The Forgotten Ally

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Text originally published in 1943 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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THE FORGOTTEN ALLY

BY

PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

AUTHOR’S PREFACE 4

CHAPTER 1—THERE ARE NO MORE PROPHETS! 5

CHAPTER 2—PRELUDE TO PALESTINE’S LIBERATION 23

CHAPTER 3—BRITAIN’S ROLE IN PALESTINE 49

CHAPTER 4—THE BEST-KEPT SECRET OF THE WAR 83

CHAPTER 5—IMPERIALISM’S REWARD 113

CHAPTER 6—THE SOLUTION 145

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 164

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Since the war now raging is one of global dimensions, involving the future and destiny of all mankind, it may appear to some that the solution of the problems of so small a country as Palestine, will be but an incidental, if not a task of minor importance for the United Nations at some future peace conference. I have nevertheless made Palestine the central theme of this book.

I have done this because I do not believe that the defeat of the Axis will automatically solve the Jewish problem with which Palestine is intimately and inextricably bound up. For that question is in fact being settled now; on the one hand by the frightful and uninterrupted killing of Jews in Europe and on the other by the lack of interest in high places, both in Britain and in America, in providing the terrorized remnants of European Jewry with a means of escape or even with a ray of hope for survival.

In the welter of immense and vexing problems facing the United Nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa, especially in the world’s traditional areas of colonialism, wherein Palestine is located, the present method of dealing with the Jews by reassuring them from time to time with saccharine but perfectly meaningless phrases and on the other hand by enforcing their exclusion from Palestine may well be, I am afraid, indicative of the manner and spirit in which other peoples’ problems are to be dealt with by the secret diplomacy of an unregenerate imperialism.

The fate of the Jews is being settled today by political events in the Near East and by decrees issued by Britain’s Colonial Office. The new and better world that is to emerge from mankind’s present agony is becoming visible in the Holy Land. It is not a happy or inspiring sight.

As one who is aware and who feels with a sense of personal involvement Christianity’s guilt in the Jewish people’s woes and the constant deepening of their anguish, I could no longer be silent. I made no emotional appeal. My language is not violent; the facts are. I simply stated the case of the Jews and their country for the consideration of all men of good will.

PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

CHAPTER 1—THERE ARE NO MORE PROPHETS!

IN my childhood in Holland—I may have been fifteen or sixteen years of age—I, remember one evening accompanying my parents to church when prayers were offered there for the return of the People of Israel to the Holy Land. There was no haughty condescension or self-righteousness about those prayers. The congregation consisted of humble Calvinist shopkeepers and farmers, a cross-section of the kleine luyden, the small people of the Netherlands whose fathers had fought the Spanish Empire in a war of eighty years’ duration for the sake of freedom of conscience. The Master of the Universe was implored to restore His People of Israel to the land He had promised them, because in the Christian world, throughout which they were dispersed they had, almost everywhere, been treated abominably. It was said from the pulpit that the sins of the Czar of Russia (for it was a time of pogroms in the Ukraine) were our sins. It was by our fault, the fault of universal Christendom and therefore of every individual Christian, that despite two thousand years of preaching the Gospel’s lesson of brotherly love, the Jews could still not live in peace in our Western world. It was crucifying Christ anew, it was shattering His mystical body, said the minister, to allow the kinsmen of the Prophets and of the Lord himself to be hunted as wild beasts from one land to another....

The return of the Jews to the land of their origin was not only asked in order that we might thereby be liberated from our blood guilt and our share of co-responsibility in the matter of their age-long persecution, but that the name of God might be glorified by prophecy fulfilled and by the ancient lamps on Zion’s hill being rekindled as a light to all mankind. Every people had its own function and destiny. In order to fulfill that destiny and task the Jews must preserve their own national character, live again in their own house, and make of their Hebraic civilization a consciously rendered contribution to the sum total of the building of the Kingdom of God on earth, with its thousand gates and its scores of widely divergent national architects....

