Cruel World (78 page)

These impressive-sounding groups had the best of intentions. The problem, already encountered in Greece and the USSR, was the control and delivery of goods and services. Lehman vaguely explained to Congress that in the early stages relief would have to be “distributed by local civilian personnel,” perhaps the Red Cross. The Army knew better. In the initial
“chaotic stages,” as they had already learned the hard way in North Africa, only the military could supply the security, transport, and organization needed “to do the job on the ground.”
²
UNRRA, therefore, would not only be subordinate to the British and American army commands in liberated areas; it also could be asked to wait for up to sixty days after the front had moved on to begin operations, and it would not be allowed to give aid to citizens of “enemy countries,” including Italy and Germany. In addition, UNRRA was expected to defer to the governments of the liberated countries and their agencies, coordinate itself with long-established entities such as the Friends and the Red Crosses, and all the while satisfy Congress, on which it depended in great measure for funds. Needless to say, the rosy idea of a noble international aid organization was soon consumed in turf wars of myriad variety. The USSR quickly dropped out. Thus, as was true of every other agency involved in normalizing liberated Europe, the genuinely vital work achieved by UNRRA, and the successor organizations into which it morphed with accompanying acronymic variations, was the result of the extraordinary individual initiatives of the field operatives, military and civilian, of many nationalities, who would save innumerable lives.

The complexity of the problems to come was illustrated in microcosm in the North African refugee camps. As we have seen, the German attack on the USSR had led to the release of hundreds of thousands of Poles from captivity. Many of the men had joined Polish Army units that were formed in the USSR, where they languished in terrible conditions before being evacuated to Iran and British jurisdiction. Those not in the Polish Army—overwhelmingly, of course, women and children, the latter estimated at 60 percent of the total
³
—were scattered in the areas bordering Iran, most notably Tashkent, where the Russians had made no preparations for them and where Polish aid groups tried to help them. Plenty of food and supplies were stockpiled for the Poles in Iran, but transporting the materials into the USSR proved difficult. Meanwhile, the Soviet government had arbitrarily declared the refugees citizens of the USSR, thereby making emigration dependent on Russian permission. Hundreds of children were sent to Soviet orphanages, where they were “Russified” and subjected to harsh punishments,
⁴
and it was only with the greatest difficulty that the USSR was persuaded to release some 20,000 children, many of whom were placed in schools across the Middle East. Thousands of other Polish children, some with their mothers, were scattered in the British colonies in Africa, in Palestine, Iran, and in refugee camps in Egypt.

To these Poles, 30 percent of whom are thought to have been Jewish, were soon added relays of Greek and Yugoslav refugees from the Balkan conflicts to a total of about 80,000 persons, who were sent to camps not only in North Africa and the Middle East, but also in Cyprus, Mexico, New Zealand, Kenya, and India. The camps were generally set up on national lines, and within them political opposites were, when possible, kept apart. There were numerous special installations for children suffering from malnutrition and tuberculosis or for teenaged boys receiving vocational and pre-military training. Amenities and staff were few. In February 1944, an observer visiting the huge camp of El Shatt in the desert near the town of Suez, where 20,000 Yugoslavs would eventually be lodged, found it primitive indeed. Located in a dusty, windblown site, which seemed to be de rigueur for such camps, the evacuees lived twelve to twenty in army tents without beds or “other furniture, even the most primitive,” and sheets and blankets were “scarce.” The visitor felt that the food, supplied by the British, was “inadequate for people who were for a long time undernourished to the point of starvation.” The meal he saw consisted of a bowl of soup with rice, a slice of bread, a small square of cheese, and an orange. Despite this, the children looked healthy, a fact he attributed to sacrifices by the adults, who did not look so well. Discipline, controlled by a Yugoslav committee, was good, and everything was immaculate.
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Things were still pretty basic three months later, when nurse Margaret Arnstein came to inspect:

Other camps she visited in the region were little better. At Khataba, forty miles northwest of Cairo, there was a measles epidemic and “an enormous amount of broncho-pneumonia.” At Nuseirat, near Gaza in Palestine, where 9,000 Greeks lived in tent barracks in an old Army camp, there was measles too, and only two nurses. Miss Arnstein noted that the overworked nurses everywhere were quite crabby, and that although the “refugees
are
in good condition for
refugees,”
one saw
“much, much
more
infant and child diarrhea … broncho-pneumonia, malnutrition of the serious nature among the babies than one sees in the worst sections at home.” The nurses would not get any rest soon. In the Yugoslav camps, refugees were arriving in groups of 3,000 to 5,000 at a time. During one such avalanche Miss Arnstein helped a doctor and a Quaker “ambulance boy” give 1,200 inoculations for typhus in one morning: “You can well imagine that doing it at this speed, our technique was non-existent, but I am glad to say that apparently there were no abscesses or infections.”
⁶
The camps did gradually improve. A later UNRRA publication reported that El Shatt had set up schools, language classes, play centers, an “excellent” hospital, and all sorts of cottage industries. It also boasted a choir and a newspaper. The writer noted that the refugees had been very inventive; they had “produced implements and tools and other useful assets to the camp, out of scrap and materials rescued from salvage,”
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not a description implying that living conditions had risen anywhere near a normal level of existence.

