WHAT IS To HAPPEN To THEM?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 258, 2 June 1944, Page 12

WHAT IS To HAPPEN To THEM?

Vernon Bartlett, M.P., and Two Refugees Discuss Europe’s Exiles

"THE LISTENER?" is not becoming a propagandist journal for refugees. It has, however, been pointed out to us that the problem discussed in our last issue was the subject of a BBC discussion a week or two earlier, and that the views expressed then would be of special interest now to our own readers, 1.-By a Czech Soldier AM a Czech, and I am dead. Four years ago I was fighting in France, and the Germans told my family that I had been killed in action. To my wife and son, my mother and father and brothers, I am four years dead. They keep no place for me in the future. To them I do not exist. With thousands of my comrades I am cut off from my country and my past with a completeness thet is difficult to imagine. I have nothing left but qa name, and even that is a new one. It is made up of our three initials — my wife’s, my son’s and my own. But we are not refugees. We came here only to fight. We did not come because we thought our country wrong. We ‘did not come to earn a living or to be safe. We came first to Yugoslavia, afterwards to France and Great Britain, always to the country where we were nearest to the enemy. That was why we left our homes. Even after the collapse of France, in the darkest hour of the war, we did not look for refuge, we looked for resistance. That light came from Great Britain, so we are here. But our goal is to go back. And to what? We are imagining our families as they were five years ago. But we know they cannot be the same. I have been five years without news of my family. My son was 10 in the month I left home. By now he is already almost a man. When I left them, there was money enough for one year. What has happened since? Have they food? Has the Gestapo spared them? How did they go through those nights of mass executions? These are the questions we are asking. What shall we find when we go back? A starving country, and our children brought up as Nazis? Or shall we never find our children at all? We are not heroes. Can you wonder if there are nights when deep in our hearts we are trying not to see the future? But we shall go back, though at first we shall we strangers, who have forgotten what their country is like. We shall go back because we must rebuild our Republic again, differently and better. 11_-By a German Writer ] AM a refugee. I am a German by birth. I am still a German by passport. But if I had a free choice, I should choose to stay in this country. I am not assuming it will be easy to stay here. I am not even assuming that it will be possible. I am only explaining why it is that some of us would like to become British citizens: There are two sides to it. Going back to Germany would. be going back to a

place that has become hateful. I have lived in Berlin. I have loved Berlin. But it is not because Berlin has been destroyed that I do not want to see it again. Physical destruction can be a clean thing, especially as far as the Nazi monuments are concerned. It is because the place has been spoilt for us. There are the haunting memories of the most ruthless persecutions we have witnessed or suffered: I have been imprisoned myself. But even if we could repress the memories, there is still the fear of the future. Our relatives and friends may be dead or morally broken. There are some young people who hardly know Germany at all, and dream of a country which can be rebuilt easily, They will go back. There are a very large number of middle-aged refugees who have taken root in a new country and are happy, most of them. And there are the people like myself who are neither old nor young. To us the years of exile have become part of our development, because we are on the side that we chose, long before we left Germany. When the war came, a great number volunteered for the pioneers. Most of them are now in the ranks of the British Army. Others hel pmaking the tanks and the aeroplanes for the Allies. We speak your language to each other-even if we speak it badly. We think in English; sometimes we even dream in English. When we talk about the news, we say to ourselves, though perhaps not to you, "We have lost so many bombers," and we feel a sense of personal loss. Total war is not just an episode. It ties you as closely to the comrades you have chosen as any blood relationship. That is why we should like to stay in England if we are given the chance. I11.-By Vernon Bartlett Two refugees from Europe have just spoken to you. From what they said you can realise a little what they have been through before they reached this country, and ultimately this microphone. Even if you multiply these two speakers by several millions, you will not easily realise the terrible and tragic variety of human problems that will have to be solved at the end of the war. The moment the collapse comes in Germany, the first thought in the minds of nearly all these people will be to get home somehow as soon as they can. The Allied Governments, as you know, are planning the distribution of food and medical supplies through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration ---UNRRA for shortbut nobody can foretell how much their careful plans will be destroyed, how much railways and roads will be crowded by this uncontrollable mass of poor, pathetic people returning to their smashed homes in bankrupt countries. One expert, Dr. E. M. Kulischer, in a report published by the International Labour Office, estimates that there will be some 30 million people to be resettled when the fighting in Europe comes to an end. I do not know whether (continued on next page)

