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Britain and U.S. Charged with Failure to Meet Responsibility to Displaced Persons

August 2, 1945
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The British and American governments are failing in their duty to the survivors of Nazi terror, a London News Chronicle correspondent writes today, describing the plight of the inmates of the camps in Germany.

An atmosphere of “imprisonment, of being unwanted and unloved is still there,” he says. “A maze of red tape stronger than barbed wire is encircling the camps. It is not known whether there is a deliberate policy to make things sufficiently unpleasant so that the internees will be ready to go anywhere, rather than remain, but that is certainly the feeling of many of the internees as well as competent social workers to whom I have talked.”

In an editorial commenting on the dispatch, the paper says that what happens to those people is the responsibility of the Allies. Common humanity and justice, it adds, demands that responsibility should not be shelved. The Chronicle says that future relations with liberated Europe will depend on a sympathetic, constructive attitude toward these internees.

Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, who returned here yesterday after a week’s tour of camps in Germany, said today that among the non-repatriable persons are 100,000 Jews, half of whom are in the American zone. This problem, he declared, must be approached not as a nuisence, but as a challenge of human rehabilitation. Be pointed out that among the displaced Jews are many from countries like Poland where anti-Semitism flourished before the war and was intensified during the Nazi occupation. These people, Dr. Goldstein said, will find it difficult and, in many cases, dangerous to return home.

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