“UNDERSTANDABLE”

Evening Star, Issue 22514, 5 December 1936, Page 24

“UNDERSTANDABLE”

AH ENGLISHMAN ON GERMAN ANTI-SEMITISM Unusual views on Germany’s antiSemitism and on her neighbour Poland are expressed by Beverley Nicols, writing in an English newspaper. When you cross the frontier from Germany‘into Poland you go back 200 years, he writes. In comfort, in education, in morality. . These frontier stations are illuminating lessons in international conditions. The offices on the German side are spotlessly clean. On the Polish side they are so dirty that one has to stand in the open doorway to breathe. On. the German side your business is accomplished in a couple of minutes by a man with charming manners. On the Polish side you may have to wait an hour, and you are sworn at. On the German side you look out on to well-tilled fields, with broad, smooth roads running through them. On the Polish side there is desolation and neglect, and the roads . . . they don’t, exist. For hundreds of miles it is impossible to travel at more than 15 miles an hour. A word about these roads. Roads are a very good index of a country’s prosperity and self-respect. The new German roads are so wonderful that they make the best by-pass in Britain look like a medieval village street. “But,” cries the anti-German, “all those roads are built with a purely military purpose, for the conduct of troops!’’ That is a he. Becayse the only bad roads in Germany which I encountered were those which led to the Dutch and Belgian frontiers. The Germans have not yet begun to think of building new roads in this direction. They have built them, instead, through the great industrial areas and as a link between the chief beauty spots. So when you hear anybody, in Parliament, or out, repeating that lie, you can contradict it.

To return to Poland, I went there because I wanted to see, for myself, the famous Polish Corridor. To most people it is merely a name. They do not realise that it is a vast wedge of land that was thrust into the heart of Germany by the iniquitous Treaty of Versailles. They do not realise that the “ corridor ” is degenerating, year by year, going back agriculturally, _ industrially, morally. That a great river, like the Vistula, is being allowed by the Poles to silt up till it may be useless one day. That the squalor of the East is infecting great territories which, under Germany, used to be clean and prosperous. WARSAW GHETTO. Another reason why I went to Poland was that I wanted to see for myself the principal ghetto of Europe, which is in Warsaw. There are about four million Jews in and their headquarters are in Warsaw. And as this was by far the most impressive sight I saw in Poland we will visit it straight away. No sight that I have ever seen on earth filled me with more profound melancholy that the ghetto of Warsaw. I have seem the slums of Glasgow, the squalor of native Arabian settlements, the filthiest quarters of Marseilles, the Bowery on a rainy dawn in winter. Thev were garden cities compared with the ghetto. The houses are tali, mostly wooden, encrusted with dirt. Prom the open windows comes a smell of centuries of dirt. The gutters and the alleys swarm with men, women, and children, so degraded by poverty and disease and oppression that it is difficult to recognise them as human beings. You feel it would be safer to offer your life to a cage of wild animals than to such people. Now ... if anybody is sufficiently stupid as to see evidences of antiSemitism in those paragraphs, he will kindly think twice before committing his stupidity to paper. There is nothing anti-Semitic in the truth. Besides, I did not feel hatred for them .. . only a profound pity. If I had been a better Christian I should have felt less physical disgust, I suppose. As it was, I felt that nothing short of a dictatorship, enforced hygiene, and a radical system of education, coupled with a great deal of dynamite to blow up these plague-spots would ever solve the Jewish problem in Poland. And now, at last, you may be able not to approve (for I violently disapprove of it), but at least to understand, the anti-Semitic movement in Germany, ' For it was the inhabitants of these Polish ghettos who, during the inflation of the pre-Hitler regime, when Germany was at its lowest ebb, swarmed into Germany, changed a handful of Polish gold into millions of German marks, and bought up vast estates, businesses, and farms all over Germany. It was these people, against whom the average British Jew would bolt and bar his doors, would shrink in horror, who got a stranglehold on German life. THE TRUTH. That is the truth, and I repeat, if truth is anti-Semitic, I am antiSemitic. And if it had happened in Britain, tens of thousands of native British Jews would have been antiSemitic, too. If you can imagine the scum of the slums of Madrid running Britain you get a fair parallel. And it is from this fact that lias arisen all the excesses, all the tragedies, and all the deplorable propaganda, which treats a Jewish genius and a Jewish gangster as if they were one and the same person. I wish that I had more time to tell you about Germany’s neighbours, hut we shall have to leave it till some other date. I should have liked, for instance, to speak of Czechoslovakia, which was my next point of call, because this country contains five million Germans who are fully determined at the earliest possible opportunity to he included in the boundaries of the Reich. And if I were in the mood for prophesying, I would bet that they will be so included before you and I are much older, and without a war.