After the service, the minister, a Walloon Huguenot by the name of Caspar Daubanton, stopped at my father’s house and was lodged in my room. As we lay in the dark, I said to him: But the Jews of Holland will never go to Palestine. And as to the others, in the other countries, how many will be left by the recurrent waves of terror to take up in Palestine where their fathers left off nearly two thousand years ago?

Daubanton replied: Do not say: they have left off. Judaism is still a living reality. It has been transplanted, it is true, from the Holy Land and has unquestionably suffered in the process of being torn from its roots, its locale, its soil, and its spiritual climate. But it is not dead. Since the Jews left Palestine they have created things of great spiritual value—the Talmud, for instance. The spiritual creativity of Judaism has not withered. Judaism is not dead. It suffers from anemia. It has no anchor. It would regain its health if allowed to function unhampered, and that can only be if the Jewish people have back a place where they can work freely.

And then referring to my remark about the Dutch Jews, he expressed the hope that they would never wish to depart from us. They had been an honor to Holland and true brothers from the day they came to us from Spain. And then Dr. Daubanton said something about which I have often thought in later years as his words came back to me. There is, he said, a mystery about the people of the Jews, a mystery which both attracts and repels us. Sometimes I think, he went on, that the mystery resides in the fact that they, unconsciously perhaps, as a people, are the bearers of God’s word....We know they are....We feel they are. And deep down in our hearts we hate them for it. For we hate God and do not want to follow His law. In their mere presence there lies always, I find, a subtle, often unavowed and undefinable challenge to us, something of a reproof, an accusation. They remind us of something of which we do not like to be reminded. I think, he said, that there sits the core of the secret of Jewish persecution in Christian lands.

And then he went on to speak about the dread possibility of that mentally reserved hatred awakening some day in Europe. Some incident, insignificant in itself, I remember him saying, may very well bring it into the open. Not long ago we saw it come snarling to the surface with the Dreyfus affair in a country as civilized as France. Who knows when and where it will break out again? And so long as that hatred persists in our hearts, he said gravely, the Jews are not safe anywhere, not in Russia, not in Germany, not in Holland, or in that far-off America to which so many of them are fleeing these days from Russia. In moments of historical crisis they are first thought of, almost instinctively, as the convenient victim on whom to unload popular frustration and wrath or fury at governmental incompetence, as we see it happening today in the empire of the Czar.

In that case, I spoke back, Palestine is not a solution either. You say yourself that the Jewish people will find no security in this world until the hatred for God is eradicated and His Law is revered in the whole world. The Jews will have to wait a long time, I’m afraid!

If God’s will is to be done by the repetition of words, he came back, with the recital of credos or with the celebration of ritual ceremonies, surely nothing will come of it. We have been doing that for two thousand years....It has brought us more evil than good; wars, strife, hatred, poverty. It must be done by deeds. In our relations with other peoples we must first of all acquire a respect for the character and instincts and the will and the deeds of others. Peoples cannot love each other. They can respect one another. We must learn that all people—the Jews, too—have a right to work out their own destiny in their own way, according to their own character and talents and national ethos. That is the true democracy towards which we are aiming. Believe me, he ended, humanity will have advanced a great step on the road to the ideal when the Jews are once more working out human relations in their own spirit. And that they can do only in their own land,....

Time went by and I gave the matter no further thought, although I laid the pastor’s words up in my heart so that I still remember them after these thirty years. Nothing more was said about Jews until one day, one of the last days at school, I was once more reminded of the problem. I was then eighteen years old. The class in Hebrew, most of whose members were destined to go to the university to study for the Christian ministry, was reading the 137th Psalm: "Al-naharoth Babel sham yeshavnu: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down...."

