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The Survivors of the Holocaust
By Anita Shapira and Irit Keynan
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Liberation
Spring was never as beautiful as in 1945: six years of the most terrible of wars had
come to an end; the Nazi regime had been beaten and defeated. Allied soldiers
from the West and the East met over the smoking ruins of Berlin. Throughout
Europe, people celebrated the victory and the end of the war. On both sides of
the line that was soon to be called the “Iron Curtain,” a popular burst of joy
and spontaneous brotherhood heralded the end of the nightmare of war, and
brought, for a fleeting moment, hope for a new start to humanity.
One people did not share
in the general euphoria: the Jews of Europe. They were a party to the war
against
Hitler, but they were not a party to the victory. For them, victory had
come too late: most of European Jewry had been exterminated. The Jewish
community in Poland, the largest in Europe, had been almost entirely destroyed:
of the 3,500,000 Jews living in Poland before 1939, only 250,000 were still
alive, most of them in the Soviet Union; 93 percent had perished. The picture
for Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Balkan States was nearly the same.
Eastern European Jewry, the center of the Jewish people ever since the
expulsion from Spain, had been liquidated in gas chambers. The Jews of Western
and Southern Europe also suffered a fatal blow, though the proportion of those
exterminated was lower. It is therefore no accident that the survivors make
little mention of V-E Day in their awareness of the extent of the tragedy, and
the beginning of an almost superhuman effort to pick up the fragments of a
shattered life and start anew.
In all of Europe, not
counting the Soviet Union, there were at the end of the war about 1,500,000
Jews (the figures are estimates, for no census was taken because of the general
chaos), the majority in Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, France, Italy and the Low
Countries. In Germany itself, there were about 60,000 Jews on V-E Day, most of
them prisoners liberated from concentration camps. In Poland, there were about
70,000 Jews; some of them were survivors of the camps, others had gone into
hiding during the war or found refuge on the “Aryan side” by means if false
papers; there were also surviving ghetto fighters, partisans and other others
who had fled to the forests. One by one, they began to emerge from their hiding
places and from the forests, to the surprise and annoyance of their Polish and
Ukrainian neighbors, who had already taken possession of their homes and
property. At the same time, survivors of concentration camps began returning to
Poland, in search of home, family, and friends. Each thought that the bitter
cup had been his lot alone, and that loved ones had surely been spared. The
revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust, the ruins of the Jewish ghetto in
Warsaw, the Jewish quarters in cities and towns now emptied of Jews, was a
terrifying experience. The homeland of Jews for a thousand years had become a
graveyard. The hostility of the populace added to the feeling of terrible tragedy.
A struggle was taking place in Poland between the forces of the Right,
concentrated around the “Armia Krajowa”, the underground organization
affiliated to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and the forces of the
Left, concentrated around the temporary government established under the aegis
of the Soviet occupation authorities in Lublin.
The Jews were considered allies
of the Left. The majority of the Polish populace did not particularly care for
the Russian occupation, which superseded the Nazi occupation. The Catholic
Church had its reservations as well. The only ones who greeted the Red Army
with undiminished joy were the Jews, who viewed it as their savior. Before
long, not a few occupied respectable positions in the new regime, which regarded
them as a loyal contingent in a hostile population. The traditional
antisemitism of the Poles and the Ukrainians, which had received legitimation
and encouragement during the period of the Nazi regime, now found a new
ideological justification. In addition, they feared losing the economic
benefits gained by looting the Jews’ property. Antisemitism was further abetted
by the general insecurity that prevailed in the chaos of the transition period.
Gangs of Ukrainian nationalists rampaged through the country, torturing and
murdering Jews and Communists. Traveling by train meant endangering one’s life.
Jews who journeyed to their home town in search of relatives or information
about their fate were sometimes attacked and murdered on their way or upon
arrival, by their ex-neighbors. In Poland more than 500 Jews were killed during
the first year after
liberation (November 1944 to October 1945), while the
government was too weak to prevent the carnage. Before 1947, the Communist
government exercised full control only in the large cities; in the rest of the
country lawlessness reigned.
Thus for the remnants of
Polish Jewry, V-E Day did not bring the relief they had hoped for.
Nevertheless, the force of life was stronger that anything else, and the seeds
of Jewish life began to develop hesitantly, on a temporary basis and under
continuous tension. Emergency relief had to be provided to ensure survival;
medical aid had to be administered to the sick; arrangements had to be made for
the care of orphans; children had to be taken out of convents and Christian
homes which had given them refuge during the Holocaust; schools and other
institutions for children had to be organized; and a network had to be set up
to help people search for relatives. All these efforts led to the renewal of
the Jewish community. The authorities helped them to establish a Central Jewish
Committee, under the leadership of Emil Sommerstein. The Committee included
Jews loyal to the new regime, who represented the Communist position that
Polish Jewry should take part in the rehabilitation of Poland and its
reconstruction as a progressive, peace-loving country, along with Zionists like
Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, who saw their function as providing immediate aid
and relief for the war refugees.
