(Author: Stuart Buxbaum, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024)
The Context
This article is part of a larger, multi-year project of researching the history of the camp system, such as concentration camps, internment camps and displaced persons’ camps, by the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre (JHGC). The research encompasses the nature of those camps, and the lives of those people subjected to internment in its various forms. The research topics are diverse and multi-faceted. They range from, inter alia, the Herero and Nama people interned on Shark Island by the German occupation of the then South West Africa (now Namibia), at the turn of the 20th Century. Turning to another continent, the internment of Japanese-American citizens, by government order, to the deserts of Nevada in the USA is also presented. This banishment was a consequence of the attack by Imperial Japan’s air force on America’s navy at anchor in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, in 1941.These diverse projects have been produced by volunteer researchers for the JHGC, dedicated to a central message of the Centre; to remember and to document.
The JHGC is highly regarded for the standard of its exhibitions. The permanent exhibitions at the centre document the Holocaust in Europe between 1933-1945, and the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. This genocide took place on the African continent at the very time that South Africa was moving into a new democratic dispensation.
Preamble.
“Abi men zeyt zich”. With these few Yiddish words the survivors of the Holocaust (the Shoah) would frequently greet one another, after the darkness, after the horror. “just as long as we see one another…“[1]
“Meanwhile Jews, who in 1945 constituted only 3.7 percent of the DP population, had been moving west from Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the subsequent years, seeking protection in the American-occupied zone. By 1947 they accounted for 25 percent of the DP’s in Germany and Austria.” [2]
List of Abbreviations and Organisations referred to in the Text
UNRRA. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. It was responsible for the care of Displaced Persons in the Displaced Persons Camps (DP Camps) after World War 2. It established temporary DP Camps in Europe.
CTB. The Central Tracing Bureau. The Bureau was established by UNRRA as the official registrars and tracing agency for missing persons. Located in London, such records were transferred to Arolsen, Germany, a former SS training school. This later became the IRO, the International Refugee Organisation.
DP Camps. Established in Germany, Austria, and Italy after WW2, these were “temporary” facilities for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. They were also termed Assembly Centres.[3]
SHAEF. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. It assisted UNRRA with logistics, supplies and security.
The Harrison Report. This reported on the atrocious conditions under which Holocaust survivors were housed in the DP Camps. This led to UNRRA taking over the administration of the camps from the military. The commission to compile the report was appointed by President Harry Truman.
International Red Cross (IRC). The duties of the IRC during World War 2 were those of visiting and monitoring POW camps, organising relief assistance and administrating the exchange of messages regarding prisoners and missing persons. The German Red Cross in Nazi controlled areas refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes.
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“The Joint”). Founded in the second decade of the 20th Century by luminaries Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall and Felix Warburg, its mission is fourfold: Rescue, Relief, Renewal and Israel. After the end of WW2, the Joint, via urgent purchasing and shipping from the USA, provided more than 227 million tons of necessities for Holocaust survivors.
Bricha Movement. (Hebrew: flight, escape). Name given to the movement in post-World War 2 Europe. Referred to as the “organized, illegal emigration from Eastern Europe into the Allied occupied zones, and to Palestine/Israel.[4]
Displaced Persons. The technical term coined by UNRRA. Denotes persons forcibly removed to localities other than their regular place of residence.
ORT. Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training. A Voluntary Organisation
Central Committee of Liberated Jews. (Hebrew, “Merkaz Ha’Pleitim“). Headquartered in Rome, it ceased activity on 10 October 1950. The majority of these records were transferred to Yivo.
YIVO. The Institute for Jewish Research dedicated to the preservation and study of the History and Culture of East European Jewry worldwide.
Displaced Persons Act of 1948. The Act authorised, for a limited period of time, the admission to the United States of 200,000 certain European displaced persons (DPs) for permanent residence.
Sheirit Ha Pletah (Pleytim). Hebrew term for Jewish survivors living in Displaced Persons’ (DP) camps and the organisation they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities.
Jewish Agency in Palestine. An organization established by Britain to comply with its League of Nations Mandate, constituted in 1929.
Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. (OSE). Founded in Russia by Jewish doctors in 1912. During WW2 it operated 14 children’s homes throughout France to save Jewish children from internment.
Jewish Brigade. A military formation of the British Army in the Second World War, formed in late 1944.
