Displaced Persons, 1945-1950: The social and cultural perspective

 

Dr Angelika Königseder and Dr Juliane Wetzel,

Zentrum fur Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin

 

Summary: This essay looks particularly at the social organisation of the Displaced Person camps and the cultural activities organised by the DPs themselves, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It draws on evidence from personal testimonies as well as more official documents and histories.

 

 

The number of Displaced Persons liberated by the Allied armies – six and a half to seven million – suggests the dimensions of the problems faced by the liberating troops. Yet, in spite of all the difficulties involved in transporting and providing for this mass of humanity in war-ravaged Europe, the military managed to repatriate over four million DPs [1] by the end of July 1945 and nearly six million by September 1945.[2] There were around a million DPs who, for one reason or another, were non-repatriable. These people may be roughly divided into three categories: (1) non-Jews from Poland and the USSR whom the Nazis had forcibly brought to Germany to be used as slave labourers but who did not wish to be repatriated because of their political differences with the new regimes in their home countries; (2) Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Balts who had willingly come to work for the Germans during the war and were for the most part sympathetic to the Nazi regime, often volunteering to join the SS. These individuals feared being prosecuted for treason or war crimes in their countries of origin and felt more secure living in the chaotic conditions of post-war Germany than in their homelands; (3) Jewish DPs,[3] who were totally debilitated, having survived the horrors of the concentration camps or, more rarely, lived out the war in hiding.

 

However terrible the fate of the non-Jewish Displaced Persons may have been, it does not compare to the tragedy of the Jews. Millions of non-Jewish slave labourers and POWs at least had the option of returning to their homes and families, whereas the Jewish DPs were completely cut off from their roots and had nowhere to go. One survivor described the experience: 'The Jews suddenly faced themselves. Where now? Where to? For them things were not so simple. To go back to Poland? To Hungary? To streets empty of Jews, towns empty of Jews, a world without Jews. To wander in those lands, lonely, homeless, always with the tragedy before one´s eyes … and to meet, again, a former Gentile neighbour who would open his eyes wide and smile, remarking with double meaning, "What! Yankel! You’re still alive!"'[4]

 

Accommodation had to be found for the non-repatriable DPs who remained in Germany, Austria, and Italy. The US Army set up camps that were technically known as assembly centres. They varied in size from sites with fifty people to camps housing over 7000 persons. They comprised barracks, former POW and slave labour camps, industrial workers´ housing, tent cities, hotels, apartment buildings, garages, stables, monasteries, hospitals, sanatoriums, schools, and so forth.

        

In the first weeks after liberation, the Allies did not recognize the Jews as a separate group. Nor did they consider them a nationality. This had far-reaching consequences because it meant that camps that housed only Jewish DPs were the exception and that Jews who had suffered persecution were often forced to live in camps alongside their former tormentors, for instance, concentration camp guards. It is difficult to gauge the psychological effects this new form of humiliation had on them. During the long years of persecution, Jews had come to believe that after liberation the world would welcome them with open arms and seek to make amends for the injuries that had been inflicted on them. Instead, they were once again compelled to live in camps. Although these could not be compared to Nazi concentration camps, they nevertheless kept alive the negative feelings associated with the National Socialist period.

 

In Germany where people tried to repress or even forget the crimes against European Jews which were committed by Germans and their collaborators, living Jews showed them quite plainly their liability. Therefore there was almost no contact between survivors and the German population. This was not only the case in the country responsible for the Holocaust; there was also little enthusiasm for the returning Jewish citizens, and a systematic refusal to recognize the Jewish fate, in other Western European countries like the Netherlands, France, or Belgium.[5]

 

Kitty Hart, who survived Auschwitz, was liberated by the US Army in 1945. Together with her mother and a friend she was accommodated in a Quaker-run DP camp near Brunswick. She remembered the time there until her emigration to England in 1946 as a charmed period of her life. The young girl enjoyed her life. In contrast, she remembers her arrival in England as a shattering experience. England for her was cold and unfriendly. Her uncle in Birmingham, where she moved together with her mother, banned any talking about experiences in the concentration camp. She felt the lack of understanding for the sufferings she had lived through: 'People didn’t understand. In some ways the suffering I endured in the early post-war years was worse than it had been in the KZ. Personally, I found that time more traumatic. […] I tried very hard to be friendly but I found that people shied away. They didn’t want to know. […] Also I was only 20, I had lived on a different planet […] I wanted to go back to school, and if there had been a chance I would have made up for what I had lost. […] What I find particularly hard to forgive is that there was no programme even within the Jewish community. […] They did not want to know what had happened to us survivors of the Holocaust. Maybe they were a little bit afraid for themselves; being Jews, maybe they thought they’d have to be more English than the English.'[6]

