Inside of Time by Ruth Gruber

Author:Ruth Gruber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

“WE WANT TO GO, WE MUST GO, WE WILL GO TO PALESTINE”

At 7 A.M. on Monday, February 4, 1946, I boarded the channel boat to sail for France. Arriving in Paris by 6:40 that night, I checked into the Hotel Rafael. Once settled, I telephoned my colleagues at the Post, who came right over and took me to a delicious French dinner and on to the Pigalle nightclub, where we stayed until one in the morning.

Paris had all the adrenaline of a great city. The air was luminous, the outdoor cafés full of coffee drinkers and observers, the Champs Elysees overflowing with strollers, the Bois de Boulogne smelling sweetly of the woods. Politically, Paris was seething again. The communists held the majority and were expected to capture more of the government in the next election. Everyone was debating the new constitution, which was soon to be voted upon by the people.

I attended a political review called the “Dix Heures” at a nightclub. The experience was disturbing because I realized how little the war had changed France. It could have been France of 1938. The country was recovering materially and physically, but anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, and minority oppression persisted. Populist movements were growing all over Europe, especially east of the Danube, but on the whole, Europe recovering from war was tired, sick, and disillusioned. As usual, the evil for which the war was fought lived after it.

On February 6,I left Paris with the committee. On the train ride I found that destruction lay everywhere along the route. London had been heavily damaged, with whole sections in rubble, but Paris had been an open city with no fighting. The only damage had been done in the last days before liberation, mostly by Frenchmen inside the city. The train plowed through the ravaged countryside on our way to Germany.

Occupied Germany was divided into four zones: American, British, French, and Russian. After London, the committee had split into subcommittees. One went to Berlin, another to Switzerland, another to the French zone, and the fourth, with which I traveled, went to the American zone in Frankfurt. Each group was to hold its own meetings and interviews, then they would all reassemble in Vienna.

Gerold Frank, of the Overseas News Agency, and I were the only reporters attached to any of the subcommittees. Ours was composed of Bartley Crum, Sir Frederick Leggett, and Richard Crossman. Crossman, however, was sick with pneumonia in England and did not join us until Vienna.

Standing at the train window, Bart confided his deep concern about the committee’s British members and about the British chairman, John Singleton.

“What exactly are you worried about?” I asked him.

“Their hostility and their anti-Semitism. They’re out to kill the Jewish Agency,” he said. “And creating the Jewish state is entirely out of the question for them. Our own James MacDonald is going to fight for the state, but he’s using it just as his bargaining point. He knows he won’t get it, but he’ll be able to get more concessions by holding out for the state.

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