This was a fascinating man who actually predicted the Holocaust. A Protestant Dutchman who immigrated to Canada at age 16, he was very pro-Jewish. Here is an excerpt from his memoirs relating to a trip he took to Warsaw in 1927, where he talks about how the Poles were all too eager to rid themselves of the Jews:
For five days I walked around the Warsaw ghetto, climbed the stairs of tenement houses, spoke to men, women and children; everywhere the same story: they were all poverty-stricken, all the Jews in the sixty or seventy city blocks, which made up the ghetto; three hundred thousand pauperized Jews. It was the same all over Poland, in the towns and villages, masses of ruined middle class people. The misery of the three million Polish Jews beggared all description. And why was this? Why this ruination and squalor? Was all this accidental or unavoidable?
So long as Poland was under the Tsar, Jews constituted a class of traders, merchants, cattle dealers, shop and tavern keepers, teachers and foresters; in short they were the middle-men. With the glorious resurrection of the Polish state, the Poles became the masters and started to build a middle class of their own, entirely composed of non-Jewish
citizens. The new middle class was built, unavoidably -- I was quite frankly told in official places and government circles -- on the systematic and calculated ruination of the Jewish population. There was no alternative. It was a question of life and death for the new Poland to destroy the old middle class or get rid of it. There were three million Jews too many in the country. Ultimately they would have to perish or be evacuated, go elsewhere, anywhere. The Polish authorities did not care where they went. In Poland they were unwanted.
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