The Liberation of the Camps by Dan Stone

Author:Dan Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300213546
Publisher: Yale University Press

Rebuilding Lives

Abraham Levent, who was taken to Feldafing after being liberated near Dachau, recalled: ‘And after a while you start – even right after the liberation – people start to make committees, to start learning, to make a newspaper. All kinds of little things show to you that's how fast the people – the Jewish people – are rising up from the ashes and right away they start building up a home.’1 That of course meant a home in a DP camp. Visitors to the DP camps were often struck by finding the inhabitants to be in quite good health. As Judah Nadich explained, the explanation was a very simple one: ‘had these people not been physically strong, they would have been among the six million Jewish victims of the Germans’.1 These were the self-styled ‘she'erit hapleitah’, or saving remnant, a designation that clearly indicates the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish DPs, the former being conscious of the fact that they represented the last survivors of a destroyed culture.1 Even accounting for the fact that by late 1946 the majority of DPs were ‘infiltrees’ from the east and not liberated camp survivors, the idea of the ‘saving remnant’ was one to which almost all adhered, giving their struggle to cling on to life in the wake of the Holocaust some sense of dignity. It was based above all on the survivors’ sense of Jewishness: having been attacked on that basis they now made their Jewish identity the single most important fact of their lives. According to the sociologist and former spokesman for the DPs of Landsberg, Samuel Gringauz, the she'erit hapleitah regarded itself as ‘a herald of the indivisibility of Jewish destiny’ as well as a harbinger of revenge against Nazism in the shape of ‘a defiant affirmation of life and national rebirth’.1

This vision entailed an emphasis on Jewish self-help. This was a notion that, at first, brought the Jewish DPs together; indeed it did not take long for the survivors to start organising themselves. As a result the DP camps became sites of Jewish history which were not just objects of the occupying forces’ policies. The camps’ history became one of interactions – albeit often contentious and ill-tempered – between the inmates, the Allies and the German population.

Naturally, the emergence of self-help did not do away with distinctions between different Jewish groups; rather, it encouraged them. Although in the early days religious distinctions between the Jewish survivors were irrelevant, they soon became one of the main sources of discord and differentiation. The re-emergence of such divisions – natural, after all, in every Jewish community as well as non-Jewish ones – is no doubt an indication of the return of ‘normality’. It was encouraged, inadvertently, by the relief groups’ policies. As well as essential material goods such as clothing, the Jewish relief workers were especially eager to provide DPs with religious items.

Rose Henriques, for example, was delighted to see how everyday items transformed the lives of survivors, writing in a

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