The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (39 page)

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NNRA’S HUMANITARIAN CAMPAIGN to rescue

Europe’s war victims commenced in a most un- promising location: a series of fly-blown refu-

gee camps near Suez, Egypt. Here, on April 3, 1944, UNRRA’s Balkan Mission, still based in Cairo, took over command of a few bedraggled camps that the British had set up to shelter Greeks, Yugoslavs, and assorted

other refugees from the German and Italian invasions of southeastern Europe. In this “city of the sands,” UN- RRA relief workers helped look after some 50,000 refu- gees, relying mainly on goods and supplies donated by the Cairo Council of Voluntary Societies, there being too few military stores to go around. The plan was that as soon as the military situation allowed, these refu- gees would be repatriated and UNRRA staff would be transferred to the Balkans. In the meantime, however, zealous young relief workers sat around in Cairo doing very little, as the camps had long since settled into a routine and were run by the refugees themselves. One young American wrote home that she was “ashamed to have nothing to report,” and had “got pretty discour- aged with the seeming inefficiency of the headquarters at Cairo.”
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Perhaps most galling to UNRRA staff was that their aid was not always welcome. In the Tolumbat camp, outside of Cairo, over 2,000 Yugoslavs had been encamped for almost three years; all but 154 of these were women, and they ran the camp committee. The camp operated smoothly, though in the eyes of UNRRA workers, the camp leaders were too rigid politically and allowed the 1,200 children far too little play time, contributing to their aggressive behavior. Yet when UN- RRA workers proposed educational initiatives, sports, games, or concerts, they often were met with “open ex- pressions of resentment.” “Advice tends to be regarded

as criticism,” complained one relief worker.
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This was a foreshadowing of things to come: UNRRA staff across Europe would soon find that refugees, especially when gathered in national groupings, tended to guard their autonomy jealously and to view relief workers as in- terfering do-gooders with insufficient respect for the struggles and sacrifices their peoples had made in the war.

On April 7, 1945, a steamer pulled out of Port Said bound for the island of Chios, carrying on board five hundred Greek refugees, mostly women, children, and old men, some of whom had been living in camps for three years. This was the first wave of repatriations that eventually carried thousands of Greeks out of Middle East camps toward home. UNRRA had prepared these refugees with an astonishing bounty of supplies: each returning refugee received four blankets, a mattress, ten days’ dry rations, one month’s medical supplies, and outfits of clothing. Each family was given utensils and cooking equipment, and the ship carried a repatriation team to guide the group back to their island. “As the ship stood ready to pull out,” one observer recalled, “color- ful refugees lined the decks waving, cheering, lustily singing Greek patriotic songs, calling excited farewells to friends who will follow later.”
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This was a promising beginning, but these relief workers, after the relative

calm and order of the Egyptian camps, were not en- tirely prepared for what awaited them.

“Greece—where malnutrition among children is nor- mal, where 85% of the country is malarious [sic] and where economic prostration has followed war and enemy occupations—is the testing ground today of UNRRA, the United Nations’ giant program to abol- ish want and restore economic stability to a battle- ravaged world.” That is how the Associated Press bu-

reau chief William B. King set the stage in his April 13, 1945, cable from Athens, raising the stakes for UNRRA to very high levels. King was right: in the early spring of 1945, Greece would be UNRRA’s first and perhaps hardest test. The conditions in liberated Greece that confronted UNRRA were shocking and demoraliz- ing. The country, poor before the war, had been rav- aged by the German occupation. The German-Italian invasion in April 1941 disrupted trade and shipping into the country, and German soldiers systematically plundered the country. Within months of the invasion, Greece faced a famine that by 1943 left about 250,000 people dead from starvation.
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Nearly 1,700 villages had been burned and left uninhabited. Malaria, tuberculo- sis, typhus, and venereal disease as well as effects of long-term malnutrition were widespread. The country had been dependent upon imports for 30 percent of its food; yet during the war, domestic production of food fell by half, and now the required seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and draft animals were unavailable. Greece once again faced imminent famine conditions. The war caused massive disruption to Greece’s infrastructure. The port at Piraeus, which handled 60 percent of the country’s prewar imports, was badly damaged. Three- quarters of the country’s once-proud merchant fleet was gone. Coastal transport, so vital in a maritime na- tion, had been wrecked. Greece’s 1,660 miles of railway

lines and 7,700 miles of roads were almost entirely in ruins, the result both of deliberate German scorched- earth policy and of resistance attacks; over 1,000 bridg- es too had been blown up. The nation’s finances were in a shambles and the country had no hope of paying for vital imports or even getting them to the people once they arrived. As a nation-state, Greece had virtually ceased to function.
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UNRRA opened its Athens-based mission on October 23, 1944, ten days after the withdrawal of the German forces and the entry of British troops into the capital. But in December, UNRRA found itself caught up in a crisis that would shape the future of Greece for years to come, and in important ways would undermine the very mission of UNRRA itself. The powerful Communist resistance forces, called the National People’s Libera- tion Army (ELAS), which had done so much to help de- feat German rule in Greece, fell into conflict with the government-in-exile, which had been sheltered un- der British protection in Cairo. King George II and his prime minister George Papandreou had strong British support; after all, Winston Churchill’s “percentages” agreement with Stalin had given Churchill reason to think that Britain could expect to have its way in Greece without Communist interference. The Soviets did in fact stay out of Greek affairs, but the powerful, armed,

and battle-tested Communist resistance fought openly with the royalist and British-backed forces for control of the country. In December, fighting broke out in Ath- ens and the British called in reinforcements from Italy to take control of the capital. Churchill was adamant that Britain retain control of Greece. He ordered the commander of British troops there, General Ronald Scobie, “to fire at any armed male in Athens who assails the British authority or Greek authority with which we are working…. Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city.” The British fought for six weeks to regain control of the city from ELAS, and in February the British, the Greek government, and ELAS forces agreed to an uneasy truce. Still, Churchill’s decision to use force against one of the biggest and most effective anti- German resistance forces in Europe earned him sharp condemnation in much of the world press.
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This brief period of fighting in Athens placed UNRRA per- sonnel in a war zone, and they were repeatedly fired upon by both sides while trying to deliver goods to hos- pitals and schools, despite waving Red Cross signals and white flags.
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In mid-December, UNRRA recalled all its personnel in Greece back to Cairo, and returned only after the British had restored order in a now dev- astated capital city. Despite this civil strife, UNRRA managed to deliver to Greece 200,000 tons of food and 1,250 tons of clothing, including 34,000 blankets, be-

tween October 1944 and March 1945.
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Because of the gravity of the looming humanitarian cri- sis, the Greek government was willing to accept a very large UNRRA role in the country, one that went well beyond the delivery of relief. UNRRA’s Greek Mission grew into something approaching a parallel govern- ment. UNRRA staff helped govern the country, writing laws, planning import programs, running and staffing the ports, operating hospitals and clinics, and deploy- ing truck fleets and medical teams across the country. By October 1945, more than 289 UNRRA staff, mostly Britons and Americans, were serving in Greece, as- sisted by 1,059 local employees and 300 personnel from voluntary relief societies. They had achieved de- liveries of food totaling 100,000 tons per month, had managed to import 4,500 trucks and 2,253 tractors, and more than 5,000 draft animals. UNRRA helped reopen two key rail lines, one from Salonika to Istanbul, the other Athens to Patras, thus opening up the interior of the country; it sent 65,000 children to summer camp, started an emergency feeding program for infants and pregnant mothers, and deployed eight DDT-spraying airplanes across the country. By the fall, although the country was still in peril, UNRRA’s efforts had started to make headway.
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Yet from the ground-level view, the picture was still deeply depressing. Isabel Hunter, a British observer on an UNRRA team, made a tour in April and May 1945 of northeastern Greece, which had endured a brutal Bul- garian occupation. Starting in Salonika, she visited an overcrowded and understaffed hospital, then went to see the Jewish cemetery, where the tombs had been ripped out of the ground by the Germans and used for tiling and road paving. In Sérrai and Drama, towns to the east of Salonika, she heard detailed descriptions of Bulgarian despoliations and atrocities, including a case in which Bulgarian soldiers played football with the head of one of their Greek victims. “ We were inclined to doubt the authenticity of such a statement,” she wrote in her report, “but when we were shown a snapshot of Bulgarian officers sitting with two heads placed in the foreground we were disgusted and convinced.” North of Drama, on the road to Kato Nevrokopion, they saw deserted villages with doors and windows gone, now occupied by rail-thin, frightened refugees. Amid this squalor, Hunter was heartened to see ships offload- ing goods in the harbor of Kaválla, and truckloads of rations and milk delivered to outlying villages. As yet, there had been no Greek government presence in the area at all: what relief there was had come from UN- RRA and British military supplies. In Patras, the coastal city in western Greece, the American Nancy Hayward,

along with three other UNRRA workers, set up a cloth- ing distribution program for the whole Patras region, which included over 750,000 people. They were hope- lessly overworked, and not until a ten-person British team from the YWCA arrived in their own trucks did the burden ease a bit. Yet the lack of supplies caused con- stant frustration. The luxurious packages given to the returning refugees from Cairo were a thing of the past: now everything was running short, especially clothing, shoes, and food.
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To outside observers, UNRRA appeared to be failing in Greece. The New York Times ran a story in late May headlined “ UNRRA in Greece Draws Criticism,” which said that to date, the agency had “accomplished little apparent good” and had “fallen far short of hopes.” The chief defense given by the Greek Mission director, Buell Maben, was that the demand was great, and that Greece itself faced terrific road and transport difficul- ties. Furthermore, the absence of a stable Greek gov- ernment meant that aid, once delivered by UNRRA to ports, was often not delivered promptly, and Greek of- ficials were selling much of the foodstuffs at high pric- es rather than distributing it freely.
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Herbert Lehman, UNRRA’s director, seems to have felt some of this criti- cism was justified. In July he traveled to Europe for a series of field trips and meetings, and arrived in Greece

on the 16th to inspect the UNRRA mission. In Salonika, he found the usual troubles: poor hospital facilities, overcrowding, refugees clothed in rags. One hospital for orphans was, he wrote in his diary, “extremely dis- tressing.” It was housed in a former Jewish hospital, and now had no trained nurses. “ The little ones, all under a year, were a wretched lot. Most of their legs were no larger than my thumb and their color was ter- rible and the mortality was staggering. One baby died right in front of me.” Back in Athens, he told the mis- sion staff that while he understood the difficulties they faced, there was criticism back in the United States, and any inefficiency in the field would only fuel the flames. Tractors sitting on quay-sides, warehouses with cloth- ing in them, foods not being delivered: such things were unacceptable, and he urged the staff to make the best of the supplies they had.
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