Read The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe Online
Authors: William I. Hitchcock
Although Yehuda Bauer has calculated that almost 10,000 Jews were spirited out of Poland by the Brichah in August, and another 6,475 in September, it was not
until October that relief officials began to perceive this new influx as the start of a new pattern of migration and resettlement. Joseph Levine of the Joint Distribu- tion Committee, stationed in Schwandorf, northeast of Munich and fairly close to the Czech border, wrote to Moses Leavitt, executive vice chairman of the JDC in New York, to fill him in on broad outlines of the new influx of Jews. Levine noted that “everyone reports murder and pillage by the Poles and that all the Jews want to get out of Poland.” Levine’s sources had told him, for example, that some Jews had attempted to re- turn to Lód after the war, only to find that the Polish police were terrorizing Jews and expelling them from the city. The same, Levine heard, was true in Radom and Lublin. Polish Jews had thus started to flee, some to Romania, some to Austria and Italy, and if possible across Czechoslovakia into southern Germany. Levine also reported that many of the Jews were coming from Russia as well. “How large a number will arrive from Poland here and elsewhere in the American zone I don’t know. I do know that the problem here is going to be a difficult one.” Eli Rock, the senior field represen- tative of the JDC in the Third Army area, also reported in October that “in the last six weeks, on the heels of the growing anti- Semitic outbreaks in Poland, a steady flow of Polish Jews to Czechoslovakia [and] to Bavaria has taken place.” Because their movements were ille-
gal and furtive, they usually arrived in Bavaria in a bad way, short of food, clothing, and blankets, and in need of medical attention. “Of a recent large group,” Rock said, “it was found that 40% were tubercular and 90% had scabies.” Rock noted that the Army did not con- sider them “legally DPs” and so was loath to care for them. They were now in dread of the prospect of being forcibly sent back to Poland. Rock was right to insist to his JDC superiors that these new refugees must first have their status as legitimate persecutees clarified so the Army and UNRRA bureaucracy would treat them properly. In November, Jacob Trobe, the head of the JDC operation in Germany, wrote to the Army’s chief liaison for Jewish affairs, Judge Simon Rifkind, that as of mid-November the rate of new arrivals was increas- ing and that the Army’s unwillingness aggressively to requisition German homes would leave thousands of Jews without shelter in the coming weeks.
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The midlevel Army commanders who faced the addi- tional logistical burdens of the new arrivals were ini- tially skeptical and indeed hostile. A memorandum for the War Department, prepared after a meeting held in Berlin on November 19 between Army, JDC, and UNRRA officials, makes the exasperation of the military plain. The memo stated that “Jews were seeping into Berlin at average rate of 200 daily,” and “ninety percent of them
are Polish or Baltic. Most appear to have been victims of Nazi persecution or profess to be victims of Polish persecution.” But the memo also insisted that “nearly all admit to leaving their homes voluntarily [under- scored in original] now, several months after cessation of hostilities, and set Berlin as their objective because from this point westward they assume aid will be giv- en.” Lieutenant Colonel Harry Messec, representing the Office of Military Government for Germany at the meeting, declared that “the whole problem gave every indication of an organized and directed movement de- spite an attempt to make it appear otherwise.” Messec was right, of course, as these Jews had certainly passed into Germany with the aid of the Brichah. Messec clearly felt the Army was being manipulated and lied to. “It is believed here,” his memo concluded, “that these people are not being displaced by any internal policy of the Polish government or organized persecu- tion and that all movements are recent individual deci- sions, and therefore that the United States Government has no moral responsibility toward such persons.” Yet Messec knew this could be an explosive issue. “It ap- pears,” he wrote in a cover letter to the memo, “that in- sufficient specific guidance has been given this office in the matter, and that the problem is of such magnitude and implications that advice on a governmental level is desirable.” The Army, quite clearly, was at a loss.
