation to adopt the style of a minor prophet and to load his text with a heavy burden of Old Testament references. The effect is to make these sections of *Rebirth and Destiny of Israel* somewhat repetitive. The reader heaves a sigh of relief when he comes on a brilliantly incisive reply delivered in the *Kneset* to the demand for a written constitution, and is inclined to turn over the pages quickly when the theme turns back once again to Jewish history.

Certainly the new State needs a national tradition, but many of its Gentile friends will feel in this book a danger that Mr. Ben Gurion's nationalism may become nationalistic, and that his contempt for experts and economists, which served Israel so well in the hour of trial, may be carried to a point where sober analysis of the problems that confront it disappears altogether. Israel won its war of independence by sheer will-power and self-reliance, which Mr. Ben Gurion rightly and frequently compares with the spirit of Dunkirk. But these qualities are not sufficient to solve the grave problems of economic development and of peace-making with the Arab world. What is needed, as a complement to Mr. Ben Gurion's prophetic leadership, is the cool, analytical statesmanship personified by Weizmann. It would be a pity if the Israeli ever came to regard such statesmanship as too sophisticated and cosmopolitan for a people rooted in its homeland. For, without it, the new

108

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seem both understandable and worth understanding. Concepts that can't be explained in nontechnical language—the quantum theory, for instance—he simply omits, with an apologetic note. At his best, calling our attention to the sound of the primitive Greek bull-roarer behind the Pythagorean music of the spheres, or introducing Einstein with a quotation from Alexander Pope, Professor Kline is able to put the same clear light on both our mangy real world and the sleek, imaginary one of the mathematicians.

THE WILD PLACE, by Kathryn Hulme (Atlantic-Little, Brown). Miss Hulme, a young Californian, served from 1945 to 1951 as deputy director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration center at Wildflecken, a onetime Sun Valley for the S.S. in the Bavarian highlands. In this bittersweet memoir, she recalls with a calm that suggests emotional exhaustion the horrifying, hilarious, heartbreaking stream of battered Poles—men, women, and children—that passed before her eyes, a thousand a week, during those years of hope, hopelessness, and resignation. A shattering book, and one that defines, once and for all, the meaning of that ghastly twentieth-century invention, the displaced person.

CURIOUS CREATURES, by Erna Pinner (Philosophical Library). A picture-and-text parade of some of nature's more highly specialized creations, by an English artist turned zoologist. One might complain that Miss Pinner somewhat overestimates our capacity for wonder in the presence of such things as flightless birds and winged mammals and mate-eating spiders, but since she writes with the enthusiasm of the genuine amateur and draws with considerable style, the result, on the whole, is an engagingly instructive trifle.

NOTE: "The Toy Fair," a collection of verse by Howard Moss, has been published by Scribner. Many of the poems originally appeared in this magazine.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22—(AP)—President Eisenhower today nominated Roswell B. Perkins, 27-year-old New York attorney, to be assistant secretary of health, education and welfare. The post pays $15,000 a year.

Perkins, a Republican, is the youngest man to be appointed by Eisenhower to the government. However.—Oregon Journal.

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The Human Ledgers Close

"The Wild Place," by Kathryn Hulme (Little, Brown. 275 pp. $3.75), relates the experiences of an American woman who served for five years as a field worker in European D. P. camps. Ieyer Levin, who reviews it below, is the author of "In Search" and other volumes.

By Meyer Levin

KATHRYN HULME'S "The Wild Place," a captivatingly vivid and sensitive book about her five years as a field worker in D.P. camps, richly deserved the Atlantic Award as a literary prize. But Kathryn Hulme ought to get several more prizes. A prize for great common sense, a prize as a human being unashamed to show that she still has a heart, as a social worker unabashed at doing good, as a citizen unafraid to show her wrath at bureaucratic wrongs, and finally as a woman who never lost her sense of humor, never lost her sense of beauty, even while confronted with the stretched-out waste of the postwar D.P. years.

