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DISPLACED PERSONS
As the Allied armies swept through Europe in 1944 and 1945, they found seven to nine
million displaced people (known collectively as Displaced Persons, DPs) living in countries not
their own. More than six million returned to their native lands. But more than one million
refused repatriation. Most of them were Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and
Yugoslavs. Some had collaborated with the Nazis and were afraid of retaliation should they
return home. Others feared persecution by the new Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
Jewish survivors could not return home. Their communities were shattered, their homes
destroyed or occupied by strangers. In the east, they were not welcome in the land of their
birth. (Many who did, such as Leon Feldhandler, the civilian leader of the escape from the
Sobibor extermination camp, were murdered by the Christians back home, because they were
Jews.) With nowhere to go, they were forced to live in camps set up on the sites where they
had been imprisoned. For most of them, this meant a prolonged stay in Germany living in the
midst of those who had sought to impose the Final Solution.
The beleaguered American army was hard pressed to juggle the multiple assignment of
serving as both an occupation force and a counterforce in the new Cold War, and of dealing with
the problems of the survivors. Short-term problems – housing, medical treatment, food,
attempting to reunite families – were acute and demanding. The army had no long-range
strategy for resettling those who could not or would not return home.
Most Jewish displaced persons wanted to begin a new life in Palestine. Although many
would have preferred to emigrate to the United States, they were not willing to wait for years to
qualify for admission. In 1945, most Jewish DPs were survivors of the concentration camps,
partisans, or those who had spent the war in hiding. Life in the concentration camps had taken
a hard toll. The survivors were destitute, and often sick. After liberation, the inhabitants of the
DP camps were often dirty. If they were not depressed, they were argumentative. They were
haunted by nightmares and mistrusted authority – even the American authorities who were
trying to help them. Living in Germany in camps that also housed people who openly hated
Jews did little to improve their morale.
Living conditions in the camps were unpleasant. Camps were overcrowded, and although
the DPs were not starved, there was never enough food. Coping again with life, with the
prospect of living after everything that had been endured, was the greatest difficulty. American
Major Irving Heymont, who directed the Landsberg displaced persons camp, wrote to his wife:
“The camp is filthy beyond description. Sanitation is virtually unknown. . . .
The Army units we relieved obviously did nothing more than insure that rations
were delivered to the camp. With few exceptions the people of the camp
themselves appear demoralized beyond hope of rehabilitation. They appear to be
beaten both spiritually and physically.”
Britain was unwilling to permit Jewish emigration to Palestine. Trying to preserve the
remnants of its empire, it was reticent to alienate the Arab world hostile to a potential Jewish
state. The United States was not ready to receive an influx of refugees. Soldiers were coming
home from the war. It was a time of transition from war production to a civilian economy, and
there was a fear that refugees would consume scarce resources and take jobs away from
Americans. Nativistic thinking did not end with World War II, even if the isolationists were
silenced. Within a few weeks of taking office as president, Harry Truman dispatched Earl
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Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, to report on the displacedpersons camps. The report was a bombshell. Harrison concluded that:
“We [the United States] appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated
them, except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in
large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder
whether the German people seeing this are not supposing that we are following or
at least condoning Nazi policy.”
His recommendations were sweeping: the special status of Jews must be recognized;
they should be evacuated from Germany swiftly; and 100,000 Jews should be admitted to
Palestine. Truman, who was later to become a hero to the Jews for recognizing Israel as a state,
followed his humanitarian impulses. He endorsed the report, rebuked the army, and intensified
the pressure on Britain to allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. He also opened the
United States to limited immigration. His personal sentiments were clear: "It is unthinkable
that they should be left indefinitely in camps in Europe."
In response to growing international pressure, the British called for an Anglo-American
Commission of Inquiry made up of six American and six British commissioners. Their strategy
was to buy some time for conditions to improve and to kill the political momentum by a
committee report. The commission was also shocked by conditions in the camps and was
impressed by the desire of Jewish displaced persons to go to Palestine. It recommended that
100.000 be admitted to Palestine immediately, a suggestion promptly rejected by the British
government. Foreign Minister Bevin wryly commented that: "The Americans wanted 100,000
Jews in Palestine because they didn't want them in New York."
