Lost Souls by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Israel’s counterattack on Hamas dragged UNRWA into the headlines. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s mission in Gaza is to assist the material needs of Palestinians; it has been the target of Israeli bombs as well as accusations of harboring Hamas members among its staff. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Lost Souls is a reminder that UNRWA was preceded by UNRAA and other agencies formed in light of World War II. Their purpose was to provide aid to at least one million Europeans displaced by that war, including Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps. Like today’s UNRWA, the old UNRAA was dogged by political controversy, albeit its staff never worked under bombardment but operated in sometimes uncomfortable tandem with the Allied military occupation of Central Europe.
The logistics of caring for one million Poles, Lithuanians, Romanians, Germans and others displaced either by the Nazis or the advancing Soviet army was challenging but straightforward. But UNRAA was also faced with Soviet leader Josef Stalin who demanded the return of “his people.” According to him, anyone living within the Soviet Union’s 1941 border was a Soviet citizen and needed to be handed back. Likewise, citizens of Poland and other Eastern European nations occupied by the Soviets as the war ended. Problem was, most of the refugees did not want to return to Soviet captivity.
Reviewing records including Soviet archives, Fitzgerald untangles the intra-agency as well as the international conflicts, which not only included the birth pangs of the Cold War but tension between ethnic groups in UNRAA camps and Britain’s policy of trying to prevent Jewish migration to Palestine. She writes with a personal touch. Fitzgerald’s late husband had fled with parents from Latvia and passed through a displaced persons camp before being resettled. She draws on his diaries for insight.
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Fitzpatrick notes that most of the people under UNRAA’s care went on to the U.S., Canada, Israel or Australia, while Palestinian refugees and their descendants from the 1948 founding of Israel remain displaced “with no solution to their plight in view after more than seventy years.”
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