The instructor remarked that the Talmud has an amazing commentary on that Bible text. It says that when the exiled Hebrews answered the Babylonians that they could not sing the Lord’s song in a strange land and hung their harps on the willow trees, their captors nevertheless insisted and even threatened them with violence. Rather than obey, the Talmud goes on to say, the Jews bit off their thumbs so that it became impossible for them to play snared instruments. For such touching loyalty to Zion, the cloud of the Shechina, the Divine Presence, overshadowed them, hiding them from their tormentors and wafted them away to a happy land. And no one knows where they were taken.

I was thinking, said the instructor smiling, that Van Paassen, who is leaving us next week to go to America, may perhaps find those Jews on his travels and write us a word as to how they have fared since they became invisible to the Babylonians.

I found them not. I did not look for them. I had other things to do than worry about Jews and their problems. Within a short time after my arrival in North America the first World War broke out, and I was on my way back to Europe as a volunteer in the British army. Even so, in the autumn of 1917 when, upon the recommendation of the War Office, I had been transferred from active duty, because of a shattered left arm, to a branch of the intelligence service where my task consisted of explaining the meaning of the news to combat troops, I was again reminded of the conversations back in Holland. I had to tell my comrades one day what a great moral and political act was Britain’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jewish people a home of their own in Palestine.

When the war was over and I had been demobilized in Canada, I entered newspaper work in that country. One of the first pieces I wrote for the Globe, of Toronto, dealt with the amazing phenomenon of the revival of the Hebrew language. A local rabbi, Dr. Barnett G. Brickner, had made a trip to the Holy Land, and I was assigned to interview him upon his return. He told me that in the new Jewish community in Palestine the old language was a spoken tongue again. I remembered Renan’s words: A quiver full of steel arrows, a cable with strong coils, a trumpet of brass crashing through the air with two or three sharp notes, such is Hebrew. A language of this kind is not adapted to the expression of scientific results....It is to pour out floods of anger and utter cries of rage against the abuses of the world, calling the four winds of heaven to the assault of the citadels of evil....It will never be put to profane use.

How then can it serve in a modern community? I asked Dr. Brickner. What is the modern Hebrew word for stovepipe, for steamboat, for smoothing iron, for reaper-binder, for electric lamp, for intravenal injection, for brassiere?....

The Rabbi explained that often the instinctive, instantaneous nomenclature given by children to an unfamiliar object, children who knew no other tongue but Hebrew, of course, was adopted for common use. For instance, a cravat had come to be known by the Hebrew word for herring because a European teacher’s tie had thus been designated by his laughing pupils, who had never seen such neckwear before. The mechanical coupling of railway cars was given a name which derived etymologically from the Hebrew word for marriage. I said I, too, should like to hear the language spoken, the language of the prophets, and not sung or drawled as it is done in synagogues, but naturally and simply. And I wrote in my interview that the Jews had put one over on the Italians, the tongue of whose Roman ancestors was dead for all everyday purposes and remained dead.

However, before I was to hear Hebrew spoken in its own milieu, many other things were to happen. I became a foreign correspondent and was stationed in Paris, where I entered the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the same time, to study biblical criticism under Guignebert, Lods, Goguel, Couchoud, and Alfred Loisy. One day I received an invitation from the Polish government to tour the country along with a party of journalists from various countries and see the new Poland that was rising from the dust and ashes of centuries. It was in Poland, Bucovina, Volhynia, and Galicia that I saw the Jews, the mass of the Jews, the real Jewish people. The male chaperon the Polish Foreign Office sent out with us was not happy about my suggestion to let us see how the Jews lived. There were so many more interesting things to observe and write about, he said: new industrial centers, new railroads, new mining districts, the new port of Gdynia. Why bother about the Jews who were still adhering to their medieval customs and archaic dress, who were an alien, unassimilable bloc, not Polish at all, and who had not caught the rhythm of the new order in Poland.

I slipped away from the officially conducted tour and went my own way. I visited the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, Lemberg, and Kalisz and the Jewish villages in the depths of the Russian Carpathians and the Polish Ukraine; and I wrote in one dispatch that I had seen human degradation at its most abject.

