Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (35 page)

The choices that people made regarding their ethnicity would have implications far beyond the end of the war. While hostilities in Europe officially ended in May 1945, the various conflicts over race and ethnicity continued for months, sometimes years, afterwards. Sometimes these conflicts were intensely local, even personal – people in small towns and villages knew the ethnicity of their neighbours, and acted accordingly. Increasingly, however, the conflict would be conducted on a regional, or even a national level. In the aftermath of the war entire populations would be expelled from areas where they had lived for centuries – purely on the basis of what was written on their wartime identity cards.

The fascist obsession with racial purity, not only in those areas occupied by Germany but elsewhere too, had a huge impact on European attitudes. It made people aware of race in a way they never had been before. It obliged people to take sides, whether they wanted to or not. And, in communities that had lived side by side more or less peacefully for centuries, it made race into a problem – indeed, it elevated it to
the
problem – that needed solving.

As the war had taught people, some of the solutions could be radical, and final.

17

The Jewish Flight

At the beginning of May 1945, an eighteen-year-old Polish Jew named Roman Halter was liberated by the Russians. He and two other Jews had been hiding with a German couple near Dresden who had taken them in after they escaped from a death march. Having survived various labour camps, including Auschwitz, he was weak and emaciated – but he was alive, and knew himself to be extremely lucky.

The day after his liberation, Halter said goodbye to the couple who had sheltered him. He wanted desperately to find out if anyone else in his family had survived the Holocaust, so he acquired himself a bicycle, tied to the handlebars a few glass jars of preserved meat that he had found in a deserted farmstead and set off on the road back to Poland.

He had not been travelling long when he came across one of his Russian liberators, who was driving a motorbike. Halter was enormously grateful to the Russians for rescuing him. He thought of them as friends to the Jews, liberators, ‘good people’ – he even spoke a little Russian himself, which he still remembered from his childhood. Unfortunately, as he would find out, his fraternal feelings were not reciprocated.

I was pleased to see him … I still remembered the Russian words which I had learned from my parents. ‘Ruski, ja cie lublu!’ I said (‘Russian, I love you’), and then added, ‘Zdrastvite towarisz’ (‘Hello friend’). He looked at me strangely and began speaking Russian very fast. I smiled and said in Polish that I was unable to understand him. He looked me up and down. Then he looked at my bike and said, ‘Dawaj czasy’ (‘Give me watches’). I understood that. He pulled up his shirt sleeves and showed me his forearms full of watches and then repeated the two words again. ‘Dawaj czasy.’

I glanced at his eyes, they were stern and cold. I began speaking to him in Polish. I said that I hadn’t got watches and showed him both my thin forearms. He pointed to the bulging blanket fixed to my bike’s crossbar and said something in Russian. I went up and took out one jar and handed it to him. ‘Mieso,’ I said. ‘Towarisz, mieso’ (‘Comrade, meat’). The meat was visible through the glass. He looked at it and then at me. ‘Towarisz, you have it, please take it and enjoy it.’

He lifted the glass jar and held it above his head for a second or so and then smashed it on to the ground. The glass and the meat spattered in all directions. I looked at the Russian soldier and fear entered my heart. What could I say to make him leave me alone? I felt momentarily numb. ‘Lower your trousers,’ he said in his language. I stood there shaken and didn’t quite know what he meant. He repeated his command and by gestures showed me what he wanted me to do.

… I put my bike carefully on the ground so as not to break the glass jars in the pouch and began lowering my trousers. ‘Why is he making me do this?’ I thought. Perhaps he thinks that I carry a belt with watches around my waist. I must tell him that I am not a German who just speaks Polish. So, as I was lowering my trousers and showing him that I am without belt or watches around my waist, I slowly told him in Polish that I am a Jew. I knew the word ‘Ivrei’. ‘Ja Ivrei,’ I repeated. ‘Ja Ivrei, ja towarisz’ (‘I am a Jew, I am a comrade’).

I stood before him now naked from my waist down, although my instinct told me not to take off my good lace-up boots in case he took them and left me bare-footed. I could not reach Chodecz bare-footed. So I let my trousers and pants hang over my socks and boots. I glanced at his eyes again. There was a look of contempt in them as he was viewing the exposed part of my body. I saw in them a killer’s void.

He took out his revolver from his holster, pointed at my head and pulled the trigger. There was a loud click. Without a word to me he kick-started his motorbike and drove off. I stood there for a time with my trousers and pants down and looked at him disappearing into the distance.
¹

The memory of that meeting would haunt Halter for the rest of his life. Its meaning was ominous. Despite their shared experience as victims of the Germans, and despite Halter’s spontaneous offer of friendship, this nameless Russian had treated him exactly as an SS officer might have done: first establishing that he was Jewish by checking to see if he were circumcised, and then putting a gun to his head. Whether Halter’s life had been saved by the gun jamming, or merely a lack of ammunition, he would never know.

In the months to come such scenes would be repeated across Europe. Jews of all nationalities would discover that the end of German rule did not mean the end of persecution. Far from it. Despite all that the Jews had suffered, in many areas anti-Semitism would
increase
after the war. Violence against Jews would resurface everywhere – even in places that had never been occupied, such as Britain. In some parts of Europe this violence would be final and definitive: the task of permanently clearing their communities of Jews, which even the Nazis had failed to do, would be finished off by local people.

The Choice to Return Home

In the aftermath of the war, European Jews began to turn their thoughts to the lessons that could be learned from what they had just experienced. Some Jewish thinkers believed that the Holocaust had been possible only because Jews had made themselves too conspicuous before and during the war. They argued that the only way to avoid the possibility of a similar catastrophe in the future was to make themselves invisible, by assimilating completely into the various countries in which they lived.

