THE JEWS' SPIRITUAL HOME
Sul,—Mr. Harold Nicolson, in 'tour issue of the 16th, recounts that Jewish refugees in this country scolded him " because our General Staff is not always as efficient as General Haider, or because our pro- paganda lacks the offensive spirit of Dr. Goebbels," and concludes from this that " their spiritual home" are " the streets that radiate from the Gedaechtniskirche at Berlin." With due respect to Mr. Nicolson, I beg to suggest that this conclusion is unwarranted. It is only human that, as an Englishman, he should resent English institutions being criticised by foreigners, no matter whether their criticisms are to the point or not. I trust that as a rule refugees are tactful enough not to hurt their hosts' feelings in this way. I certainly learnt my lesson when for a moment I thought that my battle-dress and the badge of ," a famous English county regiment " entitled me to express views of my own on controversial subjects of this kind. Last May, in a circle of friends, I was putting forward (in what I thought a tactful manner) certain points from an article in The Times on the lessons of the campaign in Crete, only to be met by the retort that, now that I had become a British subject, I had better drop my pro-German prejudices. To read an account of superior organisation in a leading English newspaper was one thing, to hear it from a recently naturalised refugee was another. Would Mr. Nicolson consider a man as " Kremlin- minded " because he held that the Russian policy of " scorched earth " compared favourably with our own failure to render the island of Penang useless to the enemy before abandoning it to him?—Yours
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