Since Jews had been banned from schools under German occupation, most of the returning teenagers and young adults had not been to school for five years. When Leo Palache got back, he was almost twenty and had never finished high school, which was deeply troubling for a man who had come from a scholarly household. His father had been a distinguished Old Testament professor whose name had been given to one of the schools in the university, the Judah Palache Institute. Leo had wanted to be a lawyer.
A program of adult education was established for cases like his, but Leo had no one to advise him to go there. Instead, he simply went back to high school. There he sat, a twenty-year-old man who had survived the death camps, in a class with fourteen-year-olds. “I felt that emotionally, it was absolutely impossible,” he said. He never did get an education, and all his life, with a mixture of humor and sadness, he would call himself “am ha-arez” the biblical word for one of the ignorant masses.
ON THE TRAIN going into Amsterdam, Leo Palache had vowed that he would immediately return to a strictly kosher diet and strict observance of the Sabbath. Others, like Jaap Meijer, could never again believe in God and his commandments. For those who wanted to be kosher after Liberation, it was difficult because there was still little food. Sal Meijer wanted to return to his trade as a kosher butcher, but no meat was available, let alone kosher meat. Instead, he opened a coffee shop on the Jodenbree-straat, next to a Sephardic butcher. Sal suspected that the meat next door was not really kosher, and it certainly wasn't legal, since the import of meat was not allowed. Some meat did come from London and Antwerp on the black market. A small scandal erupted when one kosher steer arrived and two kosher tongues were sold.
Meijer rented a room in the Transvaalbuurt, an area so named because before the war it had been largely populated by diamond workers. Once meat became available, Meijer re-opened his kosher butcher shop on the Jodenbreestraat, but the area was still in ruins.
For years, the Dutch government held fast to the policy of not giving Jews special treatment. German Jewish refugees and fleeing Nazi war criminals were thrown into the same prison camp for illegal German aliens. Immediately after the Liberation, the tax office billed the Jewish Community of the Hague—most of whom were dead—for several years of back taxes on the plot of land under the unused synagogue. Nor did the government offer Jews much help in recuperating private property that had been stolen from them. Jewish property that Dutch Nazis had taken over was repossessed by the government, and survivors like Sieg and Evelyne Biedermann had to sue to get theirs returned to them.
The Biedermanns got their millinery business back, and after it was starting to prosper by the mid-1950s, a sheepish-looking man appeared at the Biedermann door. “Pm very sorry,” he began. “But you understand-—I was sent. This is not my idea.” Sieg slowly came to understand he was from the government. But what did he want?
“Well, you understand, this is not my idea. And you don't have to do it. Other people have said no, and nothing has happened to them.”
Biedermann was losing patience. “What do you want?”
“Well, in fact, the sixty guilders.”
“What?”
“At the train station in 1945. Ten guilders were allotted, but you got sixty guilders. That was a loan. But, as I say… “
Biedermann paid back the sixty guilders and demanded a receipt.
The Netherlands wanted to remember its Resistance, but it did not want to remember what it had let happen to Jews. A pension was offered for Resistance veterans but not to Jewish victims. An equivalent pension for Jewish victims was not passed until 1973.
Not only was there little sympathy for Jews, but books and newspapers published in the Netherlands after the war revealed a certain anti-Semitism in comments about the cowardice of Jews, how they had to depend on other people to save them, how Jews in hiding stole things and couldn't be trusted.
More than 150,000 Dutch people were denounced as collaborators and arrested. A few were sentenced to death for war crimes, but most of the executions were never carried out. Dutch retribution fell far short of that of France, which prosecuted 170,000 cases of collaborators, sentenced 120,000, executed some 2,000, and lynched another 4,500. Belgium, with a population of only eight million, investigated 634,000 cases of collaboration, though only 87,000 were actually prosecuted, most of which led to convictions. It wasn't that the Dutch hadn't had collaborators. Dutch collaborators enabled the Germans to kill a far higher percentage of Jews there than in France or Belgium. Major SS operations, such as Westerbork camp, were operated by Dutch, not by Germans. Thirty thousand Dutchmen had volunteered to fight for Germany. The Germans paid seven guilders for a tip on a Jew in hiding, and one-third of the Jews hidden by Christians were betrayed to the Nazis, the best-known example being the family of Anne Frank.
