People, not just policy
Perhaps the most affecting documents are those that restore the human scale. A handwritten letter from September 1946, written from a house in Babbacombe, South Devon, introduces its author as a new assistant in UNESCO’s Libraries Section. In careful copperplate, she asks whether she might be entitled to “some extra clothing coupons” and, if so, how to obtain them. Post-war Britain was still a rationed country, and joining the international civil service did not automatically exempt one from its constraints.
A comparable appeal came from Dr Stanislas Michalski, professor of Sanskrit and Hindu literature at the University of Łódź, newly established after the war. Writing to UNESCO on 28 September 1946, he explained that his personal library at 40 Wawelska Street in Warsaw, some 6,000 volumes, most of them works of Indology, had been burned by the Germans in October 1944, and that at Łódź, where Indology had never before been taught, teaching now ran into “almost insurmountable difficulties” for lack of source material; he enclosed a list of the books most urgently needed. On 30 October, E.J. Lind of UNESCO’s Section of Belles Lettres and Museums replied that the list would be circulated to libraries specialising in oriental languages, with a promise to report back once results were known.
