Awkward Exodus

In Washington last week top UNRRA officials wondered what to do about General Sir Frederick Morgan. They had asked him to resign his post as UNRRA director in Germany after he had charged Polish Jews with planning to flee Europe (TIME, Jan. 14). The General had ignored their demands, and that was awkward.

More awkward was the fact that the charge came close to truth. In Manhattan the pro-Zionist American League for a Free Palestine ran "so what" newspaper advertisements, arguing that if there was no such plan there should be one.

Most awkward was the existence of the terror-stricken Jews themselves. Nightmares of the Hitlerian slaughter drove them on. In Poland sporadic anti-Jewish outbursts sped them. They filtered into the Allied-occupied zones of Germany.

Few were the well-fed, well-dressed Jews whom General Morgan had described. Most were in tatters, without shoes, with festering sores and wounds, road-weary and tired unto death.

There was Abraham Schuster of Lodz. He told reporters: "My wife and child were taken and killed by the Nazis. I hid out during the war in the woods and worked with the partisans. . . . But when the war ended even some of the comrades with whom I fought threatened me because I was a Jew."

Promised Land. These miserable people, and most of the remaining 1,500,000 Jews in Europe, want to go to Palestine. A troubled Anglo-American committee. sitting in the ornate old State Department hearing room at Washington, is now hearing the case for such an exodus.

Last week the committee heard Jewish leaders argue for unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine, an occasional Arab argue against it.* Star witness was scientifically precise, politically fuzzy Dr. Albert Einstein. Gently he said that British policies had prevented Jewish-Arab collaboration. Smiling, he rejected the suggestion that he was anti-British. "The Irish," said he, "have suffered a long time under your rule. I have not."

Many doubted that immigration, with the certain prospect of clashes with the Arabs, would help Europe's fearful Jews. More thought that persuading Jews they could still live in Europe made better sense. This might be UNO's first big job.

*The Iraq Parliament last week received an ironic motion for the establishment of an Arab national home--in California.

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