Category Archives: migration

by | 27 February 2026 · 6:56 pm

Pressure on Adm. Horthy, 1944

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 298-300:

The pope had not been able to utter the word ‘Jews’, or to make his plea public, but his meaning was clear enough. The American president, meanwhile, was not quite so squeamish. The very next day, 26 June, and just as the truth of Auschwitz was becoming ever more public thanks to the press coverage coming out of Switzerland, Roosevelt had his secretary of state deliver a message to Horthy:

The United States demands to know whether the Hungarian authorities intend . . . to deport Jews to Poland or to any other place, or to employ any measures that would in the end result in their mass execution. Moreover, the United States wishes to remind the Hungarian authorities that all those responsible for carrying out those kind of injustices will be dealt with . . .

The pressure, unleashed by the publication of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, was unremitting. On 30 June, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, wrote to Horthy with a warning that, if the deportations did not stop, Hungary would become a ‘pariah among other nations’. But it was that US warning, that war criminals would be held to account, that seemed to concentrate the regent’s mind.

‘I shall not tolerate this any further!’ Horthy told a council of his ministers the day Roosevelt’s message arrived. ‘The deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease!’ Tellingly, that exhortation did not apply to the deportations outside Budapest. Those continued. The next day, 27 June, would see 12,421 Jews shipped to Auschwitz in four separate transports. The deportations would continue the next day and the next.

Despite his royal title, Horthy was not the master of his kingdom: issuing a command did not make it happen. There now ensued a power struggle inside the Hungarian government, as those bent on continuing to do the Nazis’ bidding, collaborating in the effort to rid the country of its Jews, sought to resist the regent’s edict. The security forces themselves were split: there was a tank division loyal to the regent, battalions of provincial gendarmes loyal to the Final Solution.

If Horthy was to prevail, he would have to move fast. Adolf Eichmann and his local fascist allies had drawn up a plan to ensnare the last major Jewish community still untouched by the hand of the SS: the 200,000 Jews of Budapest who were the last Jews of Hungary – and, in effect, the last Jews of Europe.

This is how it would work. On 2 July, thousands of Hungarian armed police would gather in Budapest’s Heroes Square on a pretext designed to arouse minimal suspicion: a flag ceremony to honour their comrades. Then, once the formalities were over, the gendarmes would quietly spend their three days of supposed leave making themselves familiar with the locations of the single-building mini-ghettos known as ‘yellow-star houses’, in particular working out how to block off potential escape routes for any Jews minded to flee. The trains carrying Budapest’s Jews to the gas chambers were scheduled for departure on 10 July.

Except events did not run to plan. On 2 July, the 15th Air Force of the United States dropped 1,200 tons of bombs in or near Budapest, killing 136 people and destroying 370 buildings. The bombs’ targets were, in fact, factories south of the capital, but that was not how it looked from inside Hungary’s ruling circles. To them, it seemed as if Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the Hungarian political leadership responsible for the slaughter of the country’s Jews. Those at the top trembled at the prospect.

By 5 July, Horthy had installed a loyalist as the chief military commander in the capital and instructed him to take ‘all measures necessary to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews’. That same night, he sent in the tanks. As the army moved in, the provincial police, there to round up Jews, were pushed out.

In the clash of wills, the regent had won. To be clear, his prime motive was self-preservation and the assertion of his own authority, rather than the saving of Jews. The deportation of the Jews of Hungary had not especially troubled him until that moment. Indeed, it would continue for the next three days, at the same intense pace as it had throughout May and June: there were five transports from the provinces on 9 July alone. There was one more on 20 July.

But the rest were stopped. One train bound for Auschwitz was even turned around and sent back, on Horthy’s orders. Eichmann was livid: ‘In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before,’ he raged. ‘It cannot be tolerated!’ Under Horthy, there would be no deportations from Budapest.

The Jews of the capital city were saved, for now. There were many explanations – starting with the shifting calculus of Hungarian politics, as Germany began to look like the losing side in the war – but a crucial role was played by a thirty-two-page document, written by two men, one of them a teenager, who had done what no Jews had ever done before and escaped from Auschwitz. They had crossed mountains and rivers, they had hidden and starved, they had defied death and the most vicious enemy the world had ever seen. Their word had been doubted, it had been ignored and it had been suppressed. But now, at last, it had made the breakthrough they had longed for. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.

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by | 26 February 2026 · 8:18 pm

Publicizing the Auschwitz Report

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-275:

NATURALLY, THE WORKING Group always hoped that the escapees’ testimony would reach the Allied nations fighting the Third Reich. They had no clear idea how exactly it would get there; instead they cast the document upon the waters, hoping it would land on the right shore. The Auschwitz Report would be a message in a bottle.

One early copy fell into exactly the wrong hands. Oskar Krasňanský sent it to Jewish officials based in Istanbul through a courier who he had been assured was ‘reliable’. But it never arrived. Krasňanský later concluded that the messenger had been a paid spy who took the report to Hungary, only to hand it to the Gestapo in Budapest.