In June 1945, the
repatriation agreement between the Polish and Russian governments, permitting
Polish citizens who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union during the war to
return to their homeland, went into effect. Most of those affected were Jews.
According to various estimates, between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews returned to
Poland from Russia. This is much lower than the previous estimates of the
number of Jews who survived by flight to the Soviet Union. In many cases,
repatriation dashed last hopes held by refugees that their loved ones might
have been spared. At the same time, it gave new life to Polish Jewry: the
returnees brought with them the appearance of normalcy, with the arrival of
whole Jewish families, including children and old people, a phenomenon which
had disappeared several years before the Polish scene. The Communist regime
devoted considerable effort to rehabilitating the returnees. In Lower Silesia,
east of the Oder-Neisse Line, cities, villages and towns were left desolate
after the Germans, who had inhabited the area for generations, were expelled in
the wake of annexation to Poland. The Jews were invited to settle there and
take advantage of the wealth left behind by the Germans. Members of the Jewish
section of the Communist Party carried out a propaganda campaign in which they
appealed to the survivors to rebuild their lives in Poland, with the help of
the new regime. And indeed the urge to live and the desire for security and a
normal life pushed them in the direction of Silesia. Community life began to
develop, educational and cultural institutions were established, and economic
activity was renewed, with the emphasis on productivity, especially in
agriculture. For a moment, it seemed as if the situation of Polish Jewry had
been stabilized.
The Flight from Poland
However, in the summer of
1946, there was a terrible pogrom, shocking in its cruelty, in the city of
Kielce. It took place in broad daylight, under the gaze of the local police
(and some say with their participation). Jews who had managed to survive the
German occupation now found their death in the city of Kielce and its environs,
at the hands of Polish murderers. More that 70 Jews were killed; the government
was too weak to prevent the catastrophe. The axe blows in the heads of the Kielce
victims reverberated throughout Poland; Jews who had hoped to return and to
rebuild their lives in that country experienced a rude awakening. After Kielce,
there was no longer any hope for Polish Jewry except in flight. The great
“Escape Movement” (
bericha) began to take on mass proportions.
The “Escape Movement”
started as the spontaneous reaction of activist groups amongst the survivors,
who already in the days of German occupation had come to the conclusion that
the Holocaust spelled the end of hundreds of years of coexistence between Jews
and other inhabitants of Eastern Europe. This was the conclusion of
Abba Kovner and the group of surviving fighters from the Vilna Ghetto holding out in the
surrounding forests. The same conclusion was reached by a group of Jewish
partisans, led by the Lidovsky brothers, hiding in the forests around Rovno, in
Volhynia. At the same time that they gave aid to the survivors who began
emerging from the forests and other hiding places, these groups made efforts to
contact representatives of the Mossad le-Aliyah Bet (the organization
which directed the “illegal immigration” to Eretz Israel, usually called the
Mossad) in Romania, in order to create a southern escape route to the
Mediterranean Sea. Contact was established among the various groups, and soon
their activities were centered in Lublin, the seat of the provisional Communist
government of Poland. Simultaneously, almost by miracle, contact was made with
a third organized and active group of 300-400 halutzim (Zionist
pioneers), most of them members of the “Hashomer Hatzair” youth movement and a
minority of members of the “Dror” movement. At the outset of the war they had
fled to Soviet Asia, with the intention of finding their way to Eretz Israel.
This hope did not materialize, but the group was spared the fate of those who
remained in Poland and the Baltic States. Their stay in the Soviet Union
strengthened and consolidated the group. And now, after sending emissaries to
make contact with the Lidovsky and Kovner groups, they hastened to Lublin,
driven by the same hope that motivated the other two: to reach Eretz Israel
through the southern gates of Poland.
During the same period, in
January 1945, leaders of the surviving Warsaw Ghetto fighters arrived in
Lublin: Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman,
Zivia Lubetkin and Stephan Grayek. Thus it
was that the remaining prewar leadership of the Zionist youth movements
was concentrated in Lublin. As usual in times of upheaval, the young people took
the initiative and assumed responsibility and leadership. The westward and
southward movement of Jews began spontaneously, as a result of individuals’
determination not to rebuild their lives on the ruins of the past and the
graves of their loved ones. For them, Eretz Israel was not only a land of
refuge in which surviving kin might be found, but also the only place in the
world where a Jew could control his own fate. The survivors of the Zionist
youth movements took over the organization and direction of this spontaneous
immigration, believing that the responsibility for the fate of their people was
in their hands.