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that is an exaggeration. Nobody knows. But I do know that this refugee problem is the most tragic that men have ever been called upon to solve, that to millions of these people the end of the war will only start off a whole new series of fears and anxieties. So our most serious — relatively sericus-refugee problem will be that presented by some 50,000 German and Austrian refugees. Why? First, because most of them are Jews, and you can hardly blame them if they hate the idea of going back to the countries where the people of their race have suffered such terrible persecution. Even when the Nazis are only an unpleasant memory, some of the effects of their teaching will remain, for the Germans who will be in positions of influence in their country for the next 40 years or so have been taught since childhood that all the Jews are sub-human monsters who deserve no pity. But that is only one side of the question. The other is, shall we want them to stay? Personally, I have seen enough of the sufferings of peoples under European dictators to hope that these refugees may become self-respecting citizens of this country as so many other political refugees have done in the past. But it would be both unfair and foolish not to recognise that a lot of English-men-decent, kindly and tolerant Eng-lishmen-will be hostile to them. What are the reasons for this hostility? One, of course, is due to a fairly widespread dislike of all foreigners. People do not always pause to reflect that it was upon this dislike that Hitler built up National-Socialism with its horrible creed that the German people is the Herrenvolk, the master race, and that all the other peoples of the world are to be put on different scales of inferiority, with the Jews at the bottom of them all. That doctrine is, of course, the exact opposite of the doctrine upon which both Christianity and Democracy are based. But it is often easier to condemn a whole race than to condemn the lack of opportunities of education and advancement from which the people of that race may have suffered. There is another more respectable reason why these refugees may not be wanted after the war: the fear that they may increase the problem of unemployment. As things are at present, there does not seem to be much doubt that the refugees have increased our national wealth. Many of them are highly trained scientific men, and as far back as August, 1940, the Prime Minister said that "since the Germans drove the Jews out and lowered their technical standard, our science is definitely ahead of theirs." When the war broke out there were about 1500 German and Austrian doctors and dentists over here, but at first there was a great prejudice against them among many British doctors and dentists. By July, 1940, only 460 foreign practitioners of all nationalities had been granted permits to practise. Now almost all these foreigners are back at their own jobs, but we have to remember this is, in part, because so many doctors and dentists are needed in the armed forces. As for other refugees, they have started over 450 factories, making articles which we can export or should otherwise be compelled to import; buttons and zipp fasteners, mechanical toys, chemical products, clothes and so on. They have brought into this country

new business connections and methods, and ideas which will be of permanent value. For example, they have made London, instead of Leipzig, the centre of the international fur trade. Many of them have ceased to be refugees; they have become citizens. They think in English, and when they say ‘us, they mean the people of Great Britain. There is one last point I should put before you. This is no longer an overpopulated island. The Dominions, too, have put up hundreds of new factories. Canada, for example, had built no ships for 20 years before the war, and is now one of the great ship-building countries of the world. Instead of discouraging immigration, some of these Dominions will have to encourage it by every possible means, and they will not be able to pick and choose as the Americans did in their immigration laws between the two world wars. These considerations must affect our attitude towards refugees from the Continent. It is a large and difficult subject, and I leave you to make up your minds whether refugees bring wealth into a country; whether their competition with people of our own race is likely to be unfair and damaging to the country; whether the whole problem should be looked at from this severely material point of view or from the point of view that they have already suffered greatly in the common cause of defeating NationalSocialism.