"The torture and the ceaseless and systematic deportation of the Jews form some of the darkest chapters in the tragic history even of that people, and the latest report which has reached this country tells of the deportation, in terrible circumstances, of thousands of Jewish refugees from Vichy France, where they had thought they were safe from the oppressor, to Occupied France and thence to Eastern Galicia, leaving behind them between five thousand and eight thousand children of whom many are now orphans, while large numbers do not know their parents or their own names, and all are waiting for the charity of Britain, or America or Switzerland to give them sanctuary." [520] Also in October, the Archbishop of Canterbury sent the following Message to the Jewish Bulletin: "The situation of the Jews is unique, and yet has lasted for many centuries. They are a people conscious of close and real unity, and yet they have no motherland. Other people have survived and maintained their identity when there was no national State to which they could be loyal; but there was always a homeland inhabited by the people who remembered their days of independence and hoped for its restoration. For the Jews there has been no such a homeland. Their eyes might turn to Palestine; but though there were Jews among the population there, they did not form the bulk of it. The Jews as a people have been homeless. They have lived among the other peoples of the earth, and they have been loyal citizens of the nations which have made them welcome. But if their hosts turn against them they have no remedy. In earlier periods this has happened from time to time. In our day it has happened on a scale without parallel. Their sufferings are appalling and entirely undeserved. It should be our aim to assist them in all ways in our power; for their need is desperate. <237> But there is more in their claim than a plea for sympathy. One of the tests of a people's civilisation is its capacity to treat well a defined minority. To fail in this is to revert to the ethics of the wolf-pack; and to succeed is the evidence of moral stability. In the case of the Jews our task is the easier because the moral principles which we profess are largely drawn from that sacred literature which we share with them. We should be standing together in loyalty to those principles against all who repudiate or ignore them. Anti-Semitism is evidence of a barbarous outlook and a religious apostasy." [521] In the same month, the Free Church Federal Council sent a letter to the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Hertz, expressing "the deep feelings of indignation and sympathy with which the Free Churches of this country regard the cruel persecution from which the Jewish race is suffering through the tyranny exercised by the Axis powers". The message continued: