The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (42 page)

For Irving “Jack” Fasteau, an American who had worked during the war for the Social Security Board and was now part of the Military Liaison that served as a link between the Army and UNRRA, the country’s revolu- tion was part of its appeal. “From what I’ve seen,” he wrote to colleagues back in Washington, “it is a broad movement, supported by the large majority of the people; it is a shifting of power from a small well-to- do group to another portion of the population that al- though small in number appears to have been thrown up by the rigors of the last few years, who have dem- onstrated leadership qualities under a period of great stress and privation, and who seem thereby to have gained the confidence of large masses of the peasants.” Fasteau adopted a philosophical view about the cost of this upheaval: “As you know, revolution, social and economic changes, wherever and whenever they take place are not pleasant. Not everyone is satisfied…. We know that the conditions of war limit the develop- ment and application of civil liberties.” Fasteau was naturally stunned by the devastation the war wrought. “Community graves, with as many as 80 bodies, who had been shot or tortured.…Whole villages without a house standing. Miles of devastation.” Yet again, the “strenuous efforts” of the people stood out. There were no draft animals for planting; no matter: “It is not un- common to see an entire family pulling a plow.” Impro-

visation: “I saw a tractor that was being built from odd parts of cars and planes, both German and American.” In local hospitals and welfare centers, people “do so much with so little…. Beds are made from whatever wood there can be found or scrounged. Tin cans are used as utensils, wooden spoons are carved by hand from pieces of scrap lumber. The homes are very clean, everything in them is clean.” Above all, the population is “almost painfully hospitable, giving freely of what little they have.”
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Here was just what UNRRA needed: a determined people, capable and rugged, fueled by ide- als of patriotism and egalitarianism.

As a result, Yugoslavs featured prominently in UN- RRA’s public relations effort. The Yugoslav peasant was transformed into a heroic everyman in one radio script, written by UNRRA: he was a man who “had stoically resisted countless acts of God and man in the shape of barbaric invasion, droughts, and human and animal epidemics.” The ruthless German occupation threat- ened to end his way of life but “the unhesitating sac- rifice of the Jugoslav peasant”—who plowed his own fields when animals were lacking and carried buckets of water across the parched, rocky mountain-scape— defied even Hitler’s designs. Yugoslavia “had been oc- cupied but never conquered,” exclaimed one UNRRA field-worker on a BBC broadcast. “ We of UNRRA felt

privileged to work with such a people.”
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NRRA WAS NOT the only agency deployed in the broken landscape of Europe in 1945 to de- liver hope and healing. Alongside and techni-

cally under UNRRA, some 125 private charitable orga- nizations stood ready to deliver supplies, money, and staff workers wherever they could be best used. These voluntary organizations, most of which dated back to the start of the war and in some cases back to the First World War, presented both an opportunity and a head- ache for UNRRA. Voluntary agencies wished to guard their independence to some extent, for they had raised money and contributions from their own constituen- cies, often on behalf of particular groups within Eu- rope. UNRRA had to guard against the duplication of efforts and wastage of scarce space aboard ships bound for Europe from American ports. Nor did UNRRA need the administrative hassles of registering, and supervis- ing, the staff of these agencies, most of whom wished to be sent into Germany and Eastern Europe, where the need was evidently greatest. Over time, however, UNRRA worked out basic structures for these agen- cies that allowed them to play a role in delivering aid to Europe. UNRRA was wise to do so, for the American

public was far more closely tied to these church-based or national, grassroots organizations than to the vague acronym “ UNRRA.” In finding a role for voluntary re- lief organizations, UNRRA helped sustain the American public’s commitment to continued sacrifice on behalf of European civilians.
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In the United States, the American public began to raise funds for European war relief from the very opening of the war in 1939, chiefly along lines of ethnic identity. Polish-Americans raised millions in 1939 and 1940 as their homeland fell under German and Soviet occupa- tion; British War Relief raised $4 million in 1940 and $8 million in 1941 on behalf of the British civilians suffer- ing under the German blitz; Greek-Americans contrib- uted $4.3 million in 1941 alone for war relief in Greece. And on it went: Americans set up committees to raise funds for Albanians, Armenians, Czechs, Danes, Lithu- anians, Dutch, Norwegians, Russians, Yugoslavs, and dozens of other nationalities inside Europe. Such was the profusion of fund-raising appeals that the U.S. government—which wished to encourage broad-based voluntary contributions to war relief—was forced to create supervisory machinery to avoid oversaturation of national appeals and the inevitable rivalry of dif- ferent ethnic groups competing for scarce dollars. For example, in 1940, over seventy separate organizations

were busy soliciting money for British war relief. In July 1942, President Roosevelt established the President’s War Relief Control Board, and assigned it the duty to regularize and oversee war relief appeals in the United States as well as the disbursement of monies raised. It was authorized to streamline fund-raising chiefly by consolidating voluntary organizations; the British War Relief Society, for example, grouped together dozens of smaller operations. The board also initiated the Na- tional War Fund, which conducted an annual nation- wide campaign on behalf of war relief that raised some

$321 million and used it to support the USO, the War Prisoners Aid, and twenty-seven other relief agencies. The board also urged private charities to step up their own coordination so as to avoid duplication in the field. Some did so and formed the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (ACVAFS) in 1943, which gradually expanded to include most of the major private agencies operating in Europe.
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The end of the war opened a new chapter for these relief groups, for it meant that they could expand their efforts from raising money in the United States to sending skilled relief personnel along with the aid their funds had purchased. Hundreds of American re- lief workers representing dozens of organizations trav- eled to Europe in 1945, mostly to Germany, to join oth-

er equally committed European relief agencies in the field. By mid-1946, over 1,100 personnel from voluntary agencies, European and American, were at work side by side in Germany, and many others were scattered across the European landscape.

