After the Reich (65 page)

These Jews, who were known as the
she’erit Hapletah
or ‘rescued remainder’, kept flooding into Germany. Partly this was a result of renewed antisemitic violence in the new Poland, where between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in Kielce and elsewhere in 1945. Occupied Germany was considered the safest place to be. Some 270,000 Jews went to Germany after the end of the war and sought refuge in DP camps. The period before they were to find new homes in Palestine and elsewhere has been called the ‘grim aftermath of the Holocaust’.
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The British were suspicious about the influx of Jews into Germany. They thought, possibly correctly, that they were intending to use Germany as a springboard to Palestine. The head of displaced-persons operations for UNRRA in Germany, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan, thought a secret organisation was behind the arrival of so many ‘well-dressed, well-fed, rosy-cheeked’ Jews who appeared to have ‘plenty of money’. The British began to bar entrance to the DP camps to new arrivals and prevent Jews from going south via Austria. They also introduced a compulsory labour law for the inhabitants of the camps.
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At their height there were 184 Jewish camps scattered around Germany: there were eleven in the French Zone, twenty-two in the British and 151 in the American. One of the most famous camps was at Landsberg in Bavaria, where the
Landsberger Caytung
was based. The
Landsberger Caytung
, the most successful Jewish paper of the time, offered practical advice to Jews and reported on the Nuremberg trials.
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Caytung
(newspaper) was an example of the Germanified Yiddish spoken in the camps. The
Katzet
was the concentration camp, from the German ‘KZ’.

One unfortunate aspect of life in the DP camps was that Jews were often driven in with their former tormentors - Hungarian, Ukrainian, Latvians and Poles who had worked voluntarily in the camps and were now as good as stateless. They formed a rough and often criminal core at the centre of the camp. It was not uncommon for the Allies to assign ex-Nazis to the camps as guards; to add insult to injury, they were armed. The presence of these sentries and the barbed-wire fences around the barracks gave the Jews’ new quarters an aspect of the concentration camps they had only recently quit.
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The preponderance of Jewish DP camps in the American Zone was no accident: Jews wanted to reach America and found British policy on Palestine unsympathetic. Britain was the principal enemy of the Jews before 1949.
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From January to April 1946 admissions to American camps ran at around 3,000 a day, with some 2,000 entering camps in the American Zone in Austria. By April there were 3,000 Jews in Berlin, 1,600 in the French Zone, 15,600 in the British and 54,000 in the American. There were six times as many Jews in American-occupied Austria as in the British Zone. By the end of the year there were 204,000 Jews in the parts of Germany and Austria controlled by the Western Allies, 90 per cent of them in the American Zones. It was not always the case, however, that the Americans were more considerate towards the Jews than the British. General Patton expressed the view that they were ‘baser than animals’.
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The Americans were spending $500,000,000 a year on the camps. There was some question as to whom the Jews belonged. They were hardly likely to want to be Germans, and most of the eastern states disowned them too. They were effectively stateless. As numbers continued to swell, the Americans let in a trickle to the US by slightly loosening their quota in December 1945. The British Dominions, which had been excessively stingy in extending hospitality in 1938, continued to sport the oak. Jews who tried to run the blockade into Palestine were famously intercepted and interned in DP camps on Cyprus. When the Jewish state was established in May 1948 they flooded across the water.
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The DP camps in Germany resembled Yiddish-speaking villages. The language acquired immense importance before Hebrew developed under the auspices of the new state of Israel. German was clearly out, unless there was no alternative. After 1949 the state of Israel would ban both German and German music. The pre-war drive to assimilation also ground to a halt. Adolf Hitler had taught the Jews in no uncertain terms that they were not wanted.
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The camps were as close to the
Shtetlach
as anyone was likely to see after the Third Reich. Indeed, they have been described as the shtetl’s last evocation.
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The Jews remained there until they could find a means of getting to Palestine or the United States. The American quota remained very strict until 1950.

Carl Zuckmayer believed that the Jewish DP camps were keeping antisemitism alive. As the Jews were outsiders or foreigners, the word
Ausländer
(foreigner) had become synonymous with Jew in some parts of the country. A little girl near his house in the Salzkammergut told him, ‘Mummy went shopping because she wanted to bake something for you. She needed flour, so she had to go to the foreigners.’ Often this meant going to a DP camp where those still lucky enough to own cars often found supplies of benzene.