Another copy, also originally destined for Istanbul, followed an especially circuitous path. A Jewish employee of the Turkish legation in Budapest passed it to the head of the city’s Palestine office – representing those who were determined to turn that country into a refuge for Jews – who, keen to get the information to neutral Switzerland, passed it to a contact in the Romanian legation in Bern who, in turn, handed it to a businessman from Transylvania who had once been known as György Mandel but who had now, however improbably, become the unpaid first secretary of the consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, under the name of George Mantello.

The route was bizarre, but at last the report had found the right person. Mantello was a man ready to flout convention, and if necessary the law, if that’s what it took to rescue Jews from the Nazis. And for him, the Auschwitz Report had a bleakly personal significance. As he read it, he knew that his own extended family in Hungary had already been deported. The words of Vrba and Wetzler, reinforced by Mordowicz and Rosin, confirmed that all of those relatives, some 200 people, were almost certainly dead. He resolved immediately to do what he could to spread the word.

Mantello’s copy was a five-page summary in Hungarian, produced at an earlier stage of the report’s convoluted journey by an orthodox rabbi in Slovakia, so he now enlisted the help of assorted students and expats to make immediate translations of this abridged version into Spanish, French, German and English. On 22 June 1944 he handed the document to a British journalist, Walter Garrett, who was in Zurich for the Exchange Telegraph news agency. Garrett saw the news value immediately, but he also recognised that, even in its pared down form, the Auschwitz Report was still too lengthy for easy newspaper consumption. He had his British–Hungarian secretary, one Blanche Lucas, produce a fresh translation and he then distilled the core points into four arresting press releases.

Garrett made a break from the reporters’ unwritten code, which would forbid a journalist from receiving financial help from a source: doubtless for the sake of speed, he allowed Mantello to pay for those four texts to be sent to London by telegram, costly as that was. Still, despite that departure from traditional Fleet Street practice, and in welcome contrast with Krasňanský, Garrett understood the grammar of news. His telegram despatch, wired on the night of 23 June 1944, led with what was his most stunning revelation:

FOLLOWING DRAMATIC ACCOUNT ONE DARKEST CHAPTERS MODERN HISTORY REVEALING HOW ONE MILLION 715 THOUSAND JEWS PUT DEATH ANNIHILATION CAMP AUSCHWITZ BIRKENAU . . . REPORT COME EX TWO JEWS WHO ESCAPED BIRKENAU CORRECTNESS WHEREOF CONFIRMED . . . FROM THE BEGINNING JUNE 1943 NINETY PERCENT INCOMING JEWS GASSED DEATH STOP . . . THREE GAS-CHAMBERS FOUR CREMATORIUMS BIRKENAU-AUSCHWITZ STOP EACH CREMATORIUM . . . TWO THOUSAND CORPSE DAILY STOP GARRETT ADDS ABSOLUTE EXACTNESS ABOVE REPORT UNQUESTIONABLE . . . END

As soon as those words were humming along the telegraph cables to London, Garrett acted to ensure that his story – surely one of the scoops of the century – would get the widest possible distribution. The technology of 1944 allowed for few short cuts. And so, in the early hours of 24 June, Walter Garrett rode his bike through the streets of Zurich, pushing copies of his despatch by hand into the mailboxes of the city’s newspapers. Attached was a covering letter of endorsement, supplied by Mantello, from a quartet of senior Swiss theologians and clerics, all apparently vouching for the gravity of the revelations. (In fact, none of the four had seen the report: in a typical Mantello flourish, he had put their names to the letter but had dispensed with the formality of asking their permission first.) And so the first newspaper story based on what would become known as the Vrba–Wetzler Report appeared in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung later that same day.

Mantello’s efforts had worked. Thanks to those ‘two Jews who escaped Birkenau, correctness whereof confirmed’, the word was out. Breaking the dam of censorship, the following eighteen days saw the publication in the Swiss press of no fewer than 383 articles laying bare the truth of the Auschwitz death camp, even if, by accidentally omitting the estimated 50,000 Lithuanian dead, Garrett had revised down Vrba–Wetzler’s death toll. Put another way, between 24 June and 11 July more articles appeared about Auschwitz in the Swiss press than had been published about the wider Final Solution throughout the entire course of the war in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian and the whole of the British popular press put together.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, Hungary, migration, military, Poland, publishing, religion, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Turkey, war

by | 25 February 2026 · 10:38 pm

Compiling the Auschwitz Report

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 241-244:

THE CONVERSATION – part debrief, part interrogation – would last several days. As soon as he heard the men give the outline of their story, Steiner understood that this was bigger than him: the ÚŽ’s leadership needed to hear this. He telephoned Bratislava to speak to Oskar Krasňanský, a chemical engineer by profession who was one of the council’s most senior figures. Steiner urged him to come right away. Jews were not allowed to travel by train, but Krasňanský wangled a permit and was in Žilina later that same day. The head of the Jewish council, the fifty-year-old lawyer and writer Oskar Neumann, joined them twenty-four hours later.