There have been analytical reports, and innumerable sob stories about displaced persons, whose millions present a Sisyphus problem, for no sooner are the slave workers of the World War somehow distributed to old and new homes than the escapees from behind the Iron Curtain appear, and the displaced of the Korean War, and the displaced of Palestine. Miss Hulme's account is, unhappily, as she is fully aware, no wind-up report, but an introduction to the nature and treatment of a twentieth-century sickness. She reminds us that the victims do not have a communicable disease, that they are not numerals but individuals, and often remarkable individuals.

"The Wild Place" was Wildflecken, an ex-S.S. training center, isolated in a deep woods. At war's end Kathryn Hulme arrived there with a small UNRRA team. They were promptly inundated with box-car loads of Polish slave laborers, men, women, grandmothers, and children released from Germany's factories and farms. Without a grumble these people passed their first nights in the open snow when transportation from rail-end to camp proved inadequate.

A driver named Ignatz attached himself to Miss Hulme. It was only

when his baby died of malnutrition that she realized her Pole would not ask for special privileges. "I tossed and turned on the wide bed built for a German officer, trying not to think of Ignatz keeping vigil over that crib, and thinking of him constantly while trying to count G.I. shoes instead of sheep, counting them out carefully and cornering the stout-soled for the woodcutters." She remembered how these charity shoes, some gathered by American civilians, and some by the Army, "tumbled from the sacks, still bent to the shape of a foot that had walked from a Normandy beachhead into Germany. When the mud did not drop off easily we knew that it had a tougher binder than water, that it was stuck to the shoes with a soldier's blood."

One thinks of that other picture of masses of shoes in the documentary film of the piles of shoes found at an extermination camp. The fantastic poles of human feeling contrasted in these two images tell the whole story of our times.

Once the refugees were shod, and fed enough to end the malnutrition deaths, the repatriation drive began. But as their countries fell under Communist dominion few D.P.'s wanted to return to them. A huge sixty-day food package was displayed to bribe them into accepting repatriation. "Gradually we forgot the secret shame we felt when we had first stood beside the free food displays and had watched our D.P.'s stare at the terrible fascination of the bait, thrashing, twisting, and turning before they took the hook."

BUT when more and more of the repatriated ones stole back over the borders and reappeared at the camps the drive came to an end. The years of waiting began, while IRO and the United Nations sought corners in the world where these people might be distributed. The Poles made their little D.P. gardens, grew greens and herbs to add to their borscht. They made schnapps from their flour ration. They made babies, babies. They foraged a bit, on surrounding German farms, for meat to add to their diet.

"Call forward, in processing, final shipment"—what traps lay in between, through the years of waiting. "Our chief resettlement officer, who had a peculiar Swedish sense of humor, measured the documents in a single case file and found that they

—Kathryn Novak.
Kathryn Hulme—"Motive? Despair."

stretched out end to end for a distance of seventeen yards."

UNRRA became IRO, Miss Hulme moved from camp to camp, somehow managing to keep Ignatz and a few special cases along with her. "If you traveled widely enough in the Zone you could hear practically every dead-locked D.P. named by his frustrated guardian, who knew that he could never leave Europe and sleep in peace unless that one went safely ahead of him. . . . My Balts, my Jews, my Ukrainians, my Hungarian generals, my Ignatz, my Georgi . . ."

"Again and again," she writes, "we picked up and dusted off the rejected ones. One of our Ukrainian doctors, who performed some thirty major operations a week and seldom lost a case, wept like a child when he was rejected from a scheme calling for hard-rock miners for Canada." And the suicides? "On the incident report what shall I write in for motive?" she asked her field chief. "Despair," said Sam harshly, and hung up.

But the times of triumph are recorded, too, as when Georgi climbed aboard a truck and counted heads. "His mother, his wife, and their two sons; his married daughter, her husband, and their son; his wife's brother and that sister-in-law. . . He counted as if he could hardly believe the results of the risks he had taken, first to assemble them from camps all over Germany, then to get them covered by assurances from the same state as his and finally to maneuver them in close sequence through the processing. When he finished counting he twirled his mustaches. Not one of his kin would be left behind in Europe. You had to be a field worker to know what he had really accomplished."

This woman knew. She understood. And her book, so urgently needed, can make anyone understand.

Sat. Res. Nov. 28, 1953