IRO. The International Refugee Organisation. It was an intergovernmental organisation founded on 20 April 1946 to deal with the huge refugee problem created by WW2
PCIRO. Preparatory Committee of the International Refugee Organisation.[5]
Introduction and Background
Surveying the world scene, American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was drawn into prophecy. In October of 1939, struck by the threat to world peace, he opined: “When this ghastly war ends, there may be not one million but ten million or twenty million men, women and children…..who will enter into the wide picture – the problem of the human refugee.”[6] And thus it came to be that at the termination of the terrible conflict that was World War 2, there were approximately eleven million displaced persons (DPs) in Europe, eight million of whom were located in Germany. Of these there were 700 000 surviving concentration camps prisoners.[7] Additionally, there were many thousands of anti-communists and former Nazi collaborators who fled the Red army as it reconquered Eastern Europe. At the conclusion of the war and the defeat of Germany, 1.2 million East European displaced persons refused to return home, creating a large scale and ongoing refugee problem. From 1945-1952, more than 250 000 Jewish displaced persons lived in camps and urban centres in Germany, Austria and Italy. These figures vary somewhat. The researcher Margarete Myers Feinstein, for example, writes that in the five years post World War 2, nearly 300 000 Holocaust survivors passed through the displaced persons camps in Germany.[8] However, the number of survivors in the second half of 1945, according to a statistical survey of Jewish displaced persons in the three countries revealed a total of 90 566 persons.[9]
The total of 90 566 was distributed as follows:
Refugees and Displaced Persons
The interplay between the terms “refugees” and “displaced persons” is a complex one, but broad bureaucratic differences can be delineated. The term “displaced person “does not refer to the several million ethnic Germans in Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands) who had been expelled, and repatriated in Germany.[11] It became impossible however, to repatriate all after the war. At the Yalta Conference, held in early February 1945 by which time it had already become clear that Germany would be defeated, the rebuilding of Europe after the war was under discussion. It was decided to enforce repatriation and it also envisioned the establishment of displaced persons camps.[12].Theoretically perhaps, but reality complicated matters. Immediate post-war repatriation (July 1945) saw 1.5 million Soviet citizens returned to the Soviet Union.
In particular, for the displaced Jewish population, this was an especially acute and traumatic situation. Quite possibly, the term to express their existential condition was that of “catastrophic trauma”. They could not return “home”. Home no longer existed. Families no longer existed. Their Jewish communities had been destroyed, the synagogues desecrated, their livelihoods lost. The number of Jewish persons in the camps would become influenced by events in the east after World War 2. About 175 000 Jews had arrived in Poland in the late autumn of 1946 from the Soviet Union where they had fled to during the war. However, many of them had to leave because of the rising antisemitism in that country. From September through December 1945, 26 “small scale” pogroms took place.[13] Antisemitism had not been eradicated, and was still a prevalent force. Evidence of this, if indeed it was needed, was the occurrence of the Kielce Pogrom of 4 July 1946. The violence in Kielce underlined the precarious condition of Eastern European Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and acted as a catalyst for the flight from Poland of most Jews who had survived the war.[14] 42 Jews were killed and more than 40 wounded in Kielce, the results of a spurious accusation of the kidnapping of a gentile child.
Repatriation after war was also not sought by many persons dislocated by the war and who found themselves on foreign soil in the West. The Russian advance had brought a swathe of countries under their hegemony, now subject to the strict and unforgiving Communist ideology. Such reluctance resulted in the uprooted seeking shelter in DP camps. The map of Europe had unrecognizably been altered. Czechoslovakia, for example, had ceased to exist as a state, Slovakia having become independent, the Sudetenland having been annexed by Germany while its remaining territories became part of Hungary.[15] Fearing war crimes charges or communist repression meant Hungarians in Austria did not wish to be repatriated.
Thus, by the end of September 1945, 1 2 million displaced persons remained in Germany and refused to go home. Most of them were concentrated in the Western occupation zones, especially in the south-western regions under United States control.
At the Yalta conference, this admixture of persecuted Jews, perpetrators, victims, survivors, bystanders, participants, communists, the flotsam and jetsam of the war’s horrors, was foreseen. The three leaders at Yalta concluded that citizens of each country “will, without delay after their liberation, be separated from enemy prisoners of war and will be maintained separately from them in camps or points of concentration….” [16]
Further classification of refugees was the subject given attention to by the Supreme Allied Expeditionary Force. The following groups of refugees were isolated: Evacuees, war or political refugees, political prisoners, forced workers, “organisation todt” workers, deportees, intruded persons, extruded persons, civilian internees, ex-prisoners of war, and stateless people, Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp survivors.
Amidst all these persons were found the traumatised Jewish remnants of pre-war Europe. Writing about this remnant, Tad Szulc, author of The Secret Alliance, explains as follows: “Fearing new outbreaks of antisemitism, tens of thousands of Jews were streaming from Poland, Romania and Hungary into Austria, Germany, and Italy seeking a safe haven. By the end of 1946, a quarter of a million Jews filled 72 of these camps – with no place to go and little to sustain them.”[17] Of this number, it was estimated that 185 000 were in Germany, 45 000 in Austria and 20 000 in Italy.
Table 2 ,1947/1948, from Grossman.[18]
And “in March 1946, ten months after the war ended, there were an estimated 400 000 Poles and roughly 150 000 – 200 000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians living in displaced persons camps in Germany.”[19]
The Establishment of Displaced Persons Camps
The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was established in 1943 to deal with WW2 displaced persons in Europe and was the organisation assigned the responsibility for their care. It oversaw the establishment of temporary displaced persons camps. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) assisted in relocating displaced persons to reception centres and would organise transport back to their homes at war’s end. The military also assisted with logistics, supplies and security.[20]. UNRRA also oversaw the creation of the Central Tracing Bureau to help survivors locate relatives who had survived the concentration camps and slave labour camps. It further worked closely with the International Red Cross in tracking and tracing missing persons. These organisations collected over one million names in the course of the DP era and eventually this would result in the creation of the International Tracing Service.[21]
According to a Yad Vashem online article,[22] British and American authorities housed most DPs in DP Assembly Centres, separating them according to nationality to facilitate repatriation and segregating them from the general public to prevent the spread of disease and to simplify the task of providing them with food and medical care. Some of the DP Assembly Centres were established in former military installations, forced–labour camps, and even concentration camps. Military authorities viewed these as temporary arrangements that would end with the repatriation of the DPs. According again to Grossman, these accommodations widely differed in character. There were barracks, huts, hotels, apartment houses and cottages, set aside as camps or settlements.[23]
“Survivors found themselves still living behind barbed wire, still subsisting on inadequate amounts of food and still suffering from shortages of clothing medicine and supplies”. They suffered from malnutrition, depression and disease. “In the DP camps, Holocaust survivors sometimes lived alongside anti-Semites and individuals who had harmed Jews during the war.”[24]. Faced with such daunting problems, the camp authorities focused on a four-pronged program of assistance, defined as Rescue, Relief, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction. It would prove to be a daunting exercise.
The British Camps in the British Zones.
The British term “infiltree” is politically loaded and refers to those persons who would have been considered outside the law, implying the criminalisation of individuals entering a space that they are not entitled to, referring in this case to Jewish Displaced persons seeking to enter the DP camps in the British zone of defeated Germany. According to Lavsky,[25] the British authorities only considered two categories of DPs: Victims of the Nazis, and enemy Germans and Nazi collaborators. Initially most Jewish DPs were located in the British zone, but this changed when the British were reluctant to admit Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. In December 1945, the British zone closed to newcomers, hence many refugees left for the American zone.[26]
The British policies towards the DPs was expressed by disregarding their “Jewishness”. The Americans had changed their policy in this regard early on, while the British only changed it in 1946.The explanation used by the British was cynical indeed: They seemingly did not want “to practise racial discrimination like the Nazis did”[27]. The British were aware that a large proportion of the Jewish DPs wished to immigrate to Palestine. British foreign policy was weighted to not alarming the Palestine Arab population and indeed the Arab world.
For the British authorities in the occupied zones, the Jews leaving Poland were deemed to have left out of their own free will and hence were not entitled to assistance. Nevertheless, through the efforts of organizations such as the Brichah, Jews managed to enter those DP camps hoping for a temporary stay en route to elsewhere and mostly, in the end, to Palestine. The British policy thus discriminated according to their definition of “displaced persons” and “infiltrees”. Since the so called infiltrees had, as a result of hostility in the post war period renounced their nationality, these displaced persons did not fit the British authorities’ definition and were thus not entitled to the rights and assistance afforded other displaced persons. Most DPs had subsisted on diets of less than 1500 calories a day.[28]
The Harrison Report and the American Joint Distribution Committee
The “Joint “had a similar but more direct approach to its program of help for the Jewish inmates. It encompassed the Rescue of Jews at risk, their Relief, the Renewal of Jewish communities, and the assistance of such persons to leave the shores of Europe and settle in Israel (then Palestine).
In June 1945, the US government sent Earl G. Harrison, then a representative of the Intergovernmental Commission on Refugees, to examine the plight of Holocaust survivors and Jewish persons in the DP camps of Europe. Harrison requested Dr. Joseph Schwartz, the Joint’s young European director, to accompany him on an official tour of the camps. Harrison’s report was scathing and extremely critical of the military. He reported that many DPs were living under armed guard behind barbed wire in crowded and unsanitary accommodations. They could find no information about their relatives and lacked the ability to advocate with military authorities on their behalf. He came to the harsh conclusion that “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them”. It is reported that when President Harry Truman read the report, “the conditions it described made him ill”, and he instructed General Dwight Eisenhower to inspect the camps. Eisenhower ordered the immediate creation of Jewish-only centres and improved their living conditions, and increased their food rations by 300 calories a day, to 2,500 calories. The living conditions in the British occupied zone, where Jewish refugees had arrived from Bergen–Belsen were austere.[29] Also as a result of the Harrison Report, the new exodus of Jewish refugee fleeing Eastern Europe and Poland in particular, and guided in particular by the Bricha movement, were allowed to enter the DP camps of the American zone in Germany.[30] Regarding the providing of nourishment to the DPs, Ouzan refers to “so many paradoxes”: Among the displaced, German Jews were at first considered as ex-enemies by the allied soldiers. As a consequence, they were denied the rations given to “the racial persecutees.”
UNRRA took over the camps from the military in October 1945. One of the voluntary organizations which assisted it was the Joint. The Harrison report, according to Yehuda Bauer, facilitated the entry of the Joint into the DP camps.[31] Dr Schwartz, representing the Joint, had arrived in Europe almost immediately after the cessation of hostilities. The reality of the post war destruction and human suffering shocked him to the core, and he hastened back to New York and addressed the Joint’s Executive Committee. He warned that if American Jewry failed to provide the resources, the survivors would perish.[32]. Schwartz virtually re-created the JDC, putting together a field organization that covered Europe.[33] The JDC distributed emergency aid and also took care of the educational needs of the displaced, providing, for example, typewriters, books and ritual articles.[34] In the first six months of 1945, the Joint expended nearly $5 million on food for the Jewish remnant in Romania and Hungary.[35]
Life in the DP camps.
