“He Remembers Yesterday and Misses Tomorrow” – The Story of
Displaced Persons’ Camps
From the testimony of Elazar Adler:
“This matter of rehabilitating the She’erit Hapleta (the surviving remnant); the desire of Jews to live – it was unbelievable. People got married. They would take a barrack and divide it into ten small room for ten couples. The life instinct overcame everything else – “despite it all, I am alive” – and one even lived an intensive life. When I look
back at the three years in Germany [after the war], I am amazed. We took children and made them into human beings. We printed newspapers. We restored the soul to the bones. Revenge for the Holocaust? Who had time for that? You knew the reality, you knew you had no family, that you were alone, that you had to act – you were busy
doing.
After such destruction – to building a new life? [To] get married; bring children into the world? Out of forgetting, one could build a new life. Somehow, the life instinct was so strong that it kept us alive, otherwise there would have been suicides. That wasn’t all, however. Today, I see that what saved us was the struggle for
Eretz Israel.
The struggle for Eretz Israel made us recognize that this had to be our main effort. The struggle for
Eretz
Israel meant taking young people and giving them a Zionist education, teaching them Hebrew, sending them to Israel [despite the
immigration restrictions], assisting people on the Bericha routes. We were then at a stage of doing. This doing gave a point to living
[..] it kept us alive.
Source: Yad Vashem Archives, 0.3/5426, pp.41-42.
After the war, Displaced Persons’ (DP) camps were set up by the allies
in Germany, Austria and Italy, for Jews and non-Jews. Life in the DP camps was
difficult, crowded, and afforded no privacy.
Survivors often had little to do and
felt a strong sense
of emptiness. Nevertheless, the story of the DP camps represents an important
chapter in the renewal of the Jewish people as individuals and as a group. The
attempt to recover from the personal, familial and social losses manifested itself
in starting new families, a strong desire to study and learn a craft, and in
establishing communities in the camps with widespread social, cultural, political
and religious activities.
In addition, Zionist ideology and the desire to
start a new home in Eretz Israel gave
survivors hope and strength to fight for a home of their own. With the support
of various organizations, Jews of the DP camps raised world
awareness for their plight, and gathered support to ease the strict immigration laws and
open the gates to Eretz Israel (pre-state Israel). The DP camps were gradually dismantled,
and the last of the survivors left the camps in 1957. An estimated 300,000 people
spent time in Austrian and German DP camps by 1950.
“He Remembers Yesterday and Misses Tomorrow”
Source: Chaim Avni, With Jews in the
Displaced Persons’ Camp –
Emissaries’
Impressions 1945-1947
[Hebrew], Chaverim 1981, pp. 32-35.