Predictably, these agencies viewed the creation of UN- RRA with trepidation. UNRRA was the designated in- ternational agency for supplying aid in the liberated areas, and the voluntary groups faced a new level of bureaucracy before they could make their own mark in

Europe. UNRRA controlled the supplies these smaller groups would need, and of course UNRRA had gobbled up what vehicles were left over from military surplus. Voluntary agencies could not enter Germany without approval and specific orders from UNRRA, and once there, they were technically under UNRRA supervision and could be assigned anywhere. By the end of Septem- ber 1945, twelve agencies had signed agreements with UNRRA; that number expanded to thirty-six by the fall of 1946, heavily focused on work with displaced per- sons in Germany. UNRRA guarded its options by insist- ing that volunteers would not be assigned to work with their own choice of national group, nor at their choice of camp. The important exception to this was the Jewish relief agencies: after a great deal of prodding and pres- sure, the American Jewish community secured special dispensation to work with Jewish DPs and the Ameri- can Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) was designated as the coordinating agency for other Jew- ish relief organizations. This agreement served UN- RRA’s interests, as well as the Jewish DPs’, since until September 1945, the Allied armies gave Jews no special rights or status as a persecuted people; they were sim- ply lumped by nationality with other DPs. When it be- came clear in late summer that German, Polish, Baltic, and Hungarian Jews refused to be housed with their often anti- Semitic conationals, leaders of the interna-

tional Jewish community demanded, and won, the sig- nificant reform of UNRRA and SHAEF’s policy toward Jewish DPs. With this important exception, however, UNRRA deterred relief groups from focusing on spe- cific religious or national groups, and sought instead to deploy voluntary agencies in regions where their skills and labor would be most useful.
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Despite such minor rivalries with UNRRA, the exten- sive work of private humanitarian agencies in postwar Europe shows plainly that Americans at the war’s end were just as ready to work hard, give money and time, and make personal sacrifices on behalf of European recovery as they had been to fight and destroy Hitler’s regime. Indeed, one could suggest that they were even more zealous in this final stage of the war: Americans understood that what was at stake in 1945 was precise- ly the fulfillment of all the great efforts that soldiers had made on the battlefield. Were Americans to fail to administer to a brutalized Europe now, the pain and bitterness of the war would be for naught. Americans understood this instinctively—that here in Europe something awful had happened and now must be set right.

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ISTORIANS, AS WELL as many contemporaries, considered UNRRA something of a failure when it finally closed down in 1947, to be broken up

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and succeeded by various UN agencies.

It is hard to

accept this verdict. UNRRA managed to deliver to Eu- rope, as well as Asia, almost $4 billion of goods, food, medicine, and industrial and agricultural machinery at a time of global shortages, worldwide transport dif-

ficulties, and political chaos. The 25 million long tons of goods that UNRRA delivered was three times the amount the United States gave after World War I. Mil- lions of people benefited from UNRRA’s work. True, it did not create the sort of sustained institutional ma- chinery that the Marshall Plan later did. It had not sought to do so. Herbert Lehman in December 1943 had explicitly stated that the agency should be “measured by the speed with which it is able to liquidate itself; the sooner it becomes unnecessary, the greater will have been its accomplishments.”
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Even so, the London- based Economist magazine lamented the planned de- mise of UNRRA, for in an increasingly divided world, it was a genuinely international enterprise, “the only organization or activity still bridging the gulf between East and West.”
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Perhaps for that very reason, it could not long survive. The United States government felt that for all the money it had thrown at Europe in 1945– 46, it had not gained much traction in restarting the giant economic engine of the continent. Nor did Amer- icans like having to share decision making in an agen- cy funded largely with dollars. When Dean Acheson’s colleague in the State Department, Will Clayton, was sketching out plans in 1947 for what would become the Marshall Plan, he specifically said “we must avoid get- ting into another UNRRA. The United States must run this show.”
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So perhaps UNRRA fell short as a vehicle for American foreign economic interests. Yet as Francis B. Sayre said, this organization was “a new enterprise, based funda- mentally on human brotherhood.”
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And brotherhood is what it supplied. UNRRA brought the human touch back to Europe in 1945. The men and women who worked in DP camps, staffed transport and distribution centers, drove trucks, and handed out medical supplies and food—these people offered the simple and longed-for gift of decency and charity to Europeans in desperate need. The remarks made by a thirteen-year-old French girl, Yvette Rubin, might stand as a kind of epitaph for the UNRRA experience. Yvette, deported to Germany in 1942, was imprisoned for almost three years, dur- ing which time she witnessed the brutal murder of her mother. Returned to Paris in the spring of 1945, she sat one day in her father’s apartment in Paris, describing at length the horrors through which she had passed to her uncle, Jean Newman, a staff employee of UNRRA. After her painful monologue, she looked more closely at her uncle’s uniform. “ Then suddenly, excited and with shining eyes, she jumped off her chair,” recalled Newman. “’ Tonton, you are not a soldier. You are UN- RRA. I know them. I was with them for more than two weeks after I was liberated by the British armies. They are wonderful. They have saved my life. They saved me from typhus, which I was still sick with. They fed me