In Lodz I saw the almost incredible situation of three or four hundred thousand Jews crowded in an area of one square mile. Most of them were weavers of prayer shawls who had been totally ruined by the closing of Russia’s religious market. They lived, for the most part, in one-room cottages, two or three families together. In one cottage, where the weaving stool stood in the center, an old man was dying on a mattress in one corner and a child was being born in another. The remaining ten or twelve inhabitants of that room sat in the doorway, although it was bitter cold, so as not to obtrude upon the sacred but here so sordid processes of life and death. Next door in a cellar was a line-up of Polish soldiers extending into the street and awaiting their turn to visit a prostitute whose bed stood behind a curtain while her mother boiled water on a pot-bellied stove for the customers’ ablutions.

In Warsaw I climbed the stairs of the Jewish tenements, ten a day for thirty days. I was welcomed into one room where my boy guide’s parents lived. There was only one piece of furniture in the room, a bed on which the boy’s grandfather lay coughing. The old man scarcely looked up when I entered and immediately turned back to gaze through the cracked and paper-patched windowpanes through which the snow could be seen descending in heavy flakes. My guide’s father and three of his brothers sat on the floor. They were sewing buttons on khaki army overcoats. His mother stayed out on the landing, ashamed to show her ragged clothing to a stranger.

When we had sent for some food, we squatted on the floor, and the neighbors came in to share our meal. My guide’s mother, too, overcame her shyness at last and entered the room. When we had all eaten, the mother produced a family album from under the bed on which her father-in-law lay. With some pride she showed me its pictures one by one, telling me the names and family relationship of the men, women, and children whose likeness I inspected: a procession of well-to-do bourgeois Jews, confirmation and wedding groups, grandfathers, grandmothers, men in neat cloth suits such as a bourgeois wears in Holland on a Sunday, men carrying golden watch-chains on their vests, some even wearing top-hats, women in silk dresses wearing bracelets and necklaces, and lovely children, well nourished, round-cheeked, and healthy.

The mother then told me that they, the members of her family and the neighbors who had all trooped in, had not always been as I saw them now, destitute and hungry. Her own husband, for instance, had once owned a big dairy-products store in the main shopping district of Warsaw. And that neighbor, to whom she pointed, a man in a ragged coat and broken shoes, had been a prosperous timber merchant, and still another, who was dressed even more shabbily, had been a cattle dealer with offices in various large cities and with agents all over the countryside.

But now they were all paupers and beggars. And not only those in the room, but all the Jews in the block and in the next block and so on for sixty or seventy city blocks, three or four hundred thousand of them. And it was the same all over Poland, in the cities, in the towns, and in the villages; masses of ruined Jewish middle-class people. Everywhere I saw hollow-chested and pale-faced children in rags wandering about in the narrow, cold ghetto streets. There were no fires in the houses and there was little clothing to wear, although it was the heart of winter. In Kalisz I arrived on a day when the railroad yards were almost taken by storm, as a wildly riotous crowd of Jewish men, women and children clamored around some carloads of spoilt potatoes which had been rejected by the military command as unfit for consumption by the troops. And they, too, those Jews had once, not so long before, been fairly prosperous tradespeople, merchants, restaurant keepers, and professional men.

Now we are doomed, said my guide’s mother. We have no hope. If her husband and the three boys, she said, worked from morning till night six days a week, they made altogether the equivalent of two dollars a week. They could probably make a little more, she added, if they worked after nightfall, but the money to buy oil for the lamp is lacking. And I don’t know what is to happen to us when there are no more overcoats to sew buttons on....

Each man’s story was the same: once he had been fairly well to do; now he was ruined. And not only in Warsaw, it was the same in every town and village I visited. Three million Polish Jews were living in squalor and misery that beggared description, without hope of rising one step in the social ladder.

