The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (57 page)

But perhaps most astonishing to outside visitors was the alacrity with which the Jews in Landsberg em- braced politics. This was not yet party politics—Jewish leaders had developed a tacit consensus that party divisions, which had so profoundly divided Jews in prewar Eastern Europe, would be set aside under the common banner of unity of Zionism, and this unity held intact through the first postwar year. Rather, poli- tics meant organization, and the assertion of Jewish autonomy over camp life. Landsberg already had a vis- ible and competent temporary committee, chaired by Samuel Gringauz and staffed by David Trager, Jacob Oleiski, and Moses Segalson, all Lithuanian Jews who had passed through the Kovno ghetto and Dachau, as well as Dr. Abrasha Blumovicz, a Pole and former parti- san. They constantly pressed Major Heymont for great-

er independence from Army regulations and oversight, demands Heymont was reluctant to grant. In an ad- dress to the camp residents in the large Sport Hall on September 26, Major Heymont asserted that the Jews “must develop in yourselves the kind of self-discipline that will eventually lead you to complete autonomy…. You want autonomy and you will have it. But you must prove that you are capable of exercising it.”
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Of course, Heymont’s notions of discipline meant cleanliness, an end to black market activities, and scrupulous atten- tion to the orders laid down by the occupying army. Jewish leaders in the camp, however, focused on politi- cal activity, and the development of their own vision of self-help, reliance, and rehabilitation. The elections for an official Camp Committee, held on October 21, were preceded by active politicking, complete with election slogans, banners, leaflets, posters, and campaigning by the candidates. Even if this election served only as a referendum on the temporary committee, all of whose members were reelected, the very fact that Jews held a vote in the heart of Germany a mere five months after the war stood as a clear assertion of Jewish claims to political activism and autonomy.

The greatest boost in morale for the Landsberg camp residents coincided with the elections: on October 21, David Ben- Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency

Executive in Palestine and leader of the Zionist move- ment, visited Landsberg. Ben- Gurion was in Germany to make a tour of Jewish DP camps and to meet with Generals Eisenhower and Walter Bedell Smith about the Jewish refugee problem. He saw the camp at Zeilsheim, near Frankfurt, and then traveled on to Mu- nich—a city indelibly linked to the rise of the Nazi par- ty—where he met members of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews. After inspecting the hospital at Saint Ottilien, Ben- Gurion was driven to Landsberg. Arriving at about 3:00 P.M., he was greeted by over 5,000 camp residents lined up in rows along the main road toward the Sport Hall. As the camp newspaper described the event, the large audience in the hall listened atten- tively to this messenger from “the land of prophets and pioneers.” Ben- Gurion delivered the welcome mes- sage that the Jewish community now in Palestine was strong, politically and economically mature, and “re- solved to struggle so that the future of Eretz Israel and the Jewish people will no longer be dependent upon the will of foreign powers.” Ben- Gurion afterward met with Major Heymont as well as the leaders of the Camp Committee. He elaborated more fully on the positive trends in Palestine for the Jews, stating that there was a desperate need for labor and skilled workers and that it would be easy to absorb a large number of immi- grants, once the British resistance was overcome. On

this topic, Ben- Gurion was subdued, making plain his doubts about the Labour government and especially the permanent civil service in the British administra- tion. But he urged his listeners to continue their ef- forts: the survivors, he said, must “gather and concen- trate all lively remaining energies in order to transform the downfall of European Jewry into a redemption of the entire Jewish people.”
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The message he sought to convey was plain: that the Jewish DPs were not merely victims who needed help, but a political force, capable of shaping the future of Israel. “ You must not regard yourselves subjectively but from the standpoint of the Jewish nation…. You, the direct emissaries of the suf- fering of our people, are the driving force. You must be strong.”
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Ben- Gurion’s speech rallied the hopes and spirits of the camp residents. Privately, however, Ben- Gurion was somewhat more guarded about the role of the DPs in the Zionist project. To Major Heymont, he expressed his sympathy about the difficult challenges of restor- ing these Jews to dignity, saying it would take time to change the psychology of the surviving Jews and to get them to take more pride in their conditions. “In Pal- estine we too have comparable problems,” he said. “A voyage on a boat does not transform people.” In- deed, for Ben- Gurion, these DPs served a more useful

purpose in the camps than outside of them. While in Frankfurt, he confided to Zorach Warhaftig his view that “the concentration of Jewish DPs in Germany, es- pecially in the American Zone of occupation, creates a difficult and pressing problem for the United States and this may be used by us in the fight for the opening of the gates of Palestine.”
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Even the painful captivity of the survivors had its uses.

Ben- Gurion’s visit was probably the high point of op-

timism and morale in the Jewish DP camps. His ap- pearance had given a face and a name to the project of building Israel, and made it seem as if Palestine was an attainable goal for the surviving Jews. Yet with Novem- ber came dispiriting news from London: the British government, despite pressure from Washington, re- fused to allow an increased number of Jews to emigrate to Palestine. At the same time, increasing numbers of Jews were arriving in the American zone of Germany, fleeing from anti- Semitism in Eastern Europe, and fill- ing up already crowded camps with a new wave of DPs. In Landsberg, the new arrivals forced camp authori- ties to reopen formerly condemned wooden barracks. An inspection of Landsberg by Major General Arthur A. White, 71st Infantry Division, in late December de- scribed the sanitation situation there as “deplorably bad—human excreta spotted the entire area surround- ing the four wooden barracks, housing 300, of which most were children.…In shower rooms, the inmates defecated on the floor…. Garbage is still inadequately handled, being spilled and thrown about the grounds. Kitchen floors are littered with cans and waste food.” In general, camp residents showed “disregard for camp rules and regulations.”
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Army officers evinced little sympathy for the Jewish DPs. The overcrowding in the camps, one colonel told the Landsberg camp leaders, was “brought on by their own people coming into the