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Part of the problem lay in getting a clear picture of what was going on. The fluidity of the overall situation must be stressed: there was very sketchy information about the new arrivals, and often the reports that were available were contradictory. The number of Jewish “infiltrees” was infinitesimal compared to the mas- sive flows of ethnic Germans who were being expelled from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia at just the same time. There was also an important change in the military occupation structure: in November, General Eisenhower returned to the United States. His position as commander of U.S. forces in the European Theater and of the occupation forces in Germany was taken over by General Joseph T. McNarney. Eisenhower, through the Harrison report, had become personally invested in the Jewish DP problem and had made sincere efforts to improve their lot; McNarney had little background or awareness of the issue, and was reluctant to make it one of his priorities. Through the late fall, command- ers on the ground had no clear directives from Wash- ington or from the occupation authorities about how to handle the new Jewish refugees. Without clear guid- ance, a gentleman’s agreement took hold between Jews and the Army: Jews from Poland and the east would be let into the U.S. zone and treated humanely, but they would have to manage within the existing camp sys- tem, as no major new effort on their behalf would be
made.
The result, predictably enough, was that existing DP centers quickly became overcrowded. According to a JDC report, the conditions in Landsberg had shown “marked deterioration” after October; “overcrowding is serious, sanitation is deplorable; clothing supplies are extremely short.” At Föhrenwald, “the situation has deteriorated to such an extent that problems there are of a graver character today than in any other camp in the American zone.” The housing shortage at Zeilsheim was also acute and the military refused to requisition any more German homes; camp residents were packed into damp barracks, sleeping on concrete floors, while facing an extreme shortage of coal.
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Yet these condi- tions, bad as they were, did not unduly alarm American military authorities. In early December, Leo Srole, the educator and UNRRA official in Landsberg, announced his resignation and sent a strongly worded protest to Judge Rifkind and, via Abraham Klausner, to the news- papers, about the overcrowded conditions and lack of comforts in Landsberg. Immediately, General Walter Bedell Smith conducted a tour of inspection and de- clared the camp adequately supplied. This report was given added credibility by the presence of Judge Rif- kind, who soon cabled to the World Jewish Congress headquarters in New York that hyperbolic assertions of
epidemics, starvation, and misery inside the DP camps were “irresponsible stories.” Conditions were not per- fect, he readily acknowledged, but in his estimation the Army was making a great effort on behalf of the Jewish camp residents, while providing minimal shelter and aid to newcomers.
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If the camps continued to provide for a rudimentary level of existence, the infiltrees nonetheless antago- nized Army and UNRRA officials. Numerous observers were struck by officials’ steadfast refusal to undertake major requisitions of housing, in part because to do so would displace Germans and so create a new aggrieved population of homeless, and partly because there re- mained deep skepticism about the motives of the newly arriving Jews. U.S. military officers cast doubt on the claims of persecution. Messec made a tour of three assembly centers in Berlin on December 19, and after interviewing dozens of recently arrived residents, concluded that “the stories of persecution [by Poles] do not stand up under interrogation.” Instead, Messec claimed that “as a group, they are congenital psycho- pathic liars” and dismissed them with contempt: the “real cause” of the migration of Jews out of Poland was simply that they did not wish to engage in “the hard work to reestablish a war wracked nation.”
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This was a view apparently shared by British command- ers, who encountered Jewish refugees in the British zone of Austria. As early as October 2, Lieutenant- Colo- nel O’Dwyer, deputy director of the Displaced Persons division in the Allied Commission for Austria, declared that the arrival of Jews at the Austrian DP camps in Graz, Trofaiach, and Judenburg was the result of “a highly or- ganized racket.” The new arrivals, he said, were “well clothed, well shod, full of money, and prosperous look- ing; they are fat, greasy, and arrogant. Their story is that they have been in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. This may be so, but if so, they must have been very comfortable camps…. They are obstruc- tive, undisciplined, and thoroughly uncooperative.” A month later, Major General W. H. Stratton, chief of staff in the British headquarters in Austria, also reported to London his conclusion that Jewish movements were the result of “an organized move into the British zone by refugee Jews, directed by Jewish agencies.” These newcomers stood out because “they arrive generally better fed and clothed, have more money, move more freely and are less well-behaved” than other DPs. And again, a few weeks later, British headquarters in Aus- tria complained that the Jewish refugees “have been difficult to handle since their arrival and have openly avowed their intention of making a nuisance of them- selves until they are allowed to proceed to Palestine.”
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Given that these views were fairly widespread among the British commanders on the ground in Europe, it was perhaps not surprising that another senior British general, Sir Frederick Morgan, the head of UNRRA’s DP branch in Germany, should have aired similar senti- ments. Following a press conference in early January, Morgan casually told reporters that he suspected that Jews were being aided by a secret Jewish organization, and that new arrivals were “well dressed, well fed, rosy- cheeked, and with their pockets bulging with money.” These Jews “all have the same monotonous story about pogroms,” but their stories were unsupported by fact.