The Jewish camps were comparatively well provided for, and the surplus was sold off - for a price. Zuckmayer heard the Germans grumble that the Jews were growing rich from their hunger. In a dark corner of the main station in Munich he saw a Jew wearing a kaftan, with a long beard and curls - ‘a figure never seen in this part of Germany, but perhaps [visible] in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt, in Bratislava, Łódź or Warsaw’.
^cw
He had a table, chair and cash register, and scruffy individuals were showing him things they had in their pockets. A woman told him it was a big jewellery market. The last of the family heirlooms were being transformed into meat, fat or coffee. Some of the gems were obviously stolen.
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There were still 29,000 Jews in American camps in Austria at the time, who were given better rations than the other DPs, and unlike the others they were exempted from work. That this caused resentment is something of an understatement, especially as the Jews were prominent in the black market. An Allied report produced a statistic that 71 per cent of Austrians felt no guilt about the Second World War. On the other side the Jews complained too. ‘Until you get your things back, you are treated like a beggar. Once you have them back, nobody remembers that you were ever a beggar.’
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Resentment of the Jews and their higher rations led to a small riot in Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut in the summer of 1947. The issue was the milk quota. Angry protesters surrounded the hotel that served as the Jewish DP camp and pelted it with stones: ‘Down with the dirty Jews! Hang the Jews!’ they shouted. The American authorities acted firmly and one rioter was sentenced to fifteen years. The sentence was later reduced by General Keyes.
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There were also 15,000 Jews in Germany who had survived the genocide. One of these was Victor Klemperer, who went back to his damaged but inhabitable house in Dresden dreaming of good wines, food, drives in his car, visits to the seaside and the cinema. Mostly he cherished the fact of raw life, of ‘simple survival’.
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He was one of the 3 per cent of German Jews who owed his survival to an Aryan spouse. Jews tended to be given the pick of the jobs in the Russian Zone. A former ‘submarine’, the machinist Walter Besser, was put in charge of a hospital in 1945. Jewish leaders emerged from captivity in the concentration camps to found newspapers. Josef Rosensaft had been in Bergen-Belsen, where he married the camp doctor Hadassah Bimko after the war. He founded the first Yiddish newspaper in the British Zone at Belsen,
Undzer Sztyme
(Our Voice). Another was Zalman Grinberg, a doctor from Kovno. He founded the Yiddish newspaper
Undzer Weg
(Our Way), first published in October 1945. In the British Zone Hans Frey started the
Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für die Nord-Rhein Provinz in Westfalen
. Between 1945 and 1948 there were over 200 publications - books and newspapers - published in Yiddish in Germany.
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The camps were mostly old barracks buildings, together with some pukka structures that had been cleared of their German occupants. Quite a few of them were near or actually located in old concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen and Landsberg. Two training camps for Jews were housed in property that had previously belonged to Julius Streicher and Hermann Göring. Jewish DPs in the American Sector of Berlin were actually lodged in the Villa Minou, where the infamous Wannsee Conference had been held in the first weeks of 1942, and where reports had been delivered on the progress of the Final Solution.
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In the main, the camps were not as daunting as they might have seemed from the outside. They had their own schools and courses in Jewish history, Hebrew, Zionism and Palestinian geography - once more attesting to the abandonment of assimilation and the embracing of Zionism in most cases. Political parties were formed, theatres put on Yiddish classics, and concerts were given. Groups of singers such as the Happy Boys sang Yiddish songs. American rabbis were assigned to the camps to look after the spiritual well-being of the inmates.
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One of the most notorious DP camps was Bergen-Belsen. Once the British had managed to bring down the death rate it was possible to introduce some degree of comfort into the camp, especially when the inmates were moved out of the old buildings and into the well-appointed SS barracks. That took a while. At first witnesses were horrified to see how dehumanised the former prisoners had become. Many of the Jews were women, and General Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army, recalled seeing one ‘standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated’.
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In theory, at least, the French, Dutch, Russians and Poles in Belsen had homes to go to. The Jews did not want to go back, they wanted to go forward. Once the enormity of their suffering was known, they received special treatment. The British rabbi, Rev. Leslie Hardman, arrived at Belsen soon after its liberation. On Friday 20 April he conducted the first Jewish service there, observing
Kiddush
in the open air. With foreboding he remained behind to eat some
gefilte fisch
with the prisoners. The next morning he woke with excruciating pains and was forced to take to his bed for forty-eight hours.
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Hardman witnessed some old-fashioned antisemitism among the British officer corps. One officer exclaimed, ‘Bloody Jews! Serves them right!’ In general, however, it was more the dehumanising effect of the war that he observed in the British - they had seen too much horror to be able to respond any more.
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Part of the process of recovering was for women to begin to take an interest in their physical appearance again. One of the doctors working at Belsen was repeatedly asked by the women whether their beauty would return.
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For some it would take a long time: the humiliation that had been part of the policy of their Nazi torturers had gone too deep. One Red Cross man recalled asking a woman what her name was and where she came from. ‘Me . . .’ she replied, ‘no name - only number - no country, just a Jewess, do you understand? I am only a dog.’
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Baths were treated with suspicion. Some of the women had been in the extermination camps, and had learned to fear trips to the shower block. The situation was considerably improved when some old women’s clothes were found to replace the prison gear and someone discovered a cache of lipstick. In the words of one of the senior medical officers, ‘It was the action of genius, of sheer unadulterated brilliance.’ The women were overjoyed. The same officer reported seeing a woman dead on a slab still clutching her lipstick.
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By June the atmosphere was wholly changed at Belsen. When the cameramen rolled up it reminded a Red Cross woman of ‘a Butlin holiday camp’.
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The inmates wanted to know about Zionism and Palestine. Ironically Hitler had made them better Jews: assimilation was a dead letter. Even hardened atheists were keen to learn about a religion that had not been practised for a generation.
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To inject a little morale, concerts were given and the likes of Yehudi Menuhin and Benjamin Britten visited. The women of Belsen rediscovered men. Dancing became popular, although the women were still little more than skeletons. The camps were not just culturally fertile. They were productive in human life. After the genetic experiments of the concentration camps, many Jews feared they were barren. This proved not to be the case. In 1946 UNRRA reported between eight and ten thousand pregnancies in the camps, giving the Jewish camps the highest birth rate in the world.
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Incidences of antisemitism were comparatively rare, although a Jewish shopkeeper was threatened in Staubing and locals accused the Jews who inhabited the old concentration camp in Deggendorf of carrying out armed robberies. In Munich the Möhlstrasse had its complement of Jewish shops and there was even a kosher restaurant.
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The camps had flourishing black markets that led to one police raid on a camp near Stuttgart. In the course of the police action a Jew was killed during a dispute about boot-leg eggs. After that the police were banned from entering the camps.
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