The Point of No Return

David Nasaw - The Last Million

The Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2020

Barely two months before the opening of the Nuremberg trials, British prime minister Clement Attlee wrote to President Truman about the “displaced persons”—the DPs—of numerous nationalities stranded in the fallen Reich. Attlee explained that British forces would continue to “avoid treating [the Jewish DPs] on a racial basis. . . . One must remember that within these camps were people from almost every race in Europe and there appears to have been very little difference in the amount of torture and treatment they had to undergo.”

As David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in “The Last Million,” there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust, so it’s just possible that Attlee (no anti-Semite but no Zionist either) believed what he wrote. Whatever his motive, he undoubtedly didn’t want to see “the Jews [placed] in a special racial category at the head of the queue.” Much of the reason was Palestine, then under British control: “We have the Arabs to consider as well.” Attlee’s worry, evident in the letter if never explicitly spelled out, was that defining the Jewish DPs as a distinct group, unable to return “home,” would bolster the argument that they be permitted to immigrate to Palestine, in which, and about which, tensions were running dangerously high. Attlee warned that “the whole Middle East” could be “set aflame.”

“The Last Million” describes in meticulously researched detail what happened to the DPs who felt—understandably enough—that they could not go back to the lands of their birth. Within a few months of the war’s end millions of DPs were repatriated, including 1.5 million French and hundreds of thousands of others from all over Europe. Two million were sent back to the Soviet Union, many to a dismal fate (to which Mr. Nasaw briefly alludes).

But not all went home. “The Last Million,” Mr. Nasaw writes, “is the story of . . . displaced Eastern Europeans who, when the shooting stopped, refused to go home or had no homes to return to. It is the story of their confinement in refugee camps for up to five years after the war ended.” They included a pitifully small contingent of Jews, survivors of the camps, but their numbers were boosted later “by the Polish Jews who had escaped death by fleeing across the border into the Soviet Union” (or, the author might have added, had found themselves within the U.S.S.R. as a result of Stalin’s carve-up of Poland with Hitler). They had no wish to live in a Poland that had not only come under communist domination, but where anti-Semitism had outlasted the Nazis, on occasion murderously so.

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administrationhad been established as early as 1943 to focus on postwar repatriation. As relations deteriorated between the Soviets and the Western Allies, however, London and Washington were increasingly prepared to accede to the wishes of those who saw no place for themselves in their homelands. Acting through the U.N., they set up the International Refugee Organization, “dedicated not to repatriating the Last Million . . . but to resettling them elsewhere.”

Where the DPs were ultimately to be resettled rested on a complex set of considerations, including potential host countries’ labor needs and (particularly in the U.S.) ethnic politics, as well as the struggle over the future of Palestine and some very chilly Cold War calculations: From time to time, past crimes could be overlooked in the interest of combating the threat from the east, and a useful villain might be allowed to slip in. The young and the healthy were in demand, preferably from the Baltics, then Poland and Ukraine—as workers, to be sure, but that they were considered reliably anti-Soviet didn’t hurt.

Jews, many brutalized and broken, were held back, sometimes on utilitarian grounds, but often for far darker motives. Anti-Semitism was not restricted to the former killing fields, as, quote by damning quote, Mr. Nasaw reveals. With the Red Army on the Elbe, ancient prejudice was sharpened by concerns that Jewish DPs, many of whom had spent years under Soviet rule, might represent some kind of fifth column: “There are more Communists in New York City today than there are in the entire country of Holland,” claimed one congressman from South Carolina, not even bothering with a dog whistle. Exasperated by the argument over the ship that became famous as Exodus 1947, filled with Jewish DPs the British would not allow to disembark in Palestine, Truman complained that “the Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment on world affairs . . . I find [they] are very, very selfish.” It was almost as if he were blaming them for having nowhere else to go.

On the other hand, “The Last Million” occasionally reads as if Mr. Nasaw blames other Eastern Europeans, above all perhaps the Balts, for finding welcome in the West, exploitative as it frequently was. He is, of course, correct that there is something doubly disturbing—to use too mild a word—about the way both the depth of Jewish suffering and the depth of the complicity of some Eastern Europeans in the Holocaust were regularly disregarded. At the same time, while, inexcusably, there had been too many willing executioners in the Baltics and elsewhere in the East, Mr. Nasaw at times seems to underplay the terrible choices faced by—and forced upon—the Balts, caught between twin totalitarian invaders. Most Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians who fled the Red Army in 1944 did not do so because they were Nazi collaborators but because they had experienced the horrors of Soviet occupation a few years before.

In the end, the United States’s 1948 decision to open its doors far wider encouraged other nations to follow suit, while the establishment of Israel in the same year, despite its perilous beginnings, provided an essential additional refuge. But as so often in this tale of fractured, shattered lives, tragedy is never far away: Jewish DPs comprised, writes Mr. Nasaw, “one-third of the Israeli combat soldiers” in the first Arab-Israeli war “and one-third of the casualties.”