 

Despite the fact that, in retrospect, Kitty Hart sees her temporary stay in DP camps in Germany as one of the best times in her life, the survivors immediately after being liberated had to face difficult circumstances and were disappointed about the unwillingness to welcome them as the 'last remnant' (the surviving Jews). Jacob Biber described his initial experiences in the DP camp at Föhrenwald, not far from Munich: 'I had thought this might be a place of quick transit, a chance briefly to recoup our energies and spirits, but the word "camp" started my heart pounding in fear. […] In Föhrenwald, our group was directed from the theatre kitchen to our assigned quarters. Survivors of all ages, wearing torn clothes or concentration camp stripes, were passing us on either side. […] Other survivors who had arrived there before us invited us into their crowded quarters […] that first night, we exchanged much information about the death camps, and also learned that no one had yet been transferred from Camp Föhrenwald. Our stay would not end tomorrow, and probably not next week or next month, something we had not really expected. […] We were very tired after a long, hot, and active day and evening. […] For us, sleep was not a respite, but a reliving of tragedy in our nightmares. As soon as I fell asleep, the horrible tales of the skinny concentration camp survivors tormented my rest. […] I was unable to sleep for night after night. […] The caged-in environment forced a constant reliving of scenes from our horrible pasts.'[7]

 

The Jews’ sharing of quarters with non-Jews caused major psychological problems for the Jewish survivors, especially since many non-Jewish DPs made no secret of their anti-Semitism and worked to make life in the camps as difficult as possible for the Jews, who were in a weakened state and desperately trying to find out whether any of their relatives were still alive. Another bitter experience for the survivors was the fact that they would not receive help from Jewish relief organizations from abroad until late summer 1945. The first 'free' Jews encountered by the survivors were Jewish military chaplains and Jewish soldiers serving in the Allied armies. Because Jewish relief organizations had arrived late on the scene and had to clear a number of bureaucratic hurdles before they could begin their work, Jewish soldiers played an especially important role. They were familiar with the mentality of their co-religionists, understood their language, and were therefore of inestimable value in helping survivors rebuild their lives. For the 'surviving remnant', the She’erit Hapletah as they called themselves, they became the representatives of Jewry in the world, and through their personal efforts they managed to create a sense of hope in the Jewish future among the DPs and supported the initiatives undertaken by survivors to take over responsibility for their future life themselves. How far these initiatives developed into a Zionist-led aim, and how much this affected the daily life of the survivors in a much broader way than often assumed; Zeev Mankowitz showed in his book Life between Memory and Hope.[8] Mankowitz tells, amongst others, the story of 'Kibbutz Buchenwald', founded in the former concentration camp, and transferred to a village near Fulda (Geringshof) after the Americans had left Thuringia, which 'became a focus of inspiration for the young survivors.”'[9] In a letter to the Jewish Agency office in Paris the leaders of the Kibbutz in mid-1945 expressed their willingness to take their lives in their own hands: 'Through our physical labour in the kibbutz, we have meant to demonstrate that we are not destroyed, but that we have the will to live and build.'[10]

        

Within a few days of the liberation, survivors formed national interest groups in the DP camps to protect their interests. DPs from Western Europe wanted to return quickly to their home countries, in keeping with the objectives of the occupying forces. Repatriating the former prisoners from Eastern Europe was more complicated. Because of their political opposition to the new Communist regimes or their fear of reprisals for their actual or perceived collaboration with the Nazis, they did not want to be repatriated. Nor was repatriation to their former homes in Eastern Europe a realistic possibility for most of the Jewish survivors. The thriving Jewish communities had been destroyed; the anti-Semitism which continued unabated after the war doomed any attempt at rebuilding these communities.

 

After new pogrom in Eastern Europe in the summer of 1946, more than 150,000 Jews, who had fled their former homeland, reached the American zones in Germany and Austria with the help of clandestine organizations. The new and already existing DP camps turned into living centres where the She’erit Hapletah cultivated their ancient traditions, spoke Yiddish, and turned the camps of various sizes into cultural centres where religious life flourished and Zionism became not only the main aim to overcome the trauma of Nazi persecution but a force towards the creation of the State of Israel. Jewish relief organizations furnished the survivors not only with financial support, medical aid, and food but also with urgently-needed psychological support.

 

The Jewish DPs focused much of their attention on the children in the camps. During the War the Nazis had killed a great many children. Since they could not easily be exploited as slave labourers, children were of no practical use in the eyes of their murderers. Thus there were very few children and adolescents living in the DP camps in 1945. With the movement of Jews from Eastern Europe into the US Zone of Occupation, the number of children increased significantly, since both the Jews who had escaped into Russia during the war and the partisans who had fought inside enemy lines often brought children with them. In spite of their difficult circumstances, the refugees from Russia had frequently been able to keep their families intact; the partisans often had managed to care not only for their own offspring but for other children as well – children who had been hidden in forests, caves, and basements. Time and again the partisans would take in children who had been thrown out of trains by their parents as they were being transported to the death camps.

 

In the next few years, the Jewish DPs became known as the Jewish community with the highest birth-rate in the world. The high birth-rate underscores the important part played by children in the life of the Jewish DPs. Many parents hoped that generating new life would make the past easier to bear; children became the focus of their every thought and action. In some instances – unconsciously, of course – they were imposing a heavy burden on the very children they so loved. The central importance of children in the lives of the Jewish DPs found expression in schools that began as temporary expedients and gradually developed into an outstanding education system. In the DP camp Föhrenwald, for example, they created a wide variety of kindergartens, schools, and training facilities as well as a children's orchestra and chorus.

 

After arriving at Föhrenwald with the first American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) team on 19 September 1945, Miriam Warburg, herself a Joint worker, immediately began devoting her efforts to developing the camp schools. From the outset she faced a bewildering number of problems. Where was she to find qualified teachers, textbooks, pencils, and classrooms? There were not even enough chairs for the students to sit on. Furthermore, the children’s educational backgrounds varied widely, and the native tongues of the children were heterogeneous – Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, and French. Since most of the children came from Poland, Yiddish was the language most familiar to the majority, and became, at first, the language of instruction when a school opened. It became clear, though, that the children had to be taught a common language. Hebrew was the obvious choice, for the schools were geared to preparing students for emigration to Palestine.

 

As a result of what they had gone through during the years of persecution, the behaviour of Jewish children differed fundamentally from that of other children their age. A woman visitor to the Landsberg DP camp described her impressions of a Bible study class: 'A Bible class was studying the life of Moses; they were reading the part where the infant Moses is left by his mother among the bulrushes. The teacher wanted to know if the mother was justified in abandoning her child to an unknown woman, the Egyptian princess. Was that how a real mother would act? This was no problem for the children. They had to make no effort of the mind and imagination […] in order to produce replies. Of course, agreed the children, that’s how a real mother would act. One little girl mentioned mothers whom she had seen throwing children out of trains to save them from certain extermination. Perhaps a compassionate passer-by would pick up the child. Another child had been present when a baby had been thrown over a fence during an ‘action.’ And finally a boy got up and said, "Some of us in this class were given by our mothers to Poles. That’s how we escaped."'[11]

 

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the difficulties they encountered in dealing with their own past, the Jewish DPs focused their energy on educating the children and preparing them for life. In early November 1945, for example, there were twenty-seven teachers at Föhrenwald instructing students in Hebrew, religion, the Bible, English, mathematics, drawing, and sports. 250 children attended the main Tarbut (Hebrew, “culture”) school, which was organized along the lines of elementary schools maintained between the two world wars in Poland by Tarbut, a Hebrew educational and cultural organization that began activities in Russia after the February 1917 revolution. A Tarbut secondary school for older children was established in 1946. Students attended school six days a week. The curriculum included classes in Hebrew, Jewish history, the history of Palestine, world history, English, arithmetic, geography, anthropology, drawing, music, and physical education.

 

Along with the DP camp at Feldafing, Föhrenwald was a centre of Orthodox Judaism, so students also had an opportunity to attend a religious school. Rabbi Yehezkiel Yehuda Halberstam, probably the only major Hasidic leader to survive the Holocaust, introduced the Hasidic way of life to a segment of the Föhrenwald population. Halberstam’s wife and eleven children were murdered by the Nazis. He was liberated in the vicinity of the Feldafing DP camp, where he subsequently established religious schools and the first yeshiva (school for study of the Torah, Mishnah and Talmud) in Germany. Rabbi Halberstam and a hundred of his students moved to Föhrenwald after it had become the largest Jewish DP camp. He devoted his energies to reviving interest in religion and religious education. In early October 1945, for example, he helped establish an ultra-Orthodox Beth Jacob school for girls in the camp. In addition, facilities were set up for educating rabbinical students. 150 young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five attended the yeshiva that Rabbi Halberstam had established in February 1946.[12]

 

The Jewish DPs were amazingly energetic in the cultural sphere. Regardless of nationality, they all wished to become engaged to a greater or lesser degree in the cultural activities that were so important for their spiritual rehabilitation. This desire manifested itself in the establishment of a number of theatre groups both inside and outside the camps. These groups regularly performed the works of such classic Yiddish playwrights as Sholem Aleichem, S. Ansky, and Abraham Goldfaden. In addition to reviving old Yiddish songs, the groups dealt with the horrors of their recent history, presenting plays based on life in the ghettos and concentration camps. Of course, they also performed plays that evoked the dream of so many of the Jewish DPs – their future life in Palestine.

