“It
Was the Saddest Day of My Life”
– The First Days of Liberation
During 1944-1945, towards the end of World War II, Soviet, British and U.S. soldiers
rescued what remained of European Jewry from the various labor, concentration and
extermination camps. The liberation entailed mixed feelings for the survivors,
ranging from happiness to sadness, from a 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, the liberation had
arrived too late, and they died of illness, exhaustion and sometimes from
overeating.
Before the Holocaust, the number of Jewish children in Europe is estimated at
some 1.5 million. At War’s end, only some 150,000 children remained, out of them
some 40,000 were orphans under the age of 17. Among the children were those who
had survived the camps in Poland (for example, some 500 children were liberated
at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp), children returned from the Soviet Union
(the “Repatriation Children”), and children who had hidden in Christian homes or
monasteries. The children from the camps were in the worst state of all – physically
and mentally, they had difficulty distinguishing between good and bad, and had
lost their faith in their fellow man. The Repatriation Children had endured
tortuous wandering, and some suffered from hunger. Many children had been given away and hidden.
Some such children could not be found after the war, while others resisted leaving as they were
accustomed to their new environment. Many of
those that were found, resisted leaving, as they had gotten used to their new
environment. The few abandoned children who had survived, used their smarts.
They became independent and exceptionally resistant to physical and emotional pressure. In the
battle for survival, their moral judgment had been
warped, and thus they learned to survive
by any means possible.
“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.