But now the Dutch government seemed to lack either the will or the means to process all the cases that were being reported. Complaints were often investigated by amateurs. After a few years the government decided to release all but the most flagrant cases. It sent a letter to the Jewish Community saying that it had decided to release the others into society and hoped that the Jewish Community would understand and receive these people “in a Christian manner.” It was a form letter that went to all religious groups.
JEWISH LIFE RESUMED in Amsterdam. But the scale of it was different. Amsterdam had been a city like New York, where Jewish life was a basic component of the culture. Like New York, the local slang in Amsterdam was heavily laced with Yiddish. The slang continued, but with few Jews. Slowly, the figures were tabulated. Of the 110,000 Dutch Jews who had been sent to the camps, 5,000 had survived. More than three-quarters of Dutch Jewry had been murdered, the worst rate of genocide in all of Western Europe. In 1945, Victor Waterman was walking on an Amsterdam street wearing a good suit, when he heard a voice from somewhere behind him say, “Look, they missed one.”
P A R T T W O
BROYGEZ
IN THE
COLD WAR
“And what did our Eternal Father have to say on the subject? If he had no part in this, then what did he have a part in? Was he looking at life as you look at a newsreel? Was he shaking his head, and then wondering whether the survivors still loved him? And what did Jesus do about Hitler, Himmler and the Waffen SS? Turn the other cheek? And what did the pope do, and the Allies, and the Jews? God and man, old and young, wise and foolish, this race and that religion—who did not take part in this obscenity?”
GYORGY (GEORGE) KONRAD, A Feast in the Garden
8
From Lódź
to Dusseldorf
IT DID NOT TAKE A POGROM IN KLELCE TO CONVINCE LEA Lesser or Aaron Waks that this burned-out cemetery called Poland was no longer their home. The Lessers had survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union. Aaron Waks had done the same, but he had failed to convince a single member of his family to come with him. They had all believed that their home was in Lodz, and they were just not people for moving. There were even optimists among them who thought everything would be all right in Poland—now every one of them was dead. Aaron Waks was not going to forgive or forget anything. The Poles were murderers, and the Germans were murderers. Europe was a slaughterhouse of racist butchers, and a Jew was a fool to trust any of them.
Immediately after the war Aaron Waks left Lodz for an American-run camp in central Germany near Kassel, to get his connection to Palestine. Soon after, the Lesser family—Lea, her parents, three sisters, and a brother—left for the same camp. They arrived to find Aaron Waks in charge of relations with the Americans. Aaron and Lea had known each other since their childhood in the little town of Nowy Miasto, “New Town,” which had its shtetl—a little Jewish village—on the far side of the hill. They had grown up together in the Jewish part of Lodz. The few Jews who remained in their Lodz neighborhood were mostly preparing to leave, and nobody lived on the far side of the hill in Nowy Miasto anymore. But when Aaron went to Germany, he reasoned that there was more to
all of this than just getting himself out. He thought there should be no Jews at all in Europe. After two thousand years of abuse, this was the end of it. When the next pogrom was launched, there should be no Jews to be found.
The DP camps were established in Allied-occupied Germany for the 45,000 Jews who had been liberated from concentration camps in Germany and were awaiting passage out of the country. That population increased by hundreds of thousands as people like Aaron and Lea came in from the east. After the pogrom in Kielce, Polish Jews packed into the DP camps in Germany.
In 1946, Aaron and Lea were married, and one year later their first son, Ruwen, was born in the DP camp. The following year, after the State of Israel was established, Leas entire family emigrated. The DPs who had been kept out of Palestine when it was British-controlled could now enter Israel and become citizens. This should have meant the end of the DP camps, with people like Aaron Waks getting everyone out in an orderly fashion and then closing up the camps and leaving. But not everyone went and so the camps did not close down, and Aaron Waks did not see his job as finished. There were still thousands of DPs. First run by the Allied military, the camps were then turned over to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, then to the International Refugee Organization. As they were passed from one organization to the next, each expected it to be a short-term project.