 

It was at Föhrenwald that the first Jewish theatre group was founded after the war, even though the camp was still without a cultural department to provide assistance, equipment, or even moral support. At first there were no actors, director, stagehands, sets or props – not even a stage. However, a small group of students under the direction of Jacob Biber managed to overcome these obstacles. They inspired Biber to begin theatrical performances even sooner than he had planned. While he was writing a play called 'The Storm' for the group’s first performance, other talented young people attracted his attention and volunteered to join the group. Biber then put together an evening variety show, which the group first performed at Föhrenwald on 28 October 1945. The performance was so successful that the players received an invitation to present the show at Camp Feldafing. Biber described the importance of these initial performances for the Holocaust survivors: 'The theatre hall in Feldafing was large enough to accommodate most of the DPs (about two thousand individuals), but we were most touched by the rows of sick people lined up on hospital cots in front of the stage. Feldafing had a sanatorium for tubercular patients, and all the survivors with that illness had been transferred there. When the show was running, I looked out from behind the curtain and saw pleasant smiles on their skeletal faces. Some of them were still wearing their striped concentration camp clothes. Others were covered with white sheets, but their eyes peering out from the covers expressed their eternal gratitude and satisfaction once again to see Jewish children performing. I saw tears in their eyes rolling down the hollowed cheeks. Shedding a few tears myself, I breathed a silent prayer: "Thank you, God, for giving me the strength to accomplish some good." I suddenly felt a sensation of relief in my heart. The guilt I had carried in me for the sin of surviving, while so many of our loved ones had suffered and died, had somewhat diminished. I suddenly felt that my efforts were worthy, and that, perhaps, there was reason for all of us to hope again.'[13] In 1946, a number of professional actors, directors, set designers, and other theatre professionals arrived at the DP camps in the wake of the Jewish exodus from Eastern Europe. They contributed greatly to improving the quality of the performances and raising the standards of theatrical presentations in general.

 

Besides enthusiasm for such cultural events, Holocaust survivors were passionate in their desire to establish their own Jewish press, which was actually quite astonishing given the conditions prevailing at the time: paper was rationed, and typewriters and other equipment were almost impossible to come by. Nevertheless, practically every Jewish DP camp and many political parties published their own newspapers. Some camps had more than one newspaper: Feldafing, for example, published Dos Fraye Vort (The Free Word) and Dos Yiddishe Vort (The Jewish Word), the organ of the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel. Newspapers, general-interest magazines, and even sports magazines were written largely in Yiddish and Hebrew, although there were also Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, English, and German papers.[14] The publications varied in quality depending upon the editor and staff.

 

Landsberg probably had the best and most well known camp newspaper, the Yiddish-language Landsberger Lager Cajtung (Landsberg Camp Newspaper). Published from 8 October 1945 by Dr. Samuel Gringauz, its founder and editor-in-chief, the paper changed its name a year later to Jidisze Caytung (Jewish Newspaper) to emphasize its character as a publication for Jews throughout occupied Germany. Gringauz, a lawyer from Kowno (Kaunas), was at the same time chairman of the Landsberg camp committee and the Council of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews for the US Zone. At its peak, the newspaper had a circulation of 15,000.[15] Most of these publications were camp papers in the strictest sense of the word, limiting themselves largely to camp news, reminiscences of camp inmates, and such items as lists of missing persons. Frequently they lifted material from other newspapers or books published inside and outside of Germany; for the most part, they ignored copyright laws and permission to reprint.[16]

 