Zionists, however, claimed that this was nonsense: even well-assimilated Jews had been winkled out by Hitler’s henchmen and murdered along with all the others. They argued that the only way to ensure their safety was to leave Europe altogether and set up their own state.

A third group thought that either of these approaches was effectively an admission of defeat. They believed it their duty to return to their countries of origin and try to rebuild their communities as best they could.
²

The vast majority of Europe’s surviving Jews initially tended to agree with this last view – not out of any particular ideology, but simply because they had spent their years of exile and incarceration daydreaming about the possibility of returning home. Most realized, intellectually if not emotionally, that the communities they had left behind no longer existed. But the majority of Jews returned anyway, partly out of an emotional attachment to their home towns and villages, and partly out of a desire to reconstruct the only version of normality they had ever known. Whether they continued to nurture these hopes after they arrived depended a great deal on the welcome they received.

From a Jewish point of view, Europe was a confusing place after the war. Much had changed since the defeat of Germany, but much had also remained the same. On the one hand the organizations dedicated to persecuting Jews had been replaced by organizations dedicated to helping them. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was bringing in millions of dollars worth of food, medicine and clothing, and was helping to rebuild synagogues and Jewish cultural centres across the continent. Non-Jewish aid agencies such as UNRRA and the Red Cross were also providing targeted help, such as the establishment of exclusively Jewish DP camps and the tracing of friends and family members. Even the new national governments had made a start at changing attitudes towards Jews, for example by repealing all anti-Jewish legislation.

On the other hand, years of Nazi propaganda could not be overturned in a matter of weeks or months, and open anti-Semitism still existed everywhere. Sometimes this expressed itself in ways that are quite shocking. Jews who returned to the Greek city of Thessaloniki in 1945, for example, were sometimes greeted with, ‘Ah, you survived?’ or even, ‘What a pity you were not made into soap.’
³
In Eindhoven, Jewish repatriates were confronted by an official who registered them with the words, ‘Not another Jew, they must have forgotten to gas you.’
⁴
In the German cities of Garmisch and Memmingen, cinema newsreels that mentioned the death of 6 million Jews provoked shouts of ‘They didn’t kill enough of them!’ followed by deafening applause.
⁵

The greatest fear of returning Jews was that, for all the measures being put in place by governments and aid agencies, the real issue of deep-rooted anti-Semitism would never disappear. Experience had taught them that neither democracy nor apparent equality of rights, nor even their own patriotism was a guarantee against persecution. Their greatest challenge was not to treat every small incident as ‘the sign of a future explosion’ or proof that ‘a new mass murder is being prepared’.
⁶
If they were to manage this, they needed help from the communities they were rejoining.

On returning home, therefore, what Jews required more than anything else was reassurance. If they were to be able to pick up their lives once more they should be given more than just food and shelter and medical care, most of which was generally provided along the same lines as it was to other returnees. What they needed was to be
welcomed.

Some Jews, like Primo Levi, did indeed return to ‘friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story’.
⁷
There are many stories of Jews being reunited, as if by a miracle, with loved ones; of compassion from strangers who spontaneously provided them with food or shelter, or who listened to their stories. Unfortunately, however, such stories are not quite as common as they should have been, and the experience of most was somewhat different.

The Return: Holland

Of the 110,000 Dutch Jews who were deported to concentration camps during the war, only about 5,000 returned. They were amongst the 71,564 displaced Dutch people who returned to Holland in 1945, most of them en route to Amsterdam.
⁸
On arrival in the city’s central station they were interviewed, registered, and given ration cards and clothing coupons. Sometimes they were given advice on where to stay, or where to find help, but sometimes the desks of the various aid agencies were unattended. The official welcome was efficient, but cold: no flags or flowers, no brass bands, just a series of desks and questions followed by a swift dispatch outside into the streets of the city centre.
⁹

Right from the beginning there were subtle distinctions made between returnees. It was not the Jews who were discriminated against, however, but those returnees who were deemed to be collaborators. People who had worked in Germany as volunteers (
vrijwilligers
) had their repatriation cards stamped with a V: they were then refused a welcome food parcel and food coupons, and shunned by virtually every institution they came into contact with thereafter.

Of the others, the
onvrijwillig,
the only people to be greeted with any kind of fanfare were those who were deemed to have been part of the Resistance. The benefits for Resistance members were immediate. They were often sent to special convalescent centres located in luxurious settings, including a wing of Queen Wilhelmina’s palace. They were lauded in the press, in the government, and in the streets. ‘If you came from the resistance, everything was possible!’ claimed one former Resistance member, Karel de Vries. ‘You could ask for and get money from anyone. All building materials, for example, were scarce and difficult to get, but if you said, “This is for resistance fighters returning from concentration camps,” well, then it was fine, immediately!’
¹⁰
Later they were even awarded a special pension in recognition of their Resistance activities.

It quickly became obvious to returning Jews that the only distinction that the Dutch were interested in was the difference between collaborators and resisters. All other categories, including Jews, were simply lumped together as one. This was by no means unique to Holland. When Italian deportees were returned to Italy, they too were all lumped together as ‘political prisoners’, regardless of whether they had been Jews, forced labourers or prisoners of war.
¹¹
Likewise, French returnees were also put together as a single group – indeed, in most popular histories of the period today they still are.
¹²
This was not discrimination
against
Jews as such, but it was almost as bad: it was an attempt to ignore them altogether. As one Dutch camp survivor put it, ‘Where there should have been pity, I encountered the dry, difficult to approach, repellent, amorphous mass known as officialdom.’
¹³