However, disagreements
broke out among them: Abba Kovner wanted to direct their steps immediately to
Eretz Israel. He had two aims: aliyah (immigration to Eretz Israel) and
revenge. Yitzhak Zuckerman, on the other hand, thought that the organization
should stay in Poland to organize Jews and help them escape. It was his opinion
that Polish Jewry should not be left without leadership; he therefore demanded
that the leaders of the youth movements remain in Poland until an alternative
leadership cadre should develop. He also rejected the idea of revenge. The
“Asians” took the same stand. Abba Kovner’s group continued on its way to
Romania, and from there to Italy and Eretz Israel. Antek Zuckerman and his
followers stayed in Poland.
At first, the “Escape
Movement” consisted of a thin stream of several thousand persons a month, some
organized and others not, who crossed the borders of Poland on their way west
by three main routes: the northern route – through Stettin, which led to
Germany; the southwestern route through Wroclaw, which led mainly to
Czechoslovakia, and the southeastern route through Katowicz, which led
southward. The movement was basically illegal; it took advantage of the general
chaos still prevailing in the country and at its borders. In the period
immediately following the war, Europe teemed with the movement of refugees; in
the summer of 1945, millions returned to their homes: forced laborers now
liberated, refugees who had fled from the terror of the war, captives and
prisoners of war. They were joined by eight million Germans expelled from the
areas of the Oder-Neisse Line. The news formed a part of this great migration;
on the southern route, they disguised themselves as weeks returning to their
homeland. At the Czechoslovakian border, they took advantage of the sympathy of
the Czechs and the ruling Democratic-Communist Coalition government for the
suffering of the Jews. At the Polish border, the “escapees” were subject to the
arbitrariness of the border guards, who were often happy to look the other way
in return for a watch or a pair of stockings and just as often sent them back
to Poland. Whenever official border crossings were crossed, organizers of the
“underground railroad” opened alternative routes through mountain passes and
along hidden paths; such routes where the going was rough were referred to as
“the green border.”
After the Kielce pogrom,
the “Escape Movement” changed abruptly. The thin stream became a heavy current
and the flight became a semi-legal. In the wake of the pogrom, Yitzhak
Zuckerman, who was respected by the Polish authorities – they regarded him as
the spokesman of the Polish Communist movement – succeeded in reaching a secret
agreement with the Polish Minister of Defense, Marshall Marian Spychalski: in
view of the authorities’ inability to cope with antisemitism and to ensure the
safety of the Jews, they deemed it preferable to solve the “Jewish Problem” by
giving Jews the semi-legal possibility of emigration. It was decided that Jews
would be allowed to leave Poland to certain border stations, although to all
appearances, it remained illegal to cross the border. This arrangement remained
in effect until February 22, 1947, when the border was closed. In the interim,
between 75,000 and 100,000 Jews were able to flee Poland.
In an ironic twist of
fate, Germany now became a haven for Jews. When Germany was defeated by the
Allied forces in 1945, the Western world was shocked and shaken by the revelation
of the horrors of the concentration camps. Even though it had heard about the
death camps in Eastern Poland, when the latter was liberated by the Red Army,
it tended to slough off these reports as products of Soviet propaganda. With
the defeat of Germany, the truth had to be faced, and it was worse than any
nightmare. The liberated camps held about 60,000 Jews, mere shadows of human
beings hovering between life and death. Some of them were already beyond the
hope of rescue. At
Bergen-Belsen, more than 13,000 Jews died after the camp was
liberated, in spite of the devoted care of the Allies’ medical teams, who did
everything in their power to save them.
After the first shock of
liberation had passed, the dead were buried, the sick hospitalized, and the
survivors began to look for their families. Some of them had been cut off for
years from the world beyond barbed wire fences and they cherished the hope that
their loved ones had been spared. In pursuit of this hope, many joined the
“great migration” that took place in Europe in the summer of 1945. Tens of
thousands of Jewish survivors returned to their homes. Those from Western
Europe, France, Italy and the Low Countries were reabsorbed into their native
lands. For them, the odyssey of the Second World War was over. Such was not the
case for most of the survivors from Eastern Europe. They soon discovered that
the Jewish world they had known was desolated and lost, that their native lands
had turned into graveyards for loved ones, and that they themselves were
regarded as unwelcome guests. Eastern Europe vomited the Jews from its midst.
Bereft of home, family, and country, the survivors turned round and made their
way back through Poland to the same camps they had left. At least there they
were assured of a morsel of bread and the friendship of others in a similarplight.
