Pierre van Paassen

Pierre van Paassen (February 7, 1895 - January 8, 1968) was a Dutch - Canadian - American journalist, writer, and Unitarian minister. He was born in Gorinchem , The Netherlands , then emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1914.¹ After entering a seminary, he served as a missionary to Ruthenian immigrants in the Alberta hinterland, where he helped with medical work. In 1917 he left theological school to serve with the Canadian army in France in World War I as an infantryman and sapper . In 1921 he became a journalist with the Toronto Globe , and a year later moved to the U.S. and began writing a syndicated column for the Atlanta Journal Constitution . From 1924 to 1931, Van Paassen worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Evening World , based in Paris. After the World folded, he became a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star . Van Paassen spoke Dutch, French, English, and some Ruthenian (a language similar enough to Ukrainian that it allowed him to converse passably with many Russians), and later learned Hebrew. In addition to his popular storytelling in the frequently ephemeral human interest stories that the papers principally hired him to write, his many other personal accounts from the field brought home to American readers the often harsh results of European internal turmoil and of the foreign adventures of the interwar European colonial powers.² He gained fame reporting on the conflicts among Arabs, British, Jews and French in the Middle East, as well as on the on-going African slave trade and colonial problems in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. He reported on Mussolini 's Italo-Ethiopian War , the Spanish Civil War and other European and colonial conflicts. From Van Paassen's earliest travels to Palestine in 1925, he saw and developed a regard for the work of the early Jewish immigrants to improve the area's agriculture and industry. Later he became one of the first non-Jews in America to write favorably about the campaign to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, and remained a Zionist supporter afterwards. But fundamentally, Van Paassen was a Christian Democratic Socialist concerned, as he put it in his autobiographical Days of Our Years , with the enduring struggle for justice for ordinary individuals. He was a staunch opponent of fascism in Italy, Germany and France from the 1920s, reinforced by the ten days he spent as a prisoner in the Dachau Concentration Camp in late March 1933. His activities as a correspondent brought "expulsion from France by Pierre Laval , from Germany by Joseph Goebbels and from Eritrea by Count Ciano ." In 1933 Van Paassen traveled incognito to the Dome of the Rock , a famous Islamic shrine in Jerusalem . He was accompanied by a British Intelligence officer, and both smeared their faces and hands with burnt cork to give them an Arab appearance. They also wore long white garments to give them a “ Hadjihs ” appearance. Their evasiveness was a necessity, for nonbelievers were (and still are) not allowed in areas that are considered to be the holiest places in the world of Islam. The purpose of their venture was to get an inside look at the radical movement by listening to what the Mullahs were preaching in regards to the political turmoil that was taking place in then British controlled Palestine . Three years later The Great Uprising took form. This redoubled political violence was in part planned by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni , whom Van Paassen had interviewed in 1929 about his incitement of the bloody uprising that year against the Jews in Palestine. Van Paassen's autobiography, Days of Our Years , published in 1939, detailed many events that he couldn't mention in his earlier newspaper reports. It was the bestselling nonfiction book in the United States for almost two years. Hence many things I investigated or saw remained unreported. [about] the methods of the reactionary governments of Rumania and Bulgaria in suppressing popular movements - twelve thousand peasants and workers had been slain in Bulgaria alone that year - I could not send out a word. The police dogged our every footstep.... The managing editor, Mr. Tennant, warned me more than once that I had not been sent over on a crusading mission. He added, moreover, that there was no confirmation from any reliable source on that horrible business in Bulgaria. The local agency correspondents had not sent a word. It was the only policy. Correspondents like George Seldes , Samuel Spivak, David Darrah Gedye, and myself discovered only too soon that if we did speak out, we did not last very long, either in the countries in which we were stationed or in our jobs." Van Paassen became a United States citizen in 1947. In his 1964 book To Number Our Days , Van Paassen wrote more about many of the same subjects he covered in Days of Our Years, especially the maneuvers of pre-World War II Europe's empires. The book only slightly extends Van Paassen's account past the period before the U.S. entered the war, but includes much about his pre-war life as a roving correspondent. Van Paassen's views of the potential of the Soviet Union appear to have changed between 1939 and 1941, and here he writes less about Russia, and less optimistically about it, than in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s. In his books Van Paassen was not a rigorous historian, but used vivid accounts often taken from first hand encounters with participants in the conflicts about which he wrote. During the 1929 Palestine uprising, after his reporting on the massacres contradicted both the Mufti's statements and local British officials' news releases, he became the target of several assassination attempts, after the last of which a Captain Saunders pointedly asked, "Moreover, why do these things happen to you? I have received no complaints from your colleagues of the press in Jerusalem." Subsequently he became persona non grata at Government House, but insisted that "I believe my offense was that I took nothing for granted.... Adirondack Daily Enterprise , (7 February 1957 Page Six). To Number Our Days (1st edition ed.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons . dust jacket. LCCN 64-0 – 0. : |edition= has extra text ( help ) ; Unknown parameter |nopp= ignored ( |no-pp= suggested) ( help ) Syracuse Herald , 6 April 1933 Front Page). Days of Our Years (1st edition ed.). LCC D413.V35 A3 . : |edition= has extra text ( help ) Van Paassen, Pierre (1939). Days of Our Years (1st edition ed.). LCC D413.V35 A3 . : |edition= has extra text ( help ) Van Paassen, Pierre (1939). Days of Our Years (1st edition ed.). LCC D413.V35 A3 . : |edition= has extra text ( help )³