Many of these camps had originally been German prisoner-of-war camps. Future French President Frangois Mitterrand had been among the French prisoners held in the camp where Ruwen Waks was born. But as the camps became increasingly settled by DPs, they were turned into very livable villages. Ruwen remembers his childhood there fondly. “It wasn't like being in a camp,” he recalled. Families lived in houses, sometimes two-family houses, and conditions were pleasant, even privileged. The Allies saw to it that the DPs lived considerably better than most of the Germans who were suffering from shortages in their bombed-out cities.
The camps became Jewish villages, with their own autonomous governments. DPs wanted no relations with Germany, recognized no German authority over their territory, and they dealt only with the occupying powers and their own Jewish police and courts within the camps. They became in effect an Israel in Europe. Simply wanting to be in a place for Jews that was run by Jews, many of the camp inhabitants had no real desire to leave in order to live in the underdeveloped, politically destabilized Middle East. Aaron Waks, perhaps without ever thinking about it in this way, became a municipal official in a European Jewish village. His was a life of responsibilities, with the satisfaction of a sense of mission.
But something was beginning to trouble Aaron and other camp leaders: Many of the DPs were slowly settling into Germany. Germany was out there, not in their village. Living in Germany was exactly what Aaron did not want Jews to do.
Because the camps were supplied with many goods that were not available in the Germany outside the camps, black marketeering was an easy temptation for DPs. Near each DP camp, a German community sprang up from its economic activity. Some DPs were making substantial profits in the German economy. DP Jewish communities started to appear outside of the camps. In Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and Hesse, Jewish communities were founded in places that had had no Jews before the war. Among the DPs who settled in Germany, there was a strong tendency toward disreputable or even criminal activity. They hated Germany and the Germans, and anything was fair. What didn't the Germans deserve?
By 1949, excluding the Soviet sector, which had no DPs, more than half the Jews in Germany outside the DP camps were former DPs. Only about fifteen thousand German Jews had survived in Germany, most because of mixed marriages. Few among the German survivors had a strong Jewish identity. Of the 4,378 married Jews remaining in Berlin after May 1945, 94 percent were married to non-Jews. For these few survivors, most of whom had lost all property and livelihood, there was no help. A generation later, Germans would express their guilt in an eagerness to be seen helping and working with Jews. But directly after the war, German guilt worked very differently. Germans were reluctant to hire Jews because Jews made them feel bad. The survivors went hungry until foreign Jewish agencies provided them with assistance.
Slowly, in urban centers around occupied Germany, minuscule Jewish communities began to reappear. DPs were not always seen as an opportunity to enlarge these communities. Some communities put out flyers warning their members against “DP panhandlers” who might be working the area. The unscrupulous and lawless attitude of these new arrivals aggravated the old German Jewish prejudices against Eastern Jews, Ostjuden. In a harsh echo of traditional German citizenship law, some communities passed laws stating that only a German-born Jew could become Community president. In spite of everything, German Jews were Germans.
DPs settled in the larger cities like Frankfurt, where sleazy bars and beer halls that catered to soldiers and prostitutes became stereotypical DP businesses. They drifted aimlessly from one city to another. Their only moral principle was that doing anything to help Germany rebuild was wrong.
When Aaron Wakss camp was closed in 1949, it was at last time for him, Lea, and their baby to make aliyah to Israel. They had learned from Lea's family and others that it was difficult to get consumer goods in Israel. Everything that would be needed in their new home, even furniture, was bought in Germany and shipped. But the Israeli port authorities, for incomprehensible bureaucratic reasons, would not let Lea's parents pick up their goods, and the crates remained on the Israeli dock until everything in them was ruined. This became part of the Waks family mythology. Decades later, the family still insisted that Aaron and Lea did not go to Israel because the Israelis let all their goods rot on a dock. “A country that would do that? They must be criminals,” Lea said in Yiddish.
Moishe Waks, who was not born until three years later, grew up firmly believing that his family did not move to Israel because the British blockade had captured the ship with their goods and his parents had lost everything. “The ship was taken by the British, and therefore my