Harrison’s report had an immediate effect on Truman, and on the organization of the D.P. One Jewish chaplain wrote in June, 1945, “Did our leaders plan on the basis of the fact that no Jews would be alive?” Those who lived faced a second, bitter abandonment. In the brief period between the liberation and Harrison’s arrival, more than thirteen thousand former prisoners at Belsen died, as typhus continued to ravage the camp. Harrison took a different view, writing, in a report to President Truman, that “the first and plainest need of these people is a recognition of their actual status and by this I mean their status as Jews.” Many had barely survived death marches as the Nazis retreated. Instead, displaced persons were to be sorted out on what General Dwight D. Eisenhower described as a “nationality basis,” which meant that a Polish Jew who had survived the death camps might be left to share quarters with someone who had guarded a camp in Poland. The week that Harrison met with Rosensaft, a senior British official said that giving targeted support to Jewish survivors would be “unfair to the many non-Jews who have suffered on account of their clandestine and other activities in the Allied cause”-the dismissive “All lives matter” of the postwar days. Indeed, Allied officials argued that to do so would constitute religious discrimination. As David Nasaw recounts in “ The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War” (Penguin Press), Allied authorities initially maintained that it was wrong to differentiate Jews from other displaced people on the basis of their experience as Jews. There were plenty of people in Washington and London who saw no need for Harrison to investigate at all, or even to make any “particular reference” to Jews. And to think I was told, quite officially, there was no need of my visiting Belsen.” “Make effort to have doors of P”-Palestine-“& other countries open.” Listening to him and others, Harrison wrote, “Seldom have I been so depressed. . . . “Don’t leave us in this bloody region,” the notes continued. People outside E too quiet about what has happened-nobody seems concerned. Can’t go back: Anti-S, parents killed-Land soaked with Jewish blood.ģ. Peace & quiet-live out remaining years.Ģ.
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