Trucks For Lives

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28690, 13 September 1958, Page 3

Trucks For Lives

Advocate for the Dead. The Story of Joel Brand. By Alex Weissberg. Andre Deutsch. 255 pp. Index.

This is the story of a ghoulish Nazi exchange offer made to the Allies in the spring of 1944 through Joel Brand, leader of an underground organisation which specialised in smuggling Jews out of Europe. Briefly the story is this; In May, 1944, Joel Brand was approached by Adolf Eichmann, Himmler’s “Commissioner for Jewish affairs,” and informed that the Germans offered to sell one million Jews to the Allies in exchange for 10,000 army trucks —the Jews being otherwiss doomed to destruction in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where more than half a million had already been done to death. Germany was short of trucks, which were of course essential military equipment, but if the deal was made, the Nazis said that they would use the trucks “only on the Eastern front,” i.e.» only against the Russians. Sceptical at first, Brand became convinced that the fantastic offer was genuine, and might, in some modified form, be negotiated. In any ca§e Brand extracted a promise that the annihilation of the Jews would be temporarily suspended while he made his negotiations; and even if the negotiations failed, he felt that he would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives even for the time being. * He therefore undertook the negotiations, and leaving his wife and family in Hungary as hostages, was flown to Istanbul. Here he made contact with the Jewish Agency, but was received with indecision and pessimism. Nevertheless he went on to Palestine to get in touch with the British, who took him into /‘protective custody,” and kept him there for nearly a year while the proposal was given consideration. The British regarded the whole thing as a typical bit of Nazi intrigue involving the betrayal of the Russians, and in the end declined to go on with it. At length Joel Brand had to return to Hungary to report the failure of the proposal; and before the war ended the . Nazis resumed the mass extermination of the Jews.

The story is told throughout in \ the first person, and makes amazing reading—like a mixture of thriller and nightmare. It is undoubtedly all true. Brand tells it straightforwardly, though throughout he has “a chip on his shoulder”—and is obviously still resentful of the attitude of both the Allies and the Jewish Agency officials, without considering the military expediency or feasibility of the scheme. The large number of different Jewish and Nazi names and personalities mentioned in the narrative is sometimes confusing to the general reader, but the story as a whole is clearly’ told, and holds attention throughout.