According to the testimony of an emissary from Israel, Haim Avni “If you have breathed that air, you will understand that here live people who have already experienced their deaths long ago”.[36]
Extraordinarily, and in a tribute to their resilience and determination, the DP’s fashioned for themselves, haltingly yet vigorously, a self and societal rehabilitation. The Jewish displaced persons in the camps found themselves in a societal no man’s land, “liberated but not free”, wishing desperately to be “Elsewhere, Perhaps”.[37] They wished desperately to leave the encapsulated existence they found themselves in, desperate to leave Europe as a whole, yet despite the urgency and pleas for humanitarian relocation, the gates of Palestine and other countries outside of Europe remained resolutely closed. Thus, the onus on rehabilitation of the self, remained the preserve of themselves alone. This despite the efforts of UNRRA, the Joint, The American Jewish Congress (AJC) and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). Drawing somehow on their depleted strengths, they created and participated in social, cultural and educational activities. Theaters and orchestras were established, and more than 70 Yiddish newspapers were published in the camps.[38] Importantly, “they were among the first to research the Holocaust,,, collected testimonies,…gathered written documentation and held memorial services…”[39]
Sociologists are in broad agreement that the institution of marriage, broadly defined, is viewed as the creator of the family and that the family is the most basic social unit upon which society is built. And in the extremely non-normative society that constituted the DP camps, the urge to rebuild the internees’ family unit, an act of tikkun, is simply put, quite extraordinary. Michal Eisokowitz, in an article sub headed “the bittersweet post-holocaust weddings”, writes: “Data from the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, the largest and most widely known displaced persons camp for Jewish survivors, reveals that during 1946, 1070 marriages took place in this camp alone” [my emphasis]. The first year following liberation saw six to seven weddings a day [my emphasis], and sometimes even 50 in one week.”[40] Concerning these marriages, Tom Segev[41] cautiously notes that a psychologist who studied the survivors’ marriages called these alliances “marriages of despair”. They were a way for survivors to rise up against the attempt to deny them their humanity.
A Demographic Snapshot.
It goes without saying that following liberation, the death rate among survivors was tragically, very high. In Bergen-Belsen alone after liberation, a Jewish chaplain had attended mass burials of 23 000 persons, 90% of whom were estimated to have been Jewish. But surprisingly, in such a very vulnerable population, with time, the mortality rate among DPs in the camps was recorded as being low, and especially low was the infant mortality rate. These are remarkable findings. It must be emphasized that the age cohort of the Jewish DPs was younger than would be found in a general population. Besides the obvious fact that older men and women had already perished during the years of horror, Grossman points to the fact that the Jewish aid agencies provided the surviving inmates with a diet that even during those desperate days of shortages and rationing, was somewhat sustaining after the near famine conditions of their recent pasts. He also points to the special care given to the infants by their mothers, by consultations with doctors and by the establishment of clinics in the camps. The immediate period after liberation saw tuberculosis as being rife, but gradually this too was brought under control. By the end of April 1947, there was a total of 176 234 Jewish DPs in all of the displaced persons camps in the three zones of both Germany and Austria, and in Italy. A year later the available statistics show that the number of Jewish DPs outside of the camps, again in all zones in the three countries was, at the end of May 1948, 32 000.[42]
Self-Government and Self-Help in the Camps
The Camp residents, after the dislocation of their lives during the years of loss, trauma and suffering, chose to return to life. Predominant among such steps was the need for control of their social lives by themselves. They would need return to life spiritually, physically, culturally, socially, and politically. Such political activism was expressed in the creation of leadership roles within the DP camps, by political structures within those camps and by the creation of an overhead body, in this case the “Central Committee for Liberated Jews” (Merkaz Hapleitim) which was headquartered in Rome. Political leadership of the camps was rapidly established by the inmates themselves. Thus the Belsen DP camp elected to their leadership the charismatic, courageous and able Josef (Yossel) Rosensaft.
Even though the UNRRA had as one of its goals rehabilitation, the DPs themselves creatively ensured their own rehabilitation. According to Gardella,[43] they did so in the overhead principle of “Tikkun Olam”, repairing their world. This self-help program centered to a considerable extent on the social work principle of group work. Among the pioneers of this approach was the celebrated Louis Lowy (1920-1991) who had applied this method in Theresienstadt. It was in Theresienstadt that educators like Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Valtr Eisinger adopted the approach of education via art and the writing of journals was instituted.[44] and Lowy offered lessons in English and the Humanities via group activities.[45] Lowy pursued this method after liberation in the Deggendorf Displaced Persons camp. He described his thoughts in the Deggendorf Centre Revue as “a continuous fight…..fight for the creation of humanity, the creation of a human community” [46].