So long as Poland was under the czar, the Jews constituted the class of traders, merchants, and middlemen in that country. With the rebirth of the Polish state, the new masters started building a new middle class composed of the non-Jewish citizenry. The new middle class was built, unavoidably they said (for this was quite frankly admitted in government circles), on the systematic and calculated ruin of the Jewish population. It had to be, the leaders of the nationalist parties told me. There was no alternative. It was a question of life and death for the new Poland to destroy the old middle class and to get rid of it. There were two or three million superfluous Jews in Poland. Ultimately they would have to perish or be evacuated from the country, go elsewhere, anywhere. The Polish authorities did not care where they went, for in Poland there was no room for them.

In Lemberg, a great industrial center, the condition of the hundred thousand Jews was even worse than in Warsaw. There I saw entire families who lived on the ten or twelve dollars a year sent them by Jewish charitable organizations in America. Human beings were so closely packed in the ghetto of Przemysl that the air was foul and unbreathable. I constantly wondered that no epidemics were raging.

As we sat talking in that upstairs room in the slums of Warsaw, I heard the beat of a hammer somewhere in the building. I asked if anyone worked after dark. No, I was told, it was the carpenter downstairs; he was making coffins. He is the only busy man in the block. He has more work than he can handle. He works night and day, and still there are not enough coffins....

The mother closed the album. As she did so a slip of paper fell out. I picked it up. It was a snapshot of a young boy, dressed in shorts, bareheaded, his blond curls combed back. He was leaning with one hand against a tree.

Who is this? I inquired, as I handed back the photograph.

That is Mischa, my youngest boy, said the mother.

An audible silence fell upon the people in the room. I saw in amazement that the woman’s eyes were filled with tears. The old man on the bed lifted himself on his elbow: Mischa? he called out feebly in a questioning voice. The boy must be dead, I thought. I have touched on a delicate subject. I should have been more careful.

No father, said the woman to the old man, Mischa is not here. I am telling the strange gentleman about him.... And turning to me she said: Mischa lives in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel). He walked to Palestine.

He walked?

Yes, he walked. He had no money and no passport. He was notified one day that he must serve in the army. He said he would not serve in the army of a country which denied his people bread and life. He went away and disappeared. Seven months we were in fear and anxiety about him. Then came a letter from Mischa. He had arrived in the Holy Land. He is saving up money to bring us all there.

There was a stillness again. An old Jew wiped his eyes and said to me: We’ll never see Palestine. It isn’t necessary. We are lost, all the old people are lost. It doesn’t matter, so long as our children may go to the Land....

God has promised it to them, I said.

At this everyone burst out in tears, and I, too, wept for Zion....

In a lesser degree but visibly more acute each year that I returned, and matching the increase of tension throughout Europe, the situation of the Jews in Rumania and Hungary and in all that Eastern European hinterland bordering on the Soviet Union, where most of the Jews of the world are concentrated, was as tragic and hopeless as it was in Poland. The Jews—ninety-nine per cent of them in great poverty—lived from hand to mouth, from day to day, never quite free of the fear of disaster on the morrow, always at the mercy of sudden shifts in political power and of a disturbance of the precarious and already menaced status quo. They were surrounded by strong and ever stronger-growing nationalist parties with xenophobian or overtly anti-Semitic tendencies. Everywhere the Jew was looked upon as the stranger, the intruder, the alien, who by his mere presence accentuated the struggle for existence.

The Jew did not look upon himself as a stranger in Hungary or Rumania any more than he looks upon himself as a stranger in America. He had lived in those countries for ages. He had taken root. He was established. He had his civic rights. Some Jews occupied important positions. Some owned newspapers or sat on the bench in the courts of justice. Theoretically the Jew was fully equal before the law with Magyars and Wallachians and Galicians. He was a citizen. Nevertheless his rights were progressively delimited and curtailed. Certain trades and professions were closed to him. Against Jewish students a numerus clausus was introduced in the universities and colleges, first tacitly, then openly. Bit by bit he was driven back upon himself by discrimination in industry and governmental services only to be accused then of clannishness, of anational tendencies, of unassimilability. If he dared to point across the border to the Soviet Union, where racial discrimination