In the fall of 1945,
David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, made a tour of the
camps in Germany. He was received with tears of joy and with a burst of
enthusiasm, for the survivors he was a symbol of hope, of the continued
existence of the Jewish people, and of the security that leadership arouses
among those who feel lost and abandoned. The flag of Zion that he proudly
carried and the idea of a Jewish state which he propounded were adopted by the
survivors with unbounded love, as a kind of compensation that the world would
give them for their suffering. From then on, Eretz Israel would be the last and
only safe hope of redemption, and they grabbed onto it with the frenzy of
drowning men on the verge of death.
For his part, Ben-Gurion
saw the survivors as the great historical opportunity for Zionism. He
immediately understood the unique situation that had been created in Germany:
under the aegis of the Western occupation forces, especially the Americans, it
would be possible to amass Eastern European refugees. These would constitute
the most effective weapon in the Zionist struggle. He had already lost hope of
Britain changing its Eretz Israel policy, as set down in the White Paper
of 1939. During the war, some Zionists had hoped that after the victory Britain
would renew its covenant with the Jewish people, open the doors of Eretz Israel
to mass immigration, and settle the question of the political status of the country
by establishing a Jewish state. Those hopes evaporated when the Labor
government came into power in 1945. It became clear that Britain would continue
to follow its pro-Arab policy, and that it was determined to separate the
question of European Jewry, now focused on the problem of the refugees and the
“displaced persons” (DPs), from the question of Eretz Israel. Ben Gurion
thought that by increasing American involvment in the question of Eretz Israel,
he would be able to create the impetus for changing the status quo. Though the
British were victors in the war, they were now in debt to the Americans,
beholden to them politically as well as economically, and he hoped through the
latter to induce Britain to arrange its policy. It was his belief that the Jewish
DPs in the American occupation zone would bring pressure to bear on the
American government, so that it would urge Britain to open the doors to Eretz
Israel to Jewish immigration. Therefore, even before he returned home,
Ben-Gurion instructed Mossad representatives to encourage the flight of Jews
from Eastern Europe, to direct them to the American occupation zone in Germany,
and, at a later stage, to organize large-scale legal immigration” to Eretz
Israel in spite of Britain.
If it had not been for the
survivors’ strong will and their readiness to brave the dangers of the
“underground railroad”, there would have been no “Escape Movement”. The yishuv
(the Jewish community in Eretz Israel) gave this spontaneous movement its
organizational skills, its economic sources and the leadership ability of its
young people, who had been spared the Holocaust. The combination of the
tenacity of the survivors and the determination and devotion of the shelihim
(emissaries from Eretz Israel) brought about the consolidation of these unique
people’s movement, which will be recorded in the annals of history as one of
the forces that brought about the creation of the Jewish state. In 1946, the
needs and aspirations of the Jewish refugees agreed with those of the Zionist movement,
and from then on the struggle of the homeless for a new life coincided wth the
struggle for the establishment of a Jewish state. Miraculously, the 1939
prophecy of
Berl Katzenelson was to be fulfilled: “I knew that there were times
when even a large state became powerless in the face of the sorrows and
suffering of masses of people.”
In the Displaced Persons’ Camps
When Germany was defeated
by the Allied forces, about 8,000,000 foreign nationals were living on her
soil, most of them forced laborers and prisoners of war. The majority returned
to their homes during the summer of 1945. In 1946-1947, about a million
displaced persons – those for whom repatriation was considered impossible –
still remained in Germany. This population consisted of three main groups: East
Europeans who had been torn from their homes by the Nazis and who were afraid
to return because of the Soviet conquest and new regime; Nazi liberators, who
feared punishment and revenge at the hands of their own people; and Jewish
refugees. Jews constituted twenty-five percent of the general population of
displaced persons. At the end of the war, Germany and Austria were divided into
occupation zones: the British occupation forces were in northern Germany, the
French forces in the west, the American forces in the south, and the Russian
forces in the east. A small number of Jewish refugees were to be found in the
French occupation zone, while more than half of them were located in the
British zone in the Bergen-Belsen camp. The second half of 1946 saw increasing
movement of refugees from east to west, and at the beginning of 1947, when the
number of displaced persons stabilized at 210,000 most of them about 175,000
were in the American zone. This was no accident; rather, it was the result of significant
differences n the way the various occupation forces treated the Jewish
refugees, differences which developed during the summer of 1945 and became more
marked in the course of 1946. Conditions in the camps were improved, food
allotments were increased, and regulations were made to assure the smooth
running of the camps. These were defined as communities of displaced persons
under the protection of the occupation authorities and the direction of the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Almost all
UNRRA personnel were Jews, and they empathized with the refugees.
The
American Joint Distribution Committee and other Jewish philanthropic organizations were
instrumental in improving the standard of living in the camps, by providing
food, clothing, and by organizing educational and relief services. In the
autumn of 1945, the American occupation authorities opened their territories in
Germany and Austria to Jewish refugees streaming in from the East. This policy
remained in effect through the summer and fall of 1946, in spite of British
pressures to change it. The “escapees” were therefore directed to the American
zone. In the British occupation zone, they received mush harsher treatment; the
British did not regard the problem of Jewish refugees as different from that of
other displaced persons, and they refused as a matter of principle to accord
the Jews special treatment. As a result, living conditions in the camps located
in the British zone were worse than those in the American. The British also
limited the entrance of “escapees” into their area.
Two separate organizations
were created to represent the survivors of the Holocaust: one in behalf of the
refu gees in the American zone, and the other, led by Joseph Rosensaft for the refugees
in the Bergen-Belzen camp, in the British zone. In June 1945, the “Central
Committee of the Liberated Jews in Germany” was established, with the
participation of these two organizations, and in January 1946, the first
Congress was held in Munich. No real power was in the hands of the DP bodies,
which served mainly in the capacity of public spokesmen; the means for running
the camps remained with the UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee, which
were in no hurry to hand over their authority to the DPs.
“To Live Normal Lives”
Leo Srole, who directed
the relief activities of UNRRA at Landsberg, one of the largest DP camps in the
American zone, described the refugees in these words: “The Jewish refugees have
an almost obsessive desire to live normal lives again.” The phrase is
indicative of the mental state of the survivors of the Holocaust. In spite of
the limitation, life in the camps was full of vitality and intensity; it was as
if the survivors were trying to make up all at once for lost time and lost
life. More than anything else, they yearned for human relationships. At first
this was manifested in heartrending searches for blood relations. The almost
desperate seach for familiar faces endeared to the survivor anyone who had had
any connection with his former life: individuals who came from the same town or
the same city and even chance acquaintances became close friends. People from
the same town grouped together, and the group became a substitute for the lost
family. The longing for Jewish faces was so great that a chance acquaintance of
two Jews in a faraway train station often turned into a meeting of close
friends and partners in fate. Clearly, the same feelings of love that were
forged in concentration camps and the death camps now formed the basis for the
development of new kinships. Everyone hastened to raise a family. The fact that
the refugee camps were generally located in abandoned army barracks with their
gigantic halls, which allowed no privacy whatsoever, and their crowded conditions
which grew ever worse as the “Escape Movement” increased, did not dampen the
desire for the warmth of a family. The birth rate in the camps was among the
highest in the world. Even if we take into account the fact that most of the
survivors were between the ages of 20 and 40, it is impossible not to be
impressed by the outburst of the passion for life and the belief in the future
which these survivors of the sword revealed in their readiness for renewed
emotional involvement and family responsibility. The child became the symbol of
a longed-for normalcy, of the renewal of the chain that had been severed with
the annihilation of an entire generation of Jewish children. It was as if a
child was the personal contribution of each survivor to the continued existence
of the Jewish people.
One of the expressions of
the yearning for intimacy was the establishment of the “aliyah kibbutzim”.
Before long, those refugees who had been members of youth movements became
active again; They organized young people into aliyah collectives, groups which
lived together in a commune while engaging in extensive educational activities
designed to prepare them for life in Eretz Israel. Their “preparation”
consisted primarily of the study of Hebrew and Jewish history, and community
work. The kibbutzim became centers of cultural activity lectures, community
singing, theater performances and the like. For many young people, bereft of
mother and father, cut off from Jewish life for years, the kibbutzim served as
a substitute family, a source of friendship and a focus of identity. The
educational activities carried out in the framework of the aliya collectives
encompassed the refugees who were not members. The dynamic atmosphere of the
youth movements, with their optimism and their wholehearted belief in Eretz
Israel, helped to resocialize these youngsters, underdeveloped in body and
overage in spirit, who now discovered, late, the world of youth.
Most of the inhabitants of
the camps longed to return to their studies and their books. They carried out
intensive cultural activity: schools and kindergartens were organized, as well
as courses for adults, which were called “people’s universities.” A Yeshiva
(center for religious studies) was not absent from the scene either. The
library was a very important institution in the camps. No matter how many books
were sent from Eretz Israel and from the United States, they were not enough to
meet the demand. Rabbis serving in the American army contributed books that had
been confiscated in Germany. The great variety of newspapers produced reflected
the process of reconstruction of Jewish life in the camps and the political
involvement of the refugees, as well as the limited education of many of them
as a result of the war. Yiddish was the spoken language, and it was sometimes
written in Latin script and with Polish spelling. Hebrew was a very popular
subject of study as it was considered vital preparation for aliyah
(immigration) to Israel.