area voluntarily and often illegally”—not, that is, by continued persecution of Jews. The colonel told camp leaders that the Germans could not be forced to give up their homes “because the Jews were here only tempo- rarily and two wrongs don’t make a right, etc.…I told them that they must help rehabilitate themselves.”
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One officer from the Third Army surgeon’s office, downcast by the sanitation problems in Landsberg, chalked it up to the “liberation complex” that so many military officials used to describe DP behavior: “ They have been liberated, have freedom, and with it appar- ently expect freedom from restriction or regulation…. They should be made to realize that certain regulation of individuals and modification of so-called private rights is necessary for the welfare and proper sanita- tion of groups of individuals living together in a com- mon society.” The memo concluded, with no evident sense of irony, that the “need for regulatory control” in the camps “must be instilled even, if necessary for the common good, by coercive or disciplinary action.”
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Yet again, American military officials failed to see the larger context: the Army wanted order, tidiness, and rules. Jews in camps, half a year after the end of the war, could not accept continued regulation, continued hardship, waiting, privation, delay, and incarceration with equanimity. All the goodwill in the world could not reconcile these positions.

As conditions in the camps deteriorated, and as U.S. Army officers continued to berate camp leaders for their failures in running clean, orderly, and happy in- stallations, camp leaders’ spirits sank. Dr. Zalman Grin- berg, the chairman of the Central Committee of Liber- ated Jews in Bavaria, gave voice to his distress when meeting in Munich with representatives of American Jewish organizations in mid-November. After making due acknowledgment of the gift of survival that Ameri- can soldiers had given Jews in April 1945, he did not hide his disappointment. “ We had hoped that the time after liberation would be quite different,” he said. The American military was slow to address the crisis of sur- viving Jews, American relief organizations were dis- persed and ill equipped; the Central Committee had to fight to win recognition as the representative body for Jews in Bavaria; General Eisenhower’s directives or- dering significant improvements in camp conditions, he said, were not followed and Jews still lived in squal- id conditions. In such an environment, Jews struggled. “ The average Jew in the camps,” Grinberg said, “is de- pressed. The reasons for that are: the bitter yesterday, the bad today, and the hopeless tomorrow…. That is how things are six months after the liberation.”
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B

ETWEEN THE FALL of 1945 and the spring of the following year, the overall picture of the Jewish DPs worsened due to a sudden influx of Jewish

refugees, mainly from Poland, but also from the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Slovakia. This new population presented a serious challenge not only to the military and relief organizations that were charged with deal- ing with them, but also to the Jewish DP community, whose minimal resources would be stretched beyond the breaking point. Placed alongside the deeply dispir- iting British refusal to allow increased immigration to Palestine, the surge in the camp populations toward the end of 1945 worsened the morale of Jewish camp residents and exacerbated tensions between the mili- tary and the Jews. As winter settled over Europe, there were more Jews in camps in Germany than there had been in April 1945, when the Allied armies first arrived to rip down the barbed-wire fences.

Who were these newcomers, and why did they seek to gain entry into Germany? Historian Yehuda Bauer has devoted careful attention to this movement of Eastern European Jews. In the two years after the war, perhaps 250,000 Jews traveled westward, into Austria, Germa- ny, and Italy. Most were Poles, and they came because their homeland had become uninhabitable, its anti- Semitism in no way diminished by the defeat of the

Nazi regime. On the contrary, the political turmoil in- side Poland at the end of the war, as right-wing nation- alists fought the Soviet-backed Communists for control of Poland, placed the Jews in an especially vulnerable position, and resulted in their renewed persecution and dispossession. Even Poles who had returned to Po- land from Soviet Russia or indeed from Germany itself at war’s end now felt obliged to take to the roads again. Many took advantage of the secret network of Jewish operatives known as the Brichah to secure false pa- pers, arrange convoys, and deliver them to the relative safety of occupied Germany, Austria, or Italy, with the distant hope that they might from there travel to Pales- tine. The British army cut off the routes via Austria into Italy by September, however, thus channeling the flow of refugees into occupied Germany. In the fall of 1945, these underground caravans carried over 30,000 Jews out of Poland and their numbers continued to rise in 1946. According to Bauer, this was good news to Jewish leaders in Palestine, especially Ben- Gurion, who saw the Brichah effort as serving both a humanitarian and a political purpose; Jews were being moved to safety, but they were also being used to place more pressure on the Allied occupation authorities.

The military and UNRRA officials who oversaw the DP camps, already struggling with the problems of hous-

ing, feeding, and providing for the Jewish remnant, met this new influx with hostility and befuddlement. With the Harrison report still fresh in the public eye, and President Truman and General Eisenhower’s com- mands to improve the conditions of Jewish DPs, offi- cials on the ground knew that they could not forcibly turn away these new arrivals. Even so, Army officials complained that these new refugees were not, strictly speaking, displaced persons but “infiltrees” with all the criminal connotations that word implied; they assert- ed that because many of them had survived the war in Soviet-occupied Poland or in the USSR itself, they had not been persecuted by Nazis, but were instead oppor- tunists seeking to flee westward simply to find a better life under the shelter of the U.S. Army. And the Allied authorities were dimly aware of the secret organization at work moving Jews westward, a fact they resented and that certainly contributed to the icy reception the Jews received in Germany and Austria. Under duress, the American Army agreed to let them into their zone in occupied Germany, swelling the numbers of Jewish DPs and complicating an already difficult problem in liberated Germany.
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