For the officials, the first task was to establish that these two men were who they said they were. That was simple enough: Krasňanský had brought with him the records kept by the council of every transport that had left Slovakia, for what was then destination unknown. There was a card for every deportee, including their name and photograph. So when Fred and Walter gave the date and point of origin of the transports that had taken them away, the records backed them up.

More than that, Fred and Walter were also able to name several of the others who had been jammed into the cattle trucks with them, along with specific individuals who had arrived in Auschwitz on subsequent transports. Each time, the names and the dates tallied. And each time, the escapees were able to confirm the fate of the people on those lists: with next to no exceptions, they were naming the dead.

Krasňanský found these two young men credible right away. They were clearly in a terrible state. Their feet were misshapen and they were completely exhausted; he could see that they were undernourished, that they had eaten almost no food for weeks. He summoned a doctor and between them they decided that the men should stay here, in this basement room, to recover their strength. A couple of beds were brought down.

Yet, for all their physical weakness, Krasňanský was struck by the depth and sharpness of each man’s memory. It was a thing of wonder. The engineer was determined to get their testimony on record and to ensure that it would be unimpeachable.

With that in mind, he decided to interview the two separately, getting each story down in detail and from the beginning, so that the evidence of one could not be said to have contaminated or influenced the other. In sessions lasting hours, Krasňanský asked questions, listened to the answers and wrote detailed shorthand notes. Whatever emotional reaction he had to what he was hearing – which was, after all, confirmation that his community had been methodically slaughtered – he hardly showed it. He kept on asking questions and scribbling down the answers.

Walter alternated between speaking very fast, as if in a torrent, and very slowly, deliberately, as if searching for the exact word. Before the formal, separate interviews, Fred saw how Walter strained to be strictly factual, like a witness in a courtroom, only for the emotional force of the events he was describing repeatedly to prove too much. The younger man could not help himself: he seemed to be reliving those events in the telling, every fibre of his tissue and every pore of his skin back in Auschwitz. After an hour, Walter was utterly drained. And yet he had barely got started.

For the separate interview, Krasňanský ushered him into a room which he locked. It was less a protection against interruption than a security measure, given that the Jewish old people’s home of Žilina was now harbouring two fugitives from the SS, with a Gestapo warrant out for their arrest. (That was another reason to keep them in this building, day and night, for as long as two weeks: if they went out on the street looking like this, they would be noticed. People might start to talk.) Either way, Walter began the conversation by asking for a piece of paper and a pen.

He began to draw a map, the distances as close to scale as he could make them. First, he sketched the inner layout of the main camp, Auschwitz I. Then, and this was more complicated, he drew Birkenau or Auschwitz II, with its two sections, BI and BII, and multiple sub-sections, BIIa, BIIb, BIIc, and so on. Between the two, he drew the Judenrampe, explaining what he had seen and done there. He showed where the behemoths of German industry – IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp and the others – had their factories, powered by slave labour. He showed where, at the far end of Birkenau, stood the machinery of mass murder: the four crematoria, each one combining a gas chamber and set of ovens.

For forty-eight hours, whether separately or together, Walter and Fred described it all: the transports, the ramp, the selection, during which those chosen to work were marched off while those chosen to die were ferried towards the gas. The tattoos for the living, the ovens for the dead. The two men rattled off the dates and estimated numbers of every batch of Jews that had arrived since the late spring of 1942 right up until the week they had made their escape. They spoke in particular detail about the fate of their fellow Slovak Jews and the Czech family camp. Walter admitted that the plight of the latter had been especially close to his heart, given the ties of language and background: perhaps he expected his questioners would feel the same way.

Krasňanský, often joined by Neumann, listened to it all, absorbing every word. Neumann was a lawyer by training and it often felt like a cross-examination as he pressed and pushed Walter and Fred on every aspect of their evidence. Neumann might name an old schoolfriend whom he knew to have been on a specific transport, say in September 1943, asking if the pair knew the fate of that group. They would give their answer, knowing it would be checked against what they had already said about that same transport nine or ten hours earlier. The officials of the Jewish council were looking for inconsistencies, either within the testimony of Fred and Walter or between them. But they found none.

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by | 25 February 2026 · 12:49 am

Ústredňa Židov in Slovakia

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 235-245:

Over a meal, Fred and Walter explained that they needed to meet whatever semblance of a Jewish community they could find: they needed to get word to them, urgently. Čanecký replied that the doctor in Čadca was a Jew by the name of Pollack.

That name rang an instant bell. Back in Nováky, there had been a Dr Pollack scheduled to be on the same transport that took Walter to Majdanek. And yet his name had been removed from the list at the last moment. It turned out that the authorities made a sudden exception for Jewish physicians, bowing to pressure from the Slovak public, especially in rural areas, who overnight found they had no medical care. Tiso had not reckoned with the fact that, though Jews made up only a small portion of Slovakia’s population, they accounted for a big share of the country’s doctors. The president reprieved those Jewish medics who had not already been deported, despatching them to small towns and villages. Given all that, it was wholly believable that the same Dr Pollack was in Čadca. And if he was, then that was the obvious place to start. They needed to get to Čadca immediately. Fred and Walter looked at each other: they should leave right away.

…

The farmer’s last good turn was to point the escapees in the direction of the doctor. His place of work was not what they were expecting or hoping for: Dr Pollack’s clinic was inside the local army barracks. Guarding the door were two soldiers of Slovakia’s pro-Nazi army. Since Walter was the one who knew Pollack, it would fall to him to walk past those men and pretend to be a patient. He girded himself and went in.

He found Pollack’s room and, as soon as he was inside, he saw that, yes, this doctor was the same man he had known in Nováky. Except he was not alone. There was a female nurse at the doctor’s side. Thinking on his feet, Walter said he had come about a ‘gentleman’s disease’ and would prefer it if the woman were to step out.

…

So he explained who he was and where he and the doctor had first met. And then he spoke about Auschwitz. He did it as briefly as he could; still, Pollack paled and began to tremble. Walter understood why. He, Walter, was an emissary from the grave. He was the first of the 60,000 Jews who had been deported from Slovakia between March and October 1942 – half of them to Auschwitz – to have returned to the country. He was bringing the dread news that, of all those thousands, only sixty-seven Slovak Jewish men were still alive in Auschwitz, along with 400 Slovak Jewish women.

‘Where are the rest?’ Pollack asked.

‘The rest are dead,’ Walter replied.

He explained that they had not been ‘resettled’, as those who stayed behind had been told and desperately wanted to believe. They had been murdered.

Pollack himself had been spared back in the spring of 1942, along with his wife and his children. But his parents, his brothers and sisters and their families had all been deported. The doctor had heard nothing from his relatives since 1942. They and the rest of the deportees had disappeared, leaving only silence. And yet Walter’s words still made the doctor shake. Because now he knew.

Collecting himself, Pollack asked what he could do. Now it was Walter’s turn to ask the questions. Was anything left of the organised Jewish community of Slovakia? Did any groups still exist, anything approaching a leadership?

The doctor answered that the ÚŽ, the Ústredňa Židov, the Jewish Centre, or council, in Bratislava, still functioned. It was the only Jewish organisation the regime permitted, tasked now with representing the 25,000 Jews like Pollack who had evaded deportation and lived on. But the ÚŽ had to work discreetly. The doctor could arrange a contact immediately. He then handed over an address where Walter and his friend could stay the night in Čadca: they would be under the roof of a Mrs Beck, apparently a relative of Leo Baeck, the eminent rabbi.

…

A Nazi edict in 1940 had banned every Jewish organisation in Slovakia, replacing them with this single Jewish council, the ÚŽ. The country’s Jewish leaders had debated in a fever the moral rights and wrongs of taking part in such an entity. Some took Walter’s view: that to serve in the ÚŽ was to do the devil’s work for him and to bless it with the credibility of the Jewish community’s own leaders. Others had feared that Jewish refusal would only mean that the fascist devil would perform that work himself and do it more brutally. At least if Jews were involved, there might be a chance to cushion or delay the blow that would soon come raining down on Jewish heads. In the argument that raged, it was the second group that had prevailed.

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by | 23 February 2026 · 8:07 am

Planning Escape from Auschwitz

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-187:

And so by the early spring of 1944 there was a double urgency to Walter’s determination to escape. Those 5,000 or so Czechs who had entered the family camp in the second wave, arriving on 20 December 1943, would be put to death exactly six months later on 20 June. That was beyond doubt; it was the hardest of deadlines. But now there was the prospect of an even more imminent, and much larger, slaughter: hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would board trains for Auschwitz in a matter of weeks, trains that would take them to the very gates of the gas chambers.

Walter had his motive and now he acquired a mentor. After the Poles, the most successful escapees from Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners of war. Many thousands had been brought to the camp at the start, dying in the cold and dirt as they worked as slaves to build Birkenau. But there was another group, Walter estimated there were about a hundred of them, known to the Auschwitz veterans as the ‘second-hand prisoners of war’. Captured in battle, they had been sent initially to regular PoW camps but then despatched to Auschwitz as punishment for bad behaviour, including attempted escape. Among them was one Dmitri Volkov.

Not for the first time, Walter had reason to be grateful for the Russian he had taught himself back in Trnava. It meant he could talk with the second-hand PoWs as he registered them, even those whose appearance was forbidding. To Walter, Volkov was a bear of a man from the land of the Cossacks, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. Enormous and with dark, deep-set eyes, and still in his Red Army uniform, he looked like someone to be approached with care.

But with time they got to know each other, eventually striking an unspoken bargain not dissimilar to the high-school deal that had seen Walter trade lessons in Slovak for tuition in High German. Volkov allowed Walter to practise his Russian. In return, the young pen-pusher handed over his allocation of bread and quasi-margarine, honouring a vow he had made to himself much earlier: that he would not take his official ration so long as he had access to food from elsewhere. He noticed that Volkov did not eat even that meagre portion, instead cutting it into quarters, to be shared with his comrades.

They began talking. Not, at first, about the camp, but about the great Russian literary masters Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, moving on to the Soviet writers Gorky, Ehrenburg and Blok. Eventually, Volkov began to lower his guard.

He revealed that he was no mere conscript but a captain in the Red Army. In making this admission, Volkov was taking a huge risk: it was Nazi practice to shoot all Soviet officers. But he had decided to trust Walter, and not only with that information. He also told him of his own experience of escape, for the captain had once broken out of the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. As his teenage pupil listened, and over several days, Volkov proceeded to give Walter a crash course in escapology.

Some lessons were intensely practical. He told him what to carry and what not to carry. In the second category was money. Kanada might be overflowing with the stuff, but it was dangerous. If you had money, you would be tempted to buy food from a shop or a market, and that meant contact with people which was always to be avoided. Better to live off the land, stealing from fields and remote farms. Also not to be carried, at least when making the initial escape, was meat: the SS Alsatians would sniff it out immediately.

So: no money, no meat. As for what he would need, that category was larger, starting with a knife for hunting or self-defence, and a razor blade in case of imminent capture. That was a cardinal rule for Volkov: ‘Don’t let them take you alive.’ Also: matches, to cook the food you had stolen. And salt: a man could live on salt and potatoes for months. A watch was essential, not least because it could double as a compass.

The tips kept coming. All movement was to be done at night; no walking in daylight. It was vital to be invisible. If they could see you, they could shoot you. Don’t imagine you could run away; a bullet would always be faster.

Keep an eye on the time, hence the watch. Don’t be looking for a place to sleep when dawn breaks; make sure you’ve found a hiding place while it’s still dark.

But some of the advice belonged in the realm of psychology. Trust no one; share your plans with no one, including me. If your friends know nothing, they’ll have nothing to reveal when they’re tortured once you’re gone. That advice fitted with what Walter already knew for himself: that there were others eager to give up your secrets. The Politische Abteilung, the Political Department of the SS, had built up quite a network of informers among the prisoners, always listening out for talk of escape and revolt. (They were recruited by a threat from the SS that, if they refused to betray their fellow prisoners, their relatives back home would be murdered.) You never knew who you were really talking to. Best to say little.

Volkov had more wisdom to impart. Have no fear, even of the Germans. In Auschwitz, in their uniforms and with their guns, they look invincible. But each one of them, on his own, is just as small and fragile as any other human being. ‘I know they can die as quickly as anybody because I’ve killed enough of them.’ Above all: remember that the fight only starts when you’ve broken out of the camp. No euphoria, no elation. You cannot relax while you are on Nazi-ruled soil, not even for a second.

Walter did his best to take it all in, to remember it along with the mountain of numbers and dates that was piling ever higher in his mind. But there was one last bit of advice, for the escape itself.

The Nazis’ tracker dogs were trained to detect even the faintest odour of human life. If there was a single bead of sweat on your brow, they would find you. There was only one thing that defeated them.

Tobacco, soaked in petrol and then dried. And not just any tobacco. It had to be Soviet tobacco. Volkov must have seen the gleam of scepticism in Walter’s eye. ‘I’m not being patriotic,’ he said. ‘I just know machorka. It’s the only stuff that works.’

Volkov let Walter know that he had his own plans for escape and that he would not be sharing them with Walter or anyone else. He was happy to serve as the younger man’s teacher. But he would not be his partner.

For that role, there could only ever be one person. Someone whom Walter trusted wholly and who trusted him, someone whom he had known before he was in this other, darker universe, someone who, for that very reason, had an existence in Walter’s mind independent of Auschwitz: Fred Wetzler.

More than 600 Jewish men from Trnava had been sent to Auschwitz in 1942. By the spring of 1944, only two were still alive: Walter Rosenberg and Alfréd Wetzler. All the rest had either been swiftly murdered, like Fred’s brothers, or suffered the slow death in which Auschwitz-Birkenau specialised, worn down by disease, starvation and arbitrary violence, a group that almost certainly included Fred’s father. Fred and Walter had grown up with those 600 boys and men – as teachers and schoolmates, family friends and acquaintances, playground enemies and romantic rivals – and now every last one of them was gone. From the world they had both known, only Fred and Walter were left.

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by | 12 February 2026 · 3:06 am

Sugihara’s List and Tadeusz Romer

A few months ago, my wife found an interesting book in a Polish bookstore here. It is titled Lista Sugihary (Sugihara’s List), by Zofia Hartman, a graduate student from Krakow, the site of Schindler’s List, which is now well-known throughout Poland, while Chiune Sugihara remains almost entirely unknown. The Polish edition of her book was published in 2024 by Austeria Press. An English edition titled Sugihara’s List, published in 2025, can be ordered from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.

In looking for the English edition, I found a Youtube video of a book talk featuring Zofia Hartman in October 2025 at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City, sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. Hartman’s presentation was followed by a talk by Jolanta Nitoslawska, granddaughter of Polish diplomat Tadeusz Romer, Polish Ambassador in Japan 1937-1941. Romer and most of the refugees ended up in the stateless Shanghai Ghetto until Romer was included in the 1942 prisoner exchange off Africa via MS Gripsholm. He and most of his descendants ended up in Canada. Several others who attended the talk were descendants of the refugees.

Another diplomat who facilitated the exodus of so many Jewish refugees through the USSR to Japan was the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, who was director of the Philips factories there. Sugihara granted transit visas via Japan, while Zwartendijk granted official permission for the refugees to settle in Curaçao and the Dutch West Indies, if they should ever manage to get there.

One facet of Sugihara that I had not been aware of was his role as a spy for Japan, cooperating with Poland, sharing military intelligence among other areas. There was no Japanese community in Kaunas, where he served as consul. Japan and Poland both feared the USSR, and Japan was eager for evidence that the USSR might transfer troops west to fight the Germans, allowing Japan to transfer some of its troops from Manchuria to the South Pacific. Japan had helped earlier Poles exiled to Siberia and hosted a sizable number of Polish exiles in Karafuto (southern Sakhalin). Even though Poland declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, Poles and Japanese continued to cooperate.

In the summer of 2011, we visited the Sugihara Port of Humanity Museum in Tsuruga, Japan, and in the spring of 2025 we visited the Shanghai Ghetto Museum in China. I’m not sure we’ll get a chance to visit the Sugihara House Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania.

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by | 7 February 2026 · 4:18 am

Displaced Poles in World War 2

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Juliette Bretan on Polish refugees abroad during World War 2. Here are some excerpts.

Britain proved an early home for thousands of Poles following the invasion of Poland by Nazi and Soviet forces in September 1939. Polish civilians, and those in the armed forces, fled over the Carpathian mountains to Romania and Hungary, with around 90,000 military personnel known to have escaped by the end of September. Many of those in the armed forces reached France via then Yugoslavia and Italy, where new divisions were organised.

After France fell, thousands of Poles in the armed forces, and the Polish government-in-exile, transferred to London. In August 1940, an Anglo-Polish agreement allowed for the Polish land sea and air forces to be organised and employed under British command. Polish fighter and bomber squadrons were created, with Polish pilots destroying nearly 1000 enemy aircraft and dropping nearly 15,000 bombs and mines during the course of the war.

Persia

Following the Nazi invasion of Russia 1941, a treaty – the Sikorski-Mayski agreement – was signed between Poland and the Soviet Union, which included an ‘amnesty’ allowing for the release of many of the Poles who had been deported east. However, many Poles in labour camps were unaware of the development, and even those who were had only limited assistance from the Soviet authorities. Thousands of Poles, however, did manage to move south, joining Władysław Anders’s army as they moved through Russia and central Asia. In 1942, General Sikorski received permission to evacuate Poles into Persia (now Iran), across the Caspian Sea.

Africa

As Zdzisława Wójcik notes, more than half of the 37,000 Polish civilians who left the USSR with the Polish army found new homes in Africa, in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa. Some arrived by sea between 1942-43, and were housed in former POW camps or new settlements, whilst others were transported from refugee camps across the world:

The settlements […] operated their own businesses: farms, canteens, butcher shops, bakeries, and fabric–weaving, sewing and shoemaking shops […] the population in the Polish settlements had a specific demographic profile: about 47 percent were women, over 41.5 percent were teenagers and children, and only 11.5 percent were men. (Wójcik, in The Polish Deportees of World War II)

According to Wójcik, the Catholic Church played a prominent role in structuring Polish communities in Africa, although the number of priests varied by settlement. Support for the refugees was also provided by the Polish Red Cross and bureaus in Nairobi, with schools and orphanages established for children. However, the food available in these orphanages often left much to be desired, as Vala Lewicki – who was based in Uganda – remembers:

Meals were never elaborate affairs. The quick breakfast varied only between a plate of baked beans and a slice of bread with tea and coffee one day, and two slices of sparingly-buttered bread with cocoa or tea the next day. Occasionally we had powdered eggs which tasted like…powder. We had sandwiches for lunch, while dinner consisted of bean soup, a slice of meat and baked beans. Always baked beans! (Vala Lewicki, in The Polish Deportees of World War II)

New Zealand & Mexico

Just under 1000 Poles – 733 children and 105 adults – also found a new home in New Zealand during the war, after Prime Minister of the country accepted the refugees.

Arriving in Wellington in 1944, the refugees were settled in a Polish Children’s Camp in the town of Pahiatua, where Catholic services and Polish schooling and scouting trips were provided. Many of the Polish refugees also chose to settle in New Zealand after the war, finding ample opportunities for work as mining and logging industries expanded.