Slowly, the survivors renewed their lives. At first, the DP camps consisted primarily of
single men. Fewer women had survived. Life was lonely. Relief agencies such as the United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) took care of basic daily needs, but in
the fall of 1945, Jewish relief organizations came pouring into the camps. Personnel from the
Jewish Agency and the Jewish Brigade worked with the survivors. They started schools and
agricultural farms. They taught Hebrew and began the preliminary organizing that would make
the displaced persons a potent political force on behalf of the establishment of a Jewish state in
Palestine.
Jewish chaplains from the American army and Va'ad Haatzala, the rescue group organized
by Orthodox Jews to save religious Jews and their religious institutions, conducted religious
services. In 1946, the camp newspapers of Landsberg described the celebration of Purim, the
Jewish festival when Haman is defeated because of the tenacity of Mordecai and the bravery of
Esther:
“Hitler hangs in many variants and many poses: A big Hitler, a fat Hitler, a
small Hitler, with medals and without medals. Jews hung him by his head, by his
feet, or by his belly. Or: a painter's ladder with a paint and brush, here a
tombstone with the inscription “P.N.” (po nikbar). Here lies Hitler, may his name be
blotted out.”
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee worked to improve living conditions,
and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) began occupational training.
In October 1945, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the effort to build a Jewish state in
Palestine, visited the camps. Major Irving Heymont, the commander of Landsberg, described
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the visit to his wife: "To the people of the camp he is a god. . . . Never had I seen such energy
displayed in the camps." To the survivors, Ben-Gurion said:
“I come to you with empty pockets. I have no certificates for you. I can
only tell you that you are not abandoned. You are not alone. You will not live
endlessly in camps like this. All of you who want to come to Palestine will be
brought there as soon as is humanly possible. I bring you no certificates – only
hope.”
On July 4, 1946, a mob of Poles attacked the one hundred and fifty Jews who had
returned to the town of Kielce. Forty-two were killed and fifty wounded. Before the war,
twenty-four thousand Jews had lived in Kielce; the one hundred and fifty who were targets of
the pogrom were survivors who had come home looking for their families and their homes. The
Kielce pogrom was inspired by the age-old blood libel that was part of the classic pattern of antiJewish violence: the mob believed that Jews were killing Christian children and drinking their
blood, or using the blood to bake Passover wafers. In Kielce, the Poles were also stirred up by
fear that the Jews would reclaim their lost property.
Appeals were made to church leaders and civic authorities to intervene in order to prevent
a massacre. The church was silent, and the police response was to confiscate weapons held by
Jews. The only priest in the town who protested the pogrom was removed from his pulpit within
the week.
The news of the Kielce pogrom spread like wildfire throughout the remnant of the Jewish
community in Eastern Europe. It was as though nothing had changed. Jews throughout Poland
understood that it was not safe to return home; the future lay elsewhere.
Illegal emigration to the American zone of occupied Germany, which had been a trickle
immediately after the war, intensified as panicked Jews sought to leave postwar Poland.
Life inside the DP camps improved dramatically in 1946, when Polish Jews who had been
released from the Soviet Union entered along with those escaping the Kielce pogrom. An UNRRA
official described the site of their arrival at the Zilcheim DP camp near Frankfurt:
“What appeared to be an endless queue of refugees, packs and bundles on
their backs' plodded up the path toward the camp. Never had I seen such a
bedraggled lot of people. Mothers held infants to their breasts, clutching the hands
of tiny youngsters who stumbled alongside them. As I watched, a group halted
and, throwing their bundles to the ground, literally fell in their tracks from
exhaustion, unable to make the last few yards to the camp. . . . They had arrived in
the last few days from Krakow and Polish Silesia, more than seven hundred miles
distant. Fathers, mothers and children alike, hitch-hiked, rode trucks, jumped
freight trains, slept in the forests at night and somehow managed to reach here.”
Survivors married. Many who had lost a spouse remarried. Rabbis were particularly
lenient in their interpretation of Jewish law to permit remarriage. By tradition, a widow may not
remarry unless eyewitnesses had seen her husband dead. Such ordinary evidence of death was
not possible after the Holocaust. The Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, ruled that it
was sufficient to know that a person had been deported to a death camp or selected, to assume
that he or she was dead. A survivor couched his marriage proposal in words framed by tragedy:
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"I am alone. I have no one. I have lost everything. You are alone. You have no one. You
have lost everything. Let us be alone together."
