Part II: The Displaced Persons' Camps

By the end of 1945, many Jews who had survived forced labor camps, concentration camps, extermination camps, and death marches either did not want to go home or had no homes left. Thus, many survivors congregated in Displaced Persons' (DP) camps located in central Europe controlled by the Allies. Many people in the DP camps married and had children. They set up educational institutions, published more than 70 Jewish newspapers, initiated commemoration projects, and even established theaters and orchestras.
Testimony 9
Eliezer Adler was born in 1923 in Belz, Poland. He spent most of WWII in a forced labor camp in the Soviet Union. After the war Eliezer spent three years in DP camps. He recalls:
"...This issue of the rehabilitation of She'arit Hapleta ("surviving remnant"), the Jews' desire to live, is unbelievable. People got married; they would take a hut and divide it into ten tiny rooms for ten couples. The desire for life overcame everything - in spite of everything I am alive, and even living with intensity.
When I look back today on those three years in Germany I am amazed. We took children and turned them into human beings, we published a newspaper; we breathed life into those bones. The great reckoning with the Holocaust? Who bothered about that... you knew the reality, you knew you had no family, that you were alone, that you had to do something. You were busy doing things. I remember that I used to tell the young people: Forgetfulness is a great thing. A person can forget, because if they couldn't forget they couldn't build a new life. After such a destruction to build a new life, to get married, to bring children into the world? In forgetfulness lay the ability to create a new life... somehow, the desire for life was so strong that it kept us alive…"
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