“It
Was the Saddest Day of My Life”
– The First Days of Liberation
In 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, European Jewry numbered some
nine and a half million Jews. After the Holocaust, some four million remained.
At the end of the war, Holocaust survivors – individuals and broken families –
found themselves scattered throughout Europe: in extermination and concentration
camps, in hiding places, in monasteries, remote villages, forests, Russian
plains, and ruined towns. Of the glorious Jewish communities in Europe, nothing was
left but a small surviving remnant – often merely a single survivor from a family,
a community, sometimes even a city. This lesson plan focuses on the liberation of
survivors from the camps, their physical rehabilitation - their condition was
usually poor at the time of liberation – and the attempts by survivors to start a
new life.
During 1944-1945, toward the end of World War II, Soviet, British and U.S.
soldiers liberated what remained of European Jewry from the various labor,
concentration and extermination camps. The liberation came with mixed feelings
for the survivors, ranging from happiness to sadness, from
the sense of a new
beginning to grief over their immense personal loss.
During the first weeks of liberation, survivors suffered from severe malnutrition,
disease, and a difficult emotional state. For thousands, liberation had arrived too
late, and they died of illness, exhaustion and, sometimes, overeating. Many of the
survivors had lost most of their families. In effect, it was only after receiving
the initial assistance, which slightly improved their physical condition, that
survivors began the difficult emotional task of internalizing the tragedy that
had befallen them and their people.
“It Was the Saddest Day of My Life”
Yitzhak “Antek” Zukerman, from: Return to
Life, Yad Vashem and Ghetto Fighters’ House, Tel
Aviv 1995, p. 13.