By the time Nurse Arnstein was giving her assembly-line injections, the Allied armies in Italy, which they had invaded in June 1943, nearly a year before, were deeply mired in refugee matters. Since Italy was an enemy nation, agencies like UNRRA were at first not supposed to work there, but the Italians’ surrender in September and the subsequent occupation of the country by the Germans had changed its status. By 1944, the magnitude of the refugee and displaced person problem was so great that the Allied military was desperate for civilian help. Things had not gone as expected in Italy, as the amount of food and medical help available was far below expectations, based as they were on the propagandistic and essentially false statistics put out for years by the Fascist government. The Allies had stockpiled supplies but had assumed that the liberated areas would be self-sufficient within about six weeks. They had not counted on the disintegration of the Italian infrastructure that was taking place; they were also forced to admit that they had “not fully realized at the beginning the importance transportation played in the economic life of a country and the vital need for its speedy rehabilitation.” By November 1943, the danger of starvation in Sicily had become so great that officers feared civil unrest and even “the total failure of the occupation” of the island. The Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a cable demanding more supplies, declared that food requisitions were not “based on humanitarian or any other factor but that of military necessity.” In December 1943, sufficient food was brought in to avert disaster in Sicily, but now the mainland of Italy and the winter lay before the Allied planners.
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Minturno, Italy: refugee children receive food from British soldiers until they can reach safe areas in the rear
.
(photo credit 15.1)

They had been unrealistic about food and transportation, and, apparently not having absorbed the lessons of the massive exodi that had followed the Spanish Civil War or the German blitzkrieg, they were even less prepared to take care of huge, mobile masses of people uprooted by the fighting. The first weeks of progress of the Allied armies up the coasts of the boot of Italy had produced only a few needy refugees, but by late November the British Eighth Army was dealing with 7,000 people, and the number would burgeon from then on, due in great part to the scorched-earth policy of the slowly retreating Germans and their deliberate expulsion of civilians into the Allied line of advance. Improvisation by desperate civil affairs officers was the order of the day:

Refugees such as these were sent back from the front lines in Army trucks returning from supply deliveries. The people were deposited near railheads; when trains became available, they would be taken farther south. While they waited, some were given shelter in old freight cars. One report stated that “sanitation” had been provided (one wonders just how), and that “it has been our hope to get some arrangements for warming up food or producing a stove to warm them up,” adding that “weather conditions are becoming progressively more severe.” In the meantime, “we give them Army rations.”
¹⁰

As the flow of refugees increased, efforts were made to billet them in towns farther away from the fighting. There was much buck passing over who was to care for the wanderers. The consensus was that the Italians should provide services and the Allies supplies. This did not work very well: a helpful reporter from the
Chicago Daily News
wrote to headquarters to tell them that people were being given flour, but had “no means at all of baking bread.”
¹¹
One group was put in the local prison for a time, another in a cinema. As one officer described the predicament, “People don’t like refugees and it is difficult to billet them.”
¹²
By December it had become clear, once again, that the only solution was to set up a series of camps. By now the American Red Cross had sent two field representatives to help, and the Italian Red Cross in Naples was showing signs of revival. Their first project was to create a small hostel in Naples, which was certainly a major exercise in improvisation.

The hostel was to be housed in a half-destroyed school building in one of the less savory parts of the city. The damaged half could be walled off, and there was a good kitchen and seemingly sufficient bathroom facilities. The Red Cross representatives got a few dollars to buy cleaning materials. The work was not easy, as “the refugees had arrived without notice” and no cleaning could be done in advance. Electricity and plumbing were not wonderful either. The intrepid Red Cross man again went forth and found an engineer who put “the lights in the toilets and on the first floor in temporary working condition.” The rest of the lights and the toilets, however, “have been so demolished or robbed of wire and pipes that the amount of repair needed is extensive.” The engineer, like all of his kind, promised to come back sometime and fix things. Meanwhile, the Red Cross bought candles and “loaned their flashlights the first night.” Thereafter, the refugees “were fed and got to bed before dark.” What constituted “bed”
was minimal indeed. At first it was on the floor, but straw was “finally” procured. Food involved a great deal of scrounging and was augmented at one point by “a generous gift from the Negro soldiers (US Army) who drove the trucks of refugees … to Naples: they pooled together $10 and bought two big gunny sacks of oranges for the refugees, saying, ‘I guess we got it pretty good in the States.’ ” The oranges came in handy, as “no wood had been procured” for cooking and there was no kitchen equipment. Once again everyone rose to the occasion: