... And the Policeman Smiled Read Online Free PDF Page A

though it is, this achievement fell a long way short of the CBF target. Finance was undoubtedly a problem. Education and training, travel, accommodation in Palestine, not to mention the weary process of documentation, were all a heavy draw on funds. Optimistic expectations of somehow tapping into Jewish capital in Germany were consistently disappointed, but while hope of gaining this obvious source of income remained it was bound to inhibit other efforts to raise funds.
    On the administrative side the main problems centred on Jerusalem, where the British authorities were made nervous by the influx of young idealistic workers eager to make the Jewish National Home an early reality. A sharp brake was put on the further release of immigration papers. Nonetheless, violence against Jewish settlers increased, leading to fears of an Arab uprising which the administration would be unable to contain.
    As ever in these situations, the British government responded by setting up a royal commission to inquire into the causes of theunrest and to suggest remedies. Earl Peel, who was given the unenviable task of leading the team of inquiry, reported back in July 1937, having concluded that ‘the policy of conciliation, carried to its furthest limits, has failed’. His solution was to partition the country.
    The principle was welcome to Zionists but they were less keen on the practicality as envisaged by Peel, allowing them a tiny area albeit with the most fertile land, but already occupied by a hostile Arab population. Nor was there much enthusiasm for the proposed limitation on immigration to 12,000 a year for five years – an arbitrary attempt to keep some sort of ethnic balance.
    The government blew hot and cold on the proposals which encouraged Arab nationalists to further acts of terrorism and increased Jewish distrust of the mandatory power. The only firm decision was to clamp down on immigration – a self-defeating policy which simply led to a sharp increase in the number of illegal immigrants.
    Then in March 1938, the Nazis marched into Vienna. They brought with them the full panoply of anti-Jewish laws and a practised bureaucracy to enforce them. The environment was conducive to their work. In comparison with Germany, anti-Semitism in Austria had a head start. From the days of the Empire, the clash of nationalist minorities – Czechs, Poles, Croats, Slovenes and Serbs – had left the Jews isolated; distrusted on all sides. It was in Vienna that the young Hitler had learned to engage in the oratory of hate.
    For 200,000 Austrian Jews and other non-Aryans, every semblance of ordinary life disappeared as if by some appalling wizardry.
    â€˜It is impossible for you to imagine,’ wrote G. E. R. Gedge, the Central European correspondent of
The Times
, ‘what it means for one-sixth of the population of Vienna to be made pariahs overnight, deprived of all civil rights, including the right to retain property large or small, the right to be employed or to give employment, to exercise a profession, to enter restaurants, cafes, bathing beaches, baths or public parks, to be faced daily and hourly, without hope of relief, with the foulest insults which ingenious and vicious minds can devise, to be liable always to be turned overnight out of house and home, and at any hour of every day and every night to arrest without the pretence of a charge or hope of a definite sentence,however heavy – and with all this to find every country in the world selfishly closing its frontiers to you when, after being plundered of your last farthing, you seek to escape.’
    Norman Bentwich was one of the first into Vienna after the Nazi takeover. Reporting home on a ‘position more catastrophic even than we had judged’, he calculated:
    The number of persons who have to be fed in the communal soup kitchens has risen to about 25,000 a day. It should be larger, because 40,000 are in great need; but they have not the money