Famous Romanian Quotes

While the Austrian crown was dissolving like jelly in your fingers, everyone wanted Swiss francs and American dollars, and large numbers of foreigners exploited the economic situation to feed on the twitching corpse of the old Austrian currency. Austria was ‘discovered’, and became disastrously popular with foreign visitors in a parody of the society season. All the hotels in Vienna were crammed full with these vultures; they would buy anything, from toothbrushes to country estates; they cleared out private collections of antiquities and the antique dealers’ shops before the owners realised how badly they had been robbed and cheated in their time of need. Hotel receptionists from Switzerland and Dutch shorthand typists stayed in the princely apartments of the Ringstrasse hotels. Incredible as it may seem, I can vouch for it that for a long time the famous, de luxe Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg was entirely booked by unemployed members of the English proletariat, who could live here more cheaply than in their slums at home, thanks to the generous unemployment benefit they received. Anything that was not nailed down disappeared. Word gradually spread of the cheap living and low prices in Austria. Greedy visitors came from further and further afield, from Sweden, from France, and you heard more Italian, French, Turkish and Romanian than German spoken in the streets of the city centre of Vienna.

On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.