Rebirth and regeneration via group activities and learning provided for a deep sharing of trauma and its somewhat alleviation via group trust. Thus “groups in the Jewish Displaced Persons Centres revived cultural memory through education and cultural programs.”[47]. Striking in this context is how the Sheerith Hapletah took as their symbol a tree stump from which a tiny leafed branch was sprouting. This rehabilitation via self-help and group activity re-established somewhat their humanity and self-esteem.[48] The work of ORT cannot be underestimated in this project of preparing the displaced for a post-camp life. Thus the relationship between self-help and help training by an agency was fruitful and enabling of self-realization. Here the ORT schools played a major and significant role. These vocational training schools in the camps resulted in the men learning “the trades of carpenters, locksmiths, machinists, welders; the women were trained to be dressmakers, nurses, beauticians.” [49] Grossman further writes: “As of May 31, 1948, 10 400 students were enrolled in the ORT vocational courses, while 4 700 men and women were employed in special work projects of the Joint Distribution Committee.”[50]
Inter-group tensions in the DP Camps.
With the war ending and Germany staring at defeat, feverish attempts were made to empty the concentration camps and expunge of all evidence. Surviving inmates were forced to embark on death marches into the interior of Germany, and the desperate plight of the surviving remnants became evident. Many of these survivors would find respite from persecution in the DP camps.
Among those remaining and intermingling with the victims and the survivors, the author Nasow [51] describes how those who had served the Nazi cause attempted to purge the outward signs of their previous membership and of their immoral acts on behalf of the Third Reich. He related how the by now tainted uniforms were cast aside, the tattoos removed, the insignia of membership destroyed, and how incognito, they would enter and merge into the seething mass of humanity in the DP camps, to the horror of Jewish inmates who were forced to share quarters with their previous terrorisers.
From the various war-torn corners of Europe came struggling, suffering humanity. As Grossman shows, there were three overlapping groups of people who would find some form of safety within the DP camps. There were the survivors of the concentration camps and forced labour camps, and of death marches. There were those who had survived among the partisans in the forests, in hiding or by concealing their identity. And there were those, “perhaps 200 000 Jews who had been repatriated to Poland from the Soviet Union”.[52]
Inter-group relations within the Jewish DP camps came under considerable strain with the arrival of the Polish escapees into the often German speaking fledgling DP communities. A form of association that obviated the tension caused by this influx was the “landsmannschaften” informal groupings which sprouted in the camps. These were persons from the same region or towns in Europe with a common social and, geographic background and culture and which helped counterbalance the abysmal feelings of alienation, loneliness and loss. Such landsmannschaften provided safety and succor even to the fortunate ones who had managed to leave and settle elsewhere.
And in these camps were found both the disreputable, and the noble. In his “extraordinary memoir of survival”[53], Appelfeld describes how even prior to reaching the DP camp in Italy on the journey from the Ukraine, “terrible people – corrupt and violent – preyed on us all the way. Most abhorrent of all were the perverts. The children who were abused neither complained nor cried. A kind of silent expression settled on their faces. In the camp, some would hoard food and deal on the black market. But there were the noble ones. When the DP camps grew larger they would sometimes become the youth leaders and the teachers, and they defended the children with all their might….Amid the greed, bribery and corruption, these exceptional people not only taught the children to read and to write but also taught us mathematics, Hebrew, Yiddish and French.”[54]
Bergen-Belsen.
Bergen-Belsen, the largest displaced persons camp in Germany, was the centre of Jewish displaced persons political and social activity in the British zone of occupation.
The Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp was established in July 1945 in a former German army camp near the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There were three main components of the concentration camp complex itself: The POW camp, the “residence camp” (Aufenthaltslager) and the “prisoners’ camp (Haftlingslager) Within the “prisoners’ camp”, a small women’s camp (Kleines Frauenlager) was established. “Among these women were Anne Frank and her sister Margot, both of whom died in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945.” [55] After liberating the camp, on 15 April 1945, the British Army burned the terrain as a health precaution. After November 1945, the British allowed the segregation of the Jewish DP’s into their own portion of the now displaced persons camp. The Jewish population of Bergen-Belsen comprised the only exclusively Jewish DP population in the British zone. Rochy Miller, in her biography of her mother Lea Liebowitz [56] decribes how Liebowitz would later find her way to settle in South Africa. She writes that immediately after liberation, Bergen-Belsen became a DP camp caring for thousands of survivors. Leibowitz’s initial three weeks after liberation were spent in and out of consciousness in hospital. But when she recovered, she started to work – first as a secretary to the British commanding officer, then for a short while for the Jewish Council, and finally she was approached to start a kosher kitchen for the former inmates who remained in the camp. “And we were cooking for three hundred people”.[57] Such help was desperately needed in the camp, where the death rate following liberation was appallingly high. In 1946, the camp housed over 11 000 Jewish inmates. In March of that year, the British transferred the administration of the camp to UNRRA. Leibowitz would later re-establish her life in South Africa. Here she pursued her education and served her community. She championed the use of Yiddish and served on the Jewish Day of Remembrance organizing committee of the South African Board of Deputies in Johannesburg.
Leaving the DP Camps.