Meanwhile, a community of 1400 Poles also settled in Santa Rosa in Mexico, where they were welcomed by an orchestra playing the Polish national anthem. The settlement in Santa Rosa included living quarters and a school, where a Polish curriculum was used, as well as gardens and playing areas.

India

It is estimated that around 5000 Poles also found safe haven in India, after the wife of the Polish Consul General to Bombay, Kira Banasińska, petitioned the Maharaja of Nawanagar. The Maharaja had longstanding links to Poland – his father had been friends with pianist Ignacy Paderewski – and said that he was ‘trying to do whatever [he] can to save the children.’

Refugees settled in several camps in and around Bombay, as well as in a settlement built at the Maharaja’s summer palace. Polish culture remained an integral part of life, with Catholic teaching organised, Polish books provided, and the children also encouraged to give performances featuring traditional Polish dances and music. Sport was also encouraged: following the arrival of pre-war Lvovian footballer Antoni Maniak, a stadium and running track was built, and regular training sessions established to improve the children’s health and wellbeing. The Maharaja donated money to purchase sporting equipment – and the children proved themselves worthy foes against local teams.

The refugees dubbed the settlement camps ‘Little Poland’.

The Polish Red Cross supported the orphans who were being settled in India, although Ordonówna accompanied the first transport of children out of the Middle East, despite battling the symptoms of tuberculosis, which would later kill her.

Post-war resettlement

At the end of the war, many Poles were unable to return to their homeland. The British government recognised the contribution of Poles in the Allied forces, and established the Polish Resettlement Act, the first mass immigration legislation, in 1947, which offered British citizenship and support for hundreds of thousands of Poles. Following the act, transports were provided to enable their relatives to also reach the UK. Four thousand Poles arrived in overland transports from Italy by rail, whilst several ships carrying hundreds of displaced Poles arrived in ports in Southampton, Liverpool, Hull, London and Glasgow in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This included a transport of 66 Poles from Santa Rosa in Mexico, who travelled aboard the Empire Windrush in its historic passage to London in 1948; around 400 Poles – including many orphans – from Kilindini Mombasa in Kenya on the SS Scythia, which docked in Liverpool; and 600 displaced women, children and elderly Poles from Cape Town on the RMS Arundel Castle, which arrived in Southampton.

On board one transport from Lebanon in 1950, on the SS Oxfordshire, were also several unexpected passengers – two hives of bees, brought by one man in his 60s. The man was allowed to keep the bees, which he took to Haydon Park resettlement camp. By the early 1950s, over 100,000 Poles were registered in Great Britain. Among them were pre-war cultural figures, including Polish poet and songwriter Marian Hemar, and singers Adam Aston, Zofia Terné and Włada Majewska; as well as artists, including the Themersons and Stanisław Frenkiel. Many of these figures played a significant role in forming Polish communities in the UK post-war.

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Filed under Britain, France, Germany, India, Iran, Kenya, Mediterranean, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, South Africa, USSR, war

by | 1 February 2026 · 9:46 am

Bengal Famine, 1943

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Most Bengalis lived an extremely precarious existence. Some ten million were utterly dependent on agriculture, but of these more than half held less than 2 acres of land and many none at all. There was charity and relief but no social welfare; they had to fend for themselves. Through the first half of 1943 food prices had increased dramatically. … This was due in part to the shortages in Bengal but also to increased demand for the feeding of troops in India, as well as demand from around the world. It was artisans who suffered first, because as poverty increased so the money available for goods dried up. Then the shortages hit the wider Bengali population, many of whom left the country for the cities. By the time Tom Grounds was on leave in Calcutta, the city was bursting with the influx of impoverished families searching for food.

Yet while the cost of food was certainly a factor, the biggest problem now facing the authorities was how to get food to Bengal and urgently. The state had already been an importer of food for over a decade and most of it had come from Burma, now closed to India. The loss of Burma had been disastrous for Bengal’s fragile economy and the subsequent cyclone had made it catastrophic. Where else could it be sourced? North America and South America were the obvious places, but the amount needed was enormous and would have required a major diversion of shipping at a time when the demands on such seaborne transport had never been greater.

That August, Churchill was not prepared suddenly to release shipping to take food to Bengal; however draconian that may seem, far away in Britain the problems of the Bengalis seemed less pressing than the urgent need to maintain supplies at a crucial moment in the war. Britain and America were fighting in Sicily – an island that could be supplied effectively only by ship; they were about to invade mainland Italy, which also required an amphibious operation and supply; they were preparing for the invasion of north-west Europe; and they were fighting the Japanese throughout the Pacific. Was Churchill really expected to interrupt the war effort, and current operations, with millions of lives at stake in theatres of war around the world? Who was to say what effect such a diversion of shipping would have on the eventual length of the war, with its implications for further loss of life? In any case, ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat. Churchill was not to blame.