The first Jewish newspaper in post-war Germany commenced publication at Belsen DP camp. This was Belsen’s Unzer Sztyme (Our Voice), the only newspaper in occupied Germany written exclusively for the Jewish DPs until the autumn of 1945, although the DP Express, published by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), had begun to appear in Munich at the same time. The DP Express, published weekly by UNRRA’s DP Transient and Information Centre, located in the Deutsches Museum, provided information for all Displaced Persons, that is, Jews and non-Jews alike. Its articles were written not only in Yiddish but in Polish, Slovak, and German as well. Unzer Sztyme, on the other hand, was published by the Centraler Idiszer Komitet Bergen Belsen (Central Jewish Committee of Bergen-Belsen) and appeared entirely in Yiddish, starting with the first issue of 2 July 1945. The first four issues were handwritten and subsequently reproduced. Then plates were made. When the paper began to be typeset in November 1945, two new sections were added,  'Erets Yisrael and the Zionist Movement' and 'The World of Literature and Art.' On 1 January 1946 the newspaper introduced yet another new section called 'We’re Searching for Our Relatives.' Along with news about Palestine and Zionism, this section became one of the most important parts of the paper. Besides the imminent prospect of emigration, what concerned the Jewish DPs most was the search for missing family members. As with the many DP newspapers in the US Zone, one can use Unzer Sztyme to identify the issues that most concerned Belsen’s Jewish DPs and to chart how those concerns changed over time. Generally the articles dealt with the whole range of Jewish life as well as with Yiddish and Hebrew literature and various cultural events. Camp residents frequently contributed articles to the paper, and the editors reprinted reports from the international press. Several other Jewish newspapers and magazines appeared in the camp. Belsen, however, also had its own publishing house which issued various books and brochures. Some of these brochures covered the lives of such well-known figures as Joseph Trumpeldor, the Russian-born Zionist-socialist leader, the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Theodor Herzl. The many books published at Belsen included a collection of songs from the concentration camps and ghettos and a number of religious books and texts.

 

Cultural life was also vivid for non-Jewish DPs, and religious events played an important role. Churches were opened, schools were founded, sports clubs initiated, soccer games and sport events were organized such as the “Baltic Olympic games”. In the Assembly Centres for non-Jews local self-administrations were formed and a great variety of newspapers were published. To fill the gap of higher education, UNRRA Universities were opened in Hamburg, Pinneberg, Ravensburg, Esslingen, Ludwigsburg and Munich. The Munich university opened in February 1946, and had six departments functioning within a few months. In the first academic year more then 2000 DP students followed lectures from 200 professors.[17]

 

For the vast majority of survivors, the stay in Germany was only an intermediate stop, required by external circumstances, on the way to Eretz-Israel (or the homeland in Palestine). Settling in Germany for a longer period did not come into question under any circumstances. The reason why this 'temporary' stay began to take on characteristics of certain stability, lay in the narrowing of emigration options; a problem that in the 1930s had already made flight impossible for many. The United States continued its restrictive immigration policies according to the old pattern. It was not until the passing of the Displaced Persons Act in 1948, and its expansion in 1950, that immigration to the US became possible. Palestine, too, remained largely a dream for most, given the British mandate policies which only allowed immigration under certain conditions and within certain quotas. Here it was only after the founding of the State of Israel in May of 1948, that Jewish DPs could proceed unhindered to the new Jewish State. And with the aforementioned liberalisation of the US immigration process, which allowed those whose goal was the United States to emigrate; the majority of the remaining She’erit Hapletah left Germany in 1949-1950.

 

This was by no means the end of the chapter of Jewish DP history, however; as several thousand still remained in the DP camps. Of these were some who were no longer willing to bear this makeshift arrangement, characterized by an impersonal environment and insufficient privacy, and they made their way into the cities to settle there and to pursue a normal everyday existence. In spite of understandable initial resistance to participation in the rebuilding of the German economy, they began new lives and strove to integrate themselves into the Jewish cultural communities. DPs from the Eastern Jewish tradition quickly became important factors in Jewish community life. To this day, their descendents represent the majority of members in these communities.

 

One other group joined the Jewish communities much less willingly in the 1950s: a group comprised primarily of ill and elderly people who were either incapable of deciding on an immigration destination, or who, because of infectious illness, could not be accepted in a foreign country. By 1951, when most of the DP camps had been closed, these last 'remaining remnants' found themselves in the one still operative Jewish DP camp, Föhrenwald, near Munich. Only when this camp, too, was dissolved in February of 1957, did camp life definitively come to a close for the She’erit Hapletah. Closing with it, was an important phase of Yiddish life in Germany, though one that had taken place, entirely independently of the German population, in the 'ghettos' of the DP camps.

 

Together with their families, the last 'Föhrenwalder' were eventually integrated into the Jewish communities of various German cities[18], resulting, during the 1950s, in the merging together of two hitherto totally divided groups. The incorporation of Eastern Jewish DPs into the Jewish cultural communities of Germany quickly became—particularly with respect to religious and cultural development—the central task of the communities, since Jews in Germany had experienced a total population shift since 1933.

 

Citation:

Dr Angelika Königseder and Dr Juliane Wetzel, 'Displaced Persons, 1945-1950: The social and cultural perspective', Post-War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945-1950, Cengage Learning EMEA Ltd, Reading 2007