According to Grossman, the lives of the Jewish DPs passed through four distinct phases. “The first year following liberation (1945-1946) was a period of physical recovery and the search for families; the second saw the numbers greatly increased by the flight from Poland and the establishment of a DP pattern of life; the third (1947-1948) was marked by the stabilization of numbers in the camps and infused with the hope that their homelessness would come to an end ; and the fourth (1948-1950) a period of mass movement out of the camps to Israel, the US., Canada, Australia, and some Latin American countries.”[58]
The extent to which lives had been disrupted and the sheer volume of displaced persons immediately after the cessation of hostilities in Europe remains difficult to conceptualize, even after almost nine decades. The Allies, occupying powers now, were overwhelmed by the scale of the displaced persons. Ten Million people. A generally quoted figure [59] puts the number at 11.2 million. The Allies however, soon reacted. Trains, buses and trucks and any form of movable vehicle such as carts were commandeered and deployed to reallocate the millions of Poles, POWs, forced labourers who found themselves in these zones, and were sent back to their home countries. By the end of September, the military with the support of UNRRA, had managed to repatriate 4.6 million people – an average of 33,000 per day.[60]
The DP camps had become waiting rooms for emigration, and in this “waiting room”, demoralisation was a constant threat. David Nasaw, in his book “The Last Million”[61] describes not only those who were in the camps until their closure, “the last million”, but also the scope and structure of the DP camps. Nasaw discusses how the camps had become an extraordinary reservoir of labour for labour hungry economies. Post war Europe and the allies’ group of participating countries, whose wartime losses now caused huge manpower shortages, turned to the DP camps in major recruitment drives. Emissaries from various countries came to “select” able bodied men and women from the camps and repatriate them to their own countries so as to rebuild their economies. The Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, of the forests, of those escaping antisemitism in the East having spent years in the far reaches of Russia, could hardly be classified as “able bodied”. As a consequence, they were largely overlooked in these recruitment drives. Thus the British authorities instituted a drive to recruit women from the Baltic states, (the so called “Balts”), who found themselves in the DP camps, to work as nurses in Britain.[62] Dieter-Steinart[63] writes that 80 000 so called “European Volunteer Workers” (EVWs) from the DP camps were recruited by British Government officials mainly in Germany and Austria under the “Balt-Cygnet” and “Westward Ho” schemes. Background checks on war time activities of these Europeans were minimised, and the characteristic higher in prominence was the so called “assimilability” factor. Those chosen would, theoretically, be better able to fit seamlessly into their new society. In this way, collaborators and Nazi sympathisers could evade being fingered and rejected. As Hartzig writes in this regard, “It was quite well known that many of them had been Nazi sympathisers and/or collaborators and often even members of the SS.”[64] In the realignment of forces and alliances in the post war period, the prevalent fear had now switched to the Russian Empire. The “Cold War” had begun in earnest. Nazi personnel, many of whom had entered the DP camps, could reinvent themselves and find succor in places other than Europe. The Western powers had lost the appetite to prosecute and investigate the pasts of these identity-less persons, who found ways to slip into the mass of new recruits to work elsewhere. As did collaborators.
“Belgium was the first country to adopt a large –scale immigration program when it called for 20 000 coal mine workers from the DP ranks, bringing in a total of 22 000 DPs near the end of 1947. The program met with some controversy, as critics viewed it as a cynical ploy to get cheap labour.” [65]
The case of Canada too is interesting in this regard. Christianne Harzig writes that Canada “became an important political agent in the international refugee resettlement regime” trying “to bring relief to displaced persons in Europe and to supply the labour market with domestics.”[66] Canada’s immigration policy in that period “oscillated between altruism and economic self-interest” The Canadian prime minister at that time, in 1947, announced that his government would be “sending immigration officers to examine the situation among the refugee groups, and to take steps looking towards the early admission of some thousands of their numbers..’ (and) selecting the persons whom we regard as desirable citizens”[68]. In light of these selection preferences, Nasow concludes that the various labour hungry countries seeking such manpower, followed a certain hierarchy in choosing persons from the DP camps: They were to be white, Protestant, healthy and not communists. The Jewish DPs failed the test for relocation on all counts, the very last non-complying item being the suspicion that so many Jews had fled into the deep interior of Russia during the war and hence were ideologically compromised. In addition to not complying with these overt legal requirements, the covert assumptions fueling the reluctance to choose Jewish DPs, were the persistent prevalent negative stereotypes of them, which Nassow mentions as the assigned characteristics being that they were clannish, poor workers and communist sympathisers. This resettlement program under IRO auspices saw approximately 700 000 persons participating in this program. Of these, 373 000 went to the United States, 182 000 to Australia and 152 000 to Canada [69].