New families were formed. Mothers whose children had been murdered by the Nazis gave
birth again. A poster in the Bad Reichenhall Jewish Center proudly listed the natural increase of
the population. September 1946: 8 girls, 10 boys. October: 18 girls, 17 boys. November: 8
girls, 10 boys. Life was renewed even as memories of death lingered.
Political life also began anew. By 1947, more than seventy newspapers – in many
different languages and advocating every political and religious point of view – were published in
the camps. Zionists organized agricultural training programs for the future settlers of Palestine.
Youth movements were introduced into the camps. There were one hundred different schools,
both religious and secular, serving twelve thousand students. Two high schools were
established. So were vocational schools, agricultural schools, a teacher-training seminar, even a
yeshiva. Collective farms – kibbutzim – were organized in preparation for life in Palestine.
Yiddish was the lingua franca, but those who wanted to begin life in Palestine learned Hebrew.
Political demonstrations were mounted against the British for their recalcitrance in granting
independence to Palestine.
Camp life was by its nature temporary. Everyone in the camps was en route to a new
home somewhere, even if it was not yet known where that home would be. A story circulated in
the DP camps. “Where would you like to go?” an immigration official asked a Jew. “To
Australia,” he responded. “But that's so far away, responded the official. “From what?”
On December 22, 1945, President Truman granted preferential treatment to displaced
persons who wanted to immigrate to the United States. Within the next eighteen months,
22,950 DPs were admitted, 15,478 of them Jews. But the problem of what to do with the
displaced persons could not be solved merely by a minor adjustment of the quotas. Even the
advocates of immigration were hesitant. An American Friends Service Committee leader, whose
organization supported immigration, said:
“The fact is that we are no longer the “land of opportunity” of the usual
European immigrant's dream and this is especially true if we have a serious
unemployment problem following the war. . . . Now that immigration to this country
is not a matter of actual rescue from persecution or danger . . . we feel that plans
for immigration should be given careful consideration and weighed against all
possible alternatives of return to the native country, remaining in the country of
current residence, or possible migration to other countries.”
In the summer of 1946, with the American zone of occupied Germany flooded by the
100,000 Polish Jews newly released by the Soviet Union and by Jews fleeing Eastern Europe
after the Kielce pogrom, congressional action could no longer be avoided.
The American Jewish community marshaled its allies in a successful campaign to- combat
the nativistic and anti-Semitic groups that wanted to keep the lid on immigration. The
Protestant Federal Council of Churches and the Catholic publication Commonweal endorsed a
liberalized immigration law that would bring 400,000 DPs to the United States within four years.
The political struggle for a new law was ferocious.
In 1948, Congress passed a bill providing for the admission of 200,000 over four years.
Truman called it “flagrantly discriminatory against Jews.” In 1950, the act was amended to
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make it slightly less discriminatory. The change was too late: in 1949, most of the Jewish DPs
had gone to the newly established state of Israel.
A popular joke in the DP camps spoke of those waiting to leave Europe.
“Two DPs meet and one asks where the other plans to emigrate. “Canada or
Australia.” “Why not the United States?” “Because the Americans put you on a
scale, and start adding papers to the other side. When the paper equals your
weight, you're ready to go.”
There was a consistency to American policy before and after the war. Paper walls were
erected. According to the historian of American immigration Mark Wyman: “There is truth
behind this humor. A resettlement officer once laid out the documents in a single case file for
entry to the United States: they stretched seventeen yards.”
During the three years after the war, only 41.000 DPs were admitted to the United
States. Two-thirds of them were Jews. In the four years following the passage of the
immigration law of 1948, 365,223 displaced persons were brought to American shores. Half the
immigrants were Roman Catholic and only 16 percent Jews. Some of the DPs openly admitted
to having collaborated with the Nazis. All in all, fewer than 100,000 Jews were able to reach the
United States in the years between the end of the war and the closing of the last DP camp seven
years later.
In retrospect, however, the 1948 legislation was a turning point in American immigration
policy. The act governing the admission of DPs was a precedent for the American response to
subsequent waves of refugees, including Hungarians in 1957, Cubans in 1960, and Vietnamese
in 1979.
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