Soldiers from Eretz Israel
Although no real
statistical analyses have been made of the socio-economic status of the
survivors in the Holocaust, it is estimated that about 75 percent of the adult
population of the DP camps came from the lower middle classes: they were
artisans, shopkeepers and merchants. About 20 percent were skilled laborers,
and only about 5 percent were members of the upper middle class: managers and
professionals. These findings, like the fact that a higher proportion of the
survivors were men rather than woman, the absence of children and old people,
and the fact that more than 50 percent of the survivor population were between
the ages of 17 and 39, reflect the Nazi extermination policy. The
intellectuals, the potential leadership of the Jewish people, were destroyed in
their entirety. The survivors were left without leadership. While it was true
that here and there natural leaders, like Dr. Zalman Greenberg from St.
Ottilien, or Joseph Rosensaft from Bergen-Belsen, made their appearance, the
refugees generally sought strength and support from the Jews who had not been
through the war. For leadership and direction, they looked first and foremost
to the Jews of the yishuv of Eretz Israel and to those of the United
States. The rabbis serving in the American army had a great influence on the
survivors. They had connections with the occupation authorities, and more than
once opened up routes for “escapees”, or corrected injustices in the
authorities’ treatment of the DPs. But by far the greatest part in organizing
the refugees and consolidating them socially and politically was played by the yishuv.
The first contact between the survivors of the Holocaust and the yishuv
was through the Jewish volunteers from Eretz Israel who served with the British
Army. Before long, these soldiers took up the task of looking after the
survivors. Long before the Jewish Agency delegation arrived in Germany (they
did not succeed in breaking through bureaucratic obstacles thrown in their path
by the British until December 1945), the Jewish soldiers were engaged in aid
and relief activities; they were the ones who supplied the vehicles, the fuel
and the provisions for many “escapees” on their way to the DP camps in Germany,
or to the coasts of Italy and France. They were the ones who began to organize
homes for children and to take them out of convents and Christian homes. They
were the ones who began to organize homes for children and to take them out of
convents and Christian homes. They were the ones who began the work of
organizing life in the camps. However, their most important contribution was in
raising the morale of the refugees: the sight of a soldier with the Star of
David on his shoulder was both exciting and moving: it aroused feelings of
national pride and identification, feelings sorely needed by the survivors. This
was heightened when the representatives of the various welfare organizations
began to arrive, and the delegation from Eretz Israel stood out because of its
identification with the DPs. Its members came from the same lands as the
survivors of the Holocaust. They knew the language and the mentality of the
refugees, so that for the latter, communication and attachment came naturally
and spontaneously. To that was added the aura of hope wich the name “Eretz
Israel” carried with it. It seemed natural that, in the absence of leadership,
Jews from Eretz Israel should fulfill that function for the refugees.
Life in the camps was
characterized by high tension and by the continuous alternation of hope and
despair. The great source of hope was Eretz Israel. The lesson of the Holocaust
was that life in the Diaspora was full of danger; there was no way of knowing
what the morrow would bring, and therefore the Jews needed a homeland of their
own. The feeling that the whole world was against the Jews did not disappear at
the end of the war; for the DPs, the Jewish struggle for survival continued.
The experience of living in a void, and the impermanence and insecurity of life
in the camps strengthened this feeling. Intuitively, the survivors turned to
Eretz Israel as the last port, the only hope. This was reinforced by the fact
that it was the only land whose inhabitants not only expressed willingness to
take in the refugees, but were also engaged in a struggle towards this end. The
doors of the United States, Canada and the rest of the countries of the West
remained closed to the refugees (only 12,000 of them immigrated to the United
States before 1948). Thus, even those refugees who hoped to immigrate
eventually to the United States, either through the help of relatives or
through other means, identified publicly with the aspirations of the majority
to make their home in Eretz Israel and with the demand for a Jewish homeland.
The emotional intensity of
the refugees’ lives was also manifested in their political activity. Zionist
parties sprung up again overnight. The controversies among them increased
involvement in public life. Demonstrations, marches, public gatherings, and
political meetings were everyday events. To these was added the influence of
the delegation from Eretz Israel and the activity of the “shelihim.” It was no
wonder that when the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and UNRRA took a
survey among the refugees (at the beginning of 1946), more than 95 percent
expressed the desire to immigrate to Eretz Israel.