Turning to America, the so called “Goldene Medine” had, as its main obstacle to the immigration of Jewish persons from the camps, the notorious Quota Law of 1924. The bureaucracy surrounding immigration was almost insurmountable, especially so for the stateless persons confined to the camps. The “Truman Directive” of 22 December 1945, which should have facilitated the move to America, only became effective about five and a half months later, and the process was held up further by the wrangling of what constituted the definition of a Displaced Person.[70] So great was the desire to emigrate and so intense the emotions expressed to those who were enabled to leave to the US, that they were called “traitors” when escorted out of the camps.[71]
And yet. Despite the attractiveness of other countries away from blood-soaked Europe, for the Jewish DP’s an option remained: Palestine. The wish and possibility of settling in Palestine was strengthened by the Zionist ideology permeating the camps, the learning of and instruction in Hebrew, and the presence of members of the Jewish Brigade. Palestine, however, as indicated previously in this report, was under the strict and unrelenting control of the British. Truman, in 1946, put forward the proposal to the British Foreign Secretary, Eneurin Bevin, that Palestine should absorb 100 000 Jewish inmates from the camps. Bevin declined, inferring that the United States itself “did not want too many Jews in New York.”[72] At play here was the undoubted rabid antisemitism of Bevin himself, and the Foreign Office’s continued attempt to placate the Arab population of the region.
And yet. While there was discrimination against the inmates of the DP camps as Jews to emigrate to countries of safety, envoys of the Yishuv[73] also saw many of these coreligionists, those would be immigrants, as “undesirables”. One envoy to the displaced persons camps told Ben Gurion that if a 100 000 of them indeed came to Palestine, they would cause a “disaster”. Ben Gurion, however, was not deterred.[74]
Despite these restrictions, the options offered by the Jewish Brigade and the Bricha movement were their efforts to clandestinely smuggle Jewish DPs to Palestine. “To test and challenge the British, Shaul Avigur decided to take more than 4500 refugees out of DP camps in Germany and transport them illegally to Palestine.”[75]. Overloaded ships, hardly seaworthy, left from ports like Piraeus and Genoa, sailed across the Mediterranean to reach the shores of Palestine, there to be diverted to Cyprus, where approximately 16000 persons were placed in internment camps and held there until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. Indeed, the number of persons in the DP camps diminished considerably once the State was established. The monthly average of Jewish inmates in the period July 1947 and June 1948 had been 163 000.[76]. In the next twelve month period, being July 1948 and June 1949, the monthly average had dropped 95 189. According to official IRO figures, the total number of Jewish DPs who came to Israel between July 1947 and end December 1950, amounted to 120 766.[77]
Closure of the Camps.
These places of displacement were supposed to have been temporary camps of refuge. Yet they were of a considerably longer lasting nature. Most of the camps were closed by the IRO (International Refugee Organization) in 1951. The Jewish DP camp in Foerenwald, 30 km south of Munich, remained open under German rule until 1957. [78]
Memorialization
A recent “landmark exhibition” sheds light on post-Holocaust life in German displaced person camps.[79]. The exhibition opened in July 2023, and was scheduled to run through January of the following year. The exhibition, a collaboration between Munich’s Jewish Museum and that city’s Museum, narrates and recalls the very many tens of thousands of those so-called “in between persons”, caught up in a post war limbo. The “in-between’ phrase describes the estrangement of such persons from time and place, a bleak time of uncertainty, of an unknown future, of an elusive destination. This particular exhibition draws attention to the frequently glossed over epoch after the war. It recalls the lives and fates of those who “fled, were displaced, or deported”, eventually, to the limbo like camp in the environs of Munich, mainly the camp at Deggendorf. In addition to the description of life in the DP camps being characterised as being “in limbo”, of being “in between”, a survivor previously from the Foehrenwald DP camp of Munich, describes it as “the beginning of the beginning.”[80]. Although probably not a universal reaction to the time that inmates spent in the DP camps, one of those persons born in the Landsberg DP camp in 1946 and who, with his family finally found refuge in America, suggests that “they talked about the life in Landsberg, not about the death that they observed in Lodz and in the concentration camps” [83]. Others however, kept silent…..
Stuart Buxbaum, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs, holds an honours degree in Sociology from Wits University (1970) and an honours degree in Judaica from UNISA (1984). After working in the social research unit of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies in the early 1970s, he farmed for many years in Mpumalanga. His previous contributions to Jewish Affairs include a three-part history of Herber House, a boarding facility for Jewish youth from the country districts attending King David school, which appeared in 2019-2020.
NOTES
1 Rosenzaft, Menachem Z.” Children born in Displaced Persons Camps gather in Tel Aviv, Tablet magazine, December 21,2015
2 Harzig, Christianne. “MacNamara’s DP Domestics: Immigration Policymakers Negotiate Class, Race and Gender in the aftermath of World War 2”. Social Politics Oxford University Press,2003. (Quoting Wyman, p28)
3 “Displaced Persons Camps in post World War 11 Europe” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_post%E2%80%93World_War_II_Europe#:~:text=Displaced%20persons%20camps%20in%20post%E2%80%93World%20War%20II%20Europe%20were,the%20Nazi%20German%20concentration%20camps.
4 “Brihah”. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/brihah
5 Grossman, Kurt R..” The Jewish DP Problem. Its origin, scope, and liquidation. “ Institute for Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, New York, 19515 “The Last Million: Eastern European Displaced Persons in Post War Germany.” https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/last-million-eastern-european-displaced-persons-postwar-germany#:~:text=Most%20of%20them%20were %20concentrated,other%20parts% 20of%20 the%20world.
6 “The Last Million.” op. cit7 Feinstein, M.M. “Women Survivors in the Displaced Persons Camps of occupied Germany,” Shofar, volume 24,number 4,2006. pp 67-89.
7 “The Last Million.” op.cit
8 Feinstein, M.M. “Women Survivors in the Displaced Persons Camps of occupied Germany,” Shofar, volume 24,number 4,2006. pp 67-89.
9 Grossman, op.cit
10 Grossman, op.cit. Table on page 11
11 “https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/map/major-camps-for-jewish-displaced-persons-1945-1946https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany
12 Ouzan, Francoise. Jewish Identities in Displaced Peoples Camps in Germany, 1945-1957. pp 98-111. https://journals.openedition.org/bcrfj/269?amp%3Bamp%3Bid=269&lang=en
13 “Kielce Pogrom”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom
14 ibid.
15 “The Last Million.” op. cit
16 “United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Relief_and_Rehabilitation_Administration
17 Szulc, Tad. The Secret Alliance. The extraordinary story of the rescue of the Jews since World War 11. Macmillan, London, 1991. p 107.
18 Grossman, op.cit. Table on page 11
19 “The Last Million…..” op.cit
20 UNRRA, op.cit
21 “Allied Occupied Germany.’ op.cit
22 “The Return to Life in the Displaced Persons Camps, 1945-1956. ! Visual Perspective.” https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/dp-camps.html
23 Grossman, op.cit. See especially “ The Harrison Report” https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/online-documents/holocaust/report-harrison.pdf
24 “The Return to Life …..” op.cit
25 Quoted in Feinstein, M.M.: op.cit, and also https://www.jstor.org/stable/42944197
26 ibid.
28 “Displaced Persons Camps in Post World War 11 Europe.” en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_post-World_War_11_Europe. Most DP’s had subsisted on diets of less than 1500 calories a day.
29 “The Return to Life….” op.cit
30 Ouzan, op.cit
31 Szulc,Tad. op.cit. p96
32 ibid. p 104
33 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,(wiki article) op. cit
34 ibid.
35 Szulc,Tad. op.cit p 108. $5 million in 1945 equates to roughly $ 85,285,000 in mid-2023.
36 “The return to Life….” op.cit
37 The reference is to Israeli writer Amos Oz’s novel “Elsewhere Perhaps”, Mariner Books,1985
38 “The Return to Life…..” op.cit
39 ibid.
40 Eisokowitz, Michal. “The Brides of Bergen-Belsen. The bittersweet post –holocaust weddings.” https://aish.com/100468809/
41 Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust. Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1994. p 117
42 Grossman, op.cit
43 Gardella, Lorrie Greenhouse. “Repair the world: Group work in the Deggendorf Displaced Persons Center, 1945-1946”. file:///C:Downloads/1120-Article%20Text-2616-1-10-20191112%20(2).pdf
44 Reference is to the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre (JHGC) panel exhibition of Theresienstadt
45 Gardella, op.cit p 45
46 ibid. p 14
47 ibid.p 15
48 ibid. p 16
49 Grossman,op.cit
50 ibid.
51 Nasaw, David. “The last million: Europe’s displaced Persons from World War to Cold War” A talk given on “Virtual Events, Tenement Museum”
52 Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC). Quoting Grossman in 3:5-10 https://doi.org/10.3897/hmc.3.70896 (10 May 2023)
53 By-line to the title of the biography of Appelfeld, Aharon: The Story of a Life: An extraordinary memoir of survival. Penguin Books, 2006. Translated from the Hebrew.
54 Appelfeld, ibid. pp74-75.
55 US BB complex # 58
56 Miller, Rochie. Not Just a Survivor: a portrait of my mother. ISBN-10:0994228680
57 ibid, pp 177-178
58 Grossman, op.cit, p 11.
59 The expectation of SHAEF was that there would be 11.3 million refugees and DPs in western occupied countries after the war. (ref #62)
60 Hartzig, op.cit
61 Nasaw, op.cit
62 Ibid.
63 Steinart, Dieter. (Card, ref the disentangled)
64 Hartzig, op.cit, p 28
65 ‘Displaced persons camps in post-World War 11 Europe’ op.cit
66 Hartzig, Christiane.”Macnamara’s DP Domestics: Immigration…..” op.cit
67 ibid, p 10
68 Hartzig ibid. p 30
69 Ouzan, op.cit
70 Ouzan, ibid.
71 “Ernest Bevin.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Bevin
72 “Yishuv”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yishuv The term generally refers to the body of Jewish residents in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948
73 Segev, op. cit pp 120-121
74 Szulc,Tad. op. cit p171. Shaul Avigur was a founder of the Israel Intelligence Community.
75 See table in Appendix
76 Grossman, op.cit
77 Ouzan, op.cit
78 Axelrod, Toby. “Landmark exhibits shed light on post-Holocaust life in German displaced persons camps.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/landmark-exhibits-shed-light-on-post-holocaust-life-in-german-displaced-person-camps/
79 ibid.
80 ibid.
