Aftermath Of War

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28536, 15 March 1958, Page 3

Aftermath Of War

But Some There Be. Bv A. J. Forrest. Robert Hale. 252 pp. In the Birthday Honours List of June 13, 1957, Sue Ryder—•bout whose work this book is written—was awarded the 0.8. E. ftfi her services to displaced and Stateless peoples in Western Germany. For 13 years she has placed herself at the service of these people, visiting them in camp, hospital and prison, wherever it is their misfortune to be, and doing all in her power to assist them on the way to rehabilitation. In the course of her ministrations •he covers in the aggregate more than 50,000 miles a year. The displaced persons’ camps—bleak, dreary, cheerless places that they are—receive careful description in this book which narrates also the *ad case histories of some of their inmates, many of them survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps. Some 222,000 persons are still stranded in these camps which some German authorities, according to this book, consider likely to go on existing until 1968. Some years ago Sue Ryder launched the Forgotten Allies’ Friendship Fund, and her own 500-year-old home at Cavendish in Surrey she has placed at the disposal of displaced persons, arranging for batches of them to come and holiday there from time to time. One kind of work that calls for tireless effort on her Part is the securing of passports for Stateless men and women, while another of her many goodwill activities has been the establishing and running of small homes in Western Germany where, to quote the' author, ‘homeless boys of alien nationalities can be accommodated, fed, clothed, properly documented, and provided with satisfying work.” For the fine humanitarian work describes, this book will have 8 wide appeal. It should be added, however, that it contains stories of brutality that will repel *he more sensitive reader, and at times the narrative is given •n anti-German twist. In suggestas he does in more than one Place, that a stigma of shame attaches to German nationals who hved in districts where concentration camps were located, the author surely forgets to bear in fhuid that these very people went as much in fear of the Gestapo as did the camp internees. As •vidence of this there is the case the villager of Esterwegen. Cj ted on page 132 of this book. Where it is said of him that he Was “seized by the Gestapo and “ u ng into prison because out of sympathy he had fed some starv*nZ internees.” The book con•aib* a number of plates illustrative of the good work being <*ried out by Sue Ryder.