As we have noted, life in
the camps was characterized by the alternation of hope and desire. The
declaration of President Harry
Truman, in the summer of 1945, that 100,000
refugees should be allowed to immigrate to Eretz Israel, aroused a wave of
enthusiasm. However, when months passed and it became clear that the British
were not going to open the gates of Eretz Israel, despair began to set down.
The creation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the preparations
preceding its visit and the anticipation of its decisions caused great
excitement in the camps. When the Committee reached the unanimous decision that
100,000 immigration permits should be given to displaced persons in the camps,
the refugees were sure that this time redemption was at hand. Again they were
to be disappointed; British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin did not heed the
recommendations of the committee, and the gates of Eretz Israel remained closed
to immigration. Thus two years after V-E Day, the Jewish refugees were still
living in transit camps, still unable to settle down and reconstruct their
lives. Their frustrations increased and hopes for the future looked dim. True,
their lives were not in danger, but they lived on the charity of the UNRRA and
the Joint Distribution Committee, and most were unable to work for a living.
The work they did in the camps (maintenance, building, repairs) was done on a
volunteer basis. They had no desire to become part of the German economy. A
black market economy was thriving in Germany at the time, mainly supported by
Allied soldiers. Not a few of the DPs took part in it and this harmed the
reputation of the survivors with the occupation authorities (who usually turned
a blind eye to the involvement of the military in the black market), as well as
with the mass media. Among the occupation forces, hostility increased towards
the refugees as it decreased towards the Germans. [..] Unlike the non-Jewish
refugees, no solution had been found for the Jews, and they continued – as the
authorities saw it – to disrupt the pattern of life in Germany, which was
gradually returning to normal.
To Eretz Israel
In the stifling,
frustrating atmosphere of the camps, “illegal” immigration served as a safety
valve and as the last resort. In the “illegal” immigration enterprise, as in
the “Escape Movement” from Eastern Europe to Germany and Eretz Israel, private
concerns coincided with national ones.
The “illegal” immigration
to Eretz Israel, in contrast with the immigration sanctioned by the British
authorities by means of immigration permits (“certificates”) began before the
outbreak of the war and continued until 1941, and was renewed in 1944. When
“escapees” began once again to make their way to the coasts of Italy, where
they were met by soldiers from Eretz Israel, Aliyah Bet began to organize an
extensive network of “illegal” immigration. The scheme was carried out under
the leadership of Shaul Meirov (later called Avigur), who had established the
central office of Aliyah Bet in Paris. The political and economic uncertainty
in Europe following the war facilitated the creaton of a complex Mossad network
in Italy, France, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and other countries.
The network took care of purchasing vessels and equipping them, running the
ships, boarding the immigrants and bringing them to Eretz Israel. Mossad
representatives sailed with the ships and later commanded them. This network
was connected with the “escape” network, and although the two were distinct
organizations, both actually operated under the direction of Shaul Meirov, and
were in effect two arms of the same body. One was responsible for bringing the
immigrants to points of embarkation, and the other for their journey at sea.
They were joined by a third organization, the Hagana, which was responsible
through the naval unit of the Palmach for escorting the ships and disembarking
the immigrants on the shores of Eretz Israel.
The route of “escape” and
“illegal” immigration was no pleasure trip; often the refugees crossed the
border while the guards looked the other way, either out of sympathy for their
plight or because they had been bribed. But in other cases, a border crossing
involved the danger of being sent back to the country from which they had fled,
or making their way over the mountains through rough and dangerous passes. This
fact did not deter families, even those with small infants, from embarking on
the perilous journey. When they finally reached the coast, and either went to
transit camps or boarded ship to Eretz Israel, they still faced many
hardships. Even though the organizers tried their utmost to make it easier for
the immigrants, living conditions aboard these ships was terrible. The refugees
slept in bunks no more than half a meter wide, one on top of the other. They were
crammed together, and sanitary conditions were dreadful; food, and worse, water
was limited. Under such conditions, the refugees sailed through calm waters and
stormy seas, in the heart of the summer and in the cold of the winter. A few
days’ journey often turned into a nightmare lasting several weeks. In spite of
these hardships, the DPs fought for the right to board the ships. Thus – after
all they had been through – the refugees once again set out with the few
belongings they had over their shoulders and undertook the perils of the
journey to Eretz Israel. Between 1945 and 1948, 66 “illegal” vessels carrying
70,000 immigrants made their way to Eretz Israel. Of these, 64 sailed from
Europe and two from North Africa. After the first successful landings in 1945
and at the beginning of 1946, the British tightened their control of the
waterways. They attempted to stop the “Escape Movement” by appealing to the
governments of Eastern and Western Europe. These fell on deaf ears - whether
for reasons of domestic policy, wanting to “embarrass” Britain in the Middle
East, or perhaps simply because of sympathy with the refugees, the countries
did not comply. Britain appealed to the governments in control of the ports of
embarkation to prevent the “illegal” vessels from sailing, but this also
failed. They were left with only one course of action: a naval blockade of the
coast of Eretz Israel. And so it happened that the most glorious navy in the
world was pitted against the wretched vessels carrying the survivors of the
Holocaust. Destroyers with the most sophisticated equipment were recruited for
the struggle against the “illegal” immigration. The refugees, with nothing on
their side but determination and the readiness to sacrifice, were no match for
the British navy. Vessel after vessel was intercepted and brought to the port
of Haifa or (after the autumn of 1946) to Cyprus. Once again, the odyssey of
the DPs ended behind barbed wire, this time in detention camps in Palestine and
Cyprus. More than once, boarding parties intercepting the “illegal” ships fired
on and killed refugees crowded together on their decks. After July 29, 1946,
the “Black Sabbath” when the united armed struggle of the yishuv in
Palestine against the British mandate creased, the “illegal” immiration became
the main front in the fight against the British. It was also the only strategy
on which there was agreement among all circles of the yishuv and the
Zionist movement; the justice of the venture was never a subject of controversy
in contrast to armed resistance in Eretz Israel, on which opinion was divided.
In the end, Great Britain
could not hold out against the tenacity of the survivors. The “Exodus”
affair made it clear that under the political conditions prevailing in the aftermath
of the war, Britain was not able to adequately deal with the problem of the
DPs. The immigrants on board the “Exodus”, which sailed from Port-de-Bouc and
was intercepted near the coast of Eretz Israel, were returned in the British
ships to their port of departure. Their refusal to disembark in France, in
spite of the suffering they had undergone on the British ships, demonstrated
the valor of the weak against the wickedness of a power insensitive to human
suffering. When the same power revealed its heartlessness by sending the
immigrants back to Germany (to the British zone, where occupation authorities
could disembark them by force), the entire civilized world, including citizens
of Britain, was shocked by the unequal struggle in which humane justice was
defeated by brute force. Three years after the end of the war, the problem of
the DPs, the remnants of the Jewish people who survived the Holocaust,
continued to trouble the conscience of citizens of Europe and the United
States. When the British persisted in their refusal to open the gates of Eretz
Israel to the survivors, it became clearer that a Jewish state would have to be
created in order to solve the problem. The first to perceive this fact were the
Jewish people themselves, foremost among them, members of the American Jewish
community. The national awakening of American Jewry, which began after the
Holocaust, was reinforced during the three years between the end of the war and
the establishment of the State of Israel by the existence and suffering of the
DPs and their unrelenting struggle to immigrate to Eretz Israel. The
“underground railroad” and the “illegal” immigration operations exposed the
American Jewish public daily to the fate of the survivors of the Holocaust,
increasing their awareness of the problem. In this way, Jews in the United
States as well as in other parts of the Diaspora began to see that the problem
of the refugees could be solved only by the establishment of a Jewish State.
The “Jewish State in the making” was created on the tracks of the “underground
railroad” and on the routes of the “illegal” immigration. More than any other
aspect of the flight for independence, the struggle of the refugees brought
into relief the common fate of the Jewish people in the Diaspora and in the yishuv,
a fate which found concrete expression in the mission of that generation: the
creation of a Jewish State.
The Creation of a Jewish State
The British tried to separate
the solution to the “Jewish problem” from the solution of the problem of Eretz
Israel. They claimed that the problem of the Jewish refugees would be solved by
returning them to their homes in Europe and rehabilitating them here. The
problem of Eretz Israel was a political question that would have to be solved
in accordance with their Middle East policy. Bevin’s approach was based on the
denial of the connection between the Holocaust and Eretz Israel. In contrast,
the Zionist leadership, headed by David Ben-Gurion, tried to prove the opposite:
that the solution to the problem of the survivors of the Holocaust
would be found only in Eretz Israel.
[..] After the establishment of
the State of Israel, some ten thousand DPs took part in the War of
Independence, and many shed blood in defense of their new homeland. When the
doors were opened, about two-thirds of the 250,000 survivors chose to immigrate
to Israel, despite the hardships, which followed in the wake of independence.
One-third chose to reconstruct their lives in Western Europe or overseas. In
1948, changes were made in the immigration regulations of Canada and the United
States, enabling a large part of the survivors to find refuge in these
countries. Within a few years’ time, the DPs were fully absorbed in the
countries in which they settled.
Anita Shapira, Professor of the History of the Jewish People, Dean of Faculty of the
Humanities, Tel Aviv University
Irit Keynan, Ph.D in the History of the Jewish People and Director of the Hagana Archives
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