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This seemed to be a widespread view, despite growing evidence of atrocities in Poland against Jews. Not until the especially bloody murder of forty-one Jews in the town of Kielce on July 4, 1946, would the doubters fi- nally be silenced.
With that pogrom, the exodus out of Poland gained still greater momentum: in the summer of 1946, accord- ing to Bauer, over 90,000 Jews from Eastern Europe made their way westward, there to join a fragile, tenta- tive population of camp-dwelling Jews, suspended be- tween liberation and freedom. It is a sordid truth: for thousands of Jews in Europe, the promise brought by the Allied armies in April had turned sour by the end of 1945. For most of them, this awkward limbo would
endure until 1948, when at long last the final leg of their journey ended on the shores of an independent Israel. For Jews, then, the war’s end was no end at all but an intermediate stage on a longer path toward survival and regeneration. Their long wait appears in retrospect an unconscionable delay, another tragedy in a landscape already crowded with tragedies. Even so, this Jewish passage through postwar Europe con- tains within its complexity and messiness something of the miraculous. Here, among blackened bricks and bleached bones, small bands of Jews faced their future with grim determination; and alongside them stood, often uneasily, American soldiers who had defeated the Nazi regime, and now provided shelter and protec- tion for its victims. There is ample evidence to show that many Army officials were slow to realize the scope of the Jewish catastrophe, and reluctant to take up the cause of these survivors. Yet as Judge Simon Rifkind stated in an address to an audience of American Jews in April 1946, “were it not for the [American] Army, there would not be any Jews in Central Europe today to constitute a Jewish problem. The survival of the rem- nant of Israel is the result of the courage and devotion of American soldiers of all creeds and colors.” Rifkind was right to salute the efforts of the U.S. Army, which had done so much to secure Jewish liberation. Yet it fell to the Jews alone to transform this liberation into
freedom, and here is where the real heroism lay. After a decade of genocide and persecution, Jews in Europe remained focused on renewal and regeneration, and they did so, as Judge Rifkind put it, “as a brigade of free men, united by common memories and fired by a com- mon aspiration to live again as a people.”
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A
T THE CLOSE of the Second World War, the sur- viving Jews in Europe believed that the suffering they had endured at the hands of the Third Reich
now entitled them to a state of their own: a home that would be built in Palestine. The Jews of Europe had tried integration; they had even tried segregation; and still they had been persecuted and slaughtered. Sure- ly now, in the wake of the Holocaust, the world would make every effort to hasten the Jews on their passage to Palestine, where they might pursue the lives and hopes that Europe had so cruelly denied them.
The British government did not see things the same way. Britain in 1945 controlled Palestine under a two- decade-old League of Nations mandate, making Pales- tine a colony at one remove. Yet for Britain, it was also a piece of an informal empire, a wide sphere of influ- ence that stretched the length of the Mediterranean Sea, from Gibraltar through Greece to the Near East and down to Cairo and Suez. Palestine was an impor- tant foothold in a strategically vital part of the world through which the routes to India ran, and whence came Britain’s oil supplies. Britain had long held to a policy of limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine and had done so throughout the 1930s, claiming that
the interests of the region would be served by main- taining an Arab majority there. Jewish immigration, this argument ran, could only upset this balance, cause civil strife, and require a more muscular British police role there. In 1945, a weakened and financially insecure Britain did not have the resources to police its empire in this manner, making it all the more imperative that Jews not be allowed to go to Palestine in large num- bers. To defend this indefensible position, the British frequently resorted to a convenient formulation. Jews, British officials stated repeatedly, did not constitute a separate people or “race.” Indeed, to assert their dif- ference was only to play into the hands of the anti- Semites who had persecuted Jews all these years. Jews had suffered, but so had others; they deserved only the same treatment and rights as other DPs in liberated Europe. Unlike, say, Poles or Czechs, this argument went, the Jews did not constitute a distinct “nation,” and they certainly could make no special claim to a Jewish state that rested solely upon their persecution at the hands of the Nazis. The positions staked out by the British government and the Jewish survivors were diametrically opposed. The stage was set for a violent clash, and it occurred in Germany, in a highly charged setting: the camp of Bergen-Belsen.
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