Not all India was facing famine – only Bengal and the north-east. One problem was that in 1935 the government had ceded considerable central power to the provinces, where the regional governments were all democratically elected. The previous year, 1942, these had all agreed to introduce trade barriers between one another. The central government of India now announced there should be free trade in grain, but plans to send relief to Bengal had been obstructed by local government officers, police and other officials who feared their own provinces risked suffering a similar fate to that of Bengal. Wavell, in one of his first acts as Viceroy-Designate, had forced the issue by threatening legal and even military action, and by August substantial amounts of grain had finally begun to arrive in Bengal. It was, however, too little too late to bring a swift end to the humanitarian disaster rising horrifically throughout the region. Relief kitchens hastily set up in Calcutta and elsewhere were simply not enough. With malnutrition came disease; those not dying of starvation were just as likely to succumb to typhus, malaria or cholera, and there were not enough hospitals or medical care to cope.

The famine had certainly been exacerbated by the war and by the fact that the Indian government had prioritized combatting the Japanese above all other matters. Yet the authorities, although slow to react, were certainly not immune to the horrors unfolding and, of course, while the tragedy of human suffering was truly appalling, the famine was yet another massive problem for the Allied command to overcome. It stretched already overstretched lines of supply, pushed the limited medical services to breaking point, affected food supplies to the troops, further sapped the morale of those who witnessed the starving, dying and dead throughout Bengal, and damaged the reputation of the British even more, and all at a time when there was a new Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief.

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Filed under Bangladesh, Britain, Burma, disease, food, Italy, Japan, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 17 January 2026 · 8:46 am

Polish Diaspora in France

My latest compilation from Culture.pl has an article on the Polish diaspora in France. Here are some excerpts:

When we think of the Polish diaspora, France is rarely the first place that comes to mind – often overshadowed by the UK, the US or Germany. Yet the Polish presence in France is older, more complex and more deeply woven into the country’s cultural fabric than most realise.

Through interviews with contemporary Polish migrants and archival research into historical communities, a layered story emerges – one as much about shared histories as it is about work, struggle and identity. Beginning with 19th-century exile, expanding through interwar labour migration, and continuing into today’s cosmopolitan realities, Poles have long helped shape the life of their adopted country. And France, in turn, has shaped them.

The earliest sustained Polish presence in France took shape in the 19th century, following the failed November Uprising of 1830-1831. Thousands of officers, intellectuals and activists fled the Russian-controlled partition and sought refuge in France, launching what became known as the ‘Great Emigration’. This wave of political exiles – over 5,000 by 1833 – formed one of the most enduring diasporic communities of the era. Unlike other groups who returned after political amnesties, most remained as long as Poland’s partitioned status endured.

One bold but ultimately unsuccessful plan – to form a Polish legion to fight in Portugal’s Liberal Wars in 1833 – was led by General Józef Bem and reflected the enduring ideal of transnational solidarity. It gave lasting currency to the phrase ‘For our freedom and yours’ (‘Za wolność naszą i waszą’), which became a defining expression of Poland’s internationalist military ethos throughout the 19th century.

Polish émigrés built schools, charitable institutions and political societies. Some were initially settled in places like Belle-Île-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany, while growing numbers made their way to Paris, which would soon become a central hub of Polish cultural and political life in exile.

…

Building on these early foundations, Paris evolved into what some would later call ‘Poland’s second capital’. Throughout the 19th century, the city became a vibrant centre where Polish political elites, artists and intellectuals gathered, united by a commitment to preserving national identity in exile.

Nowhere was this more visible than at the prestigious Collège de France, where Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz was appointed the first Chair of Slavic Literature in Western Europe in 1840. His lectures, a blend of cultural commentary and political advocacy, attracted wide audiences – including figures like George Sand – and reflected diasporic longing for unity and liberation. Though ultimately dismissed for the political intensity of his teachings, Mickiewicz remained an emblematic figure in Franco-Polish cultural relations.

That same spirit of cultural continuity shaped another enduring institution: the Polish School in Paris, founded in 1842 by General Józef Dwernicki and fellow émigrés. The school aimed to raise children in Polish language and tradition, even as they grew up on foreign soil. With Mickiewicz himself serving as vice-president of its council, the institution embodied how deeply intertwined education, culture and politics were in émigré life – a place where Polish identity could be preserved and transmitted across generations born in exile.

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Filed under economics, education, France, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, Portugal, Russia

by | 15 January 2026 · 10:12 pm

Cold, Cold Heart in Palau

I just discovered that I had missed the last two posts to Jim Geselbracht’s wonderfully nostalgic (for me) Palauan Music blog. I heard lots of Palauan renditions of Japanese enka and American country and western music during my earliest fieldwork in Micronesia in the 1970s. In his latest post, Jim looks at the antecedents of the Palauan song Aggie Chiang from the 1980s, whose melody goes back at least to 1951 recordings by Hank Williams, Dinah Washington, and Tony Bennett. Hank Williams may have adapted it in turn from You’ll Still Be in My Heart (1945) by “T” Texas Tyler and his Oklahoma Melody Boys. Jim posts links to all those renditions.

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Filed under Japan, language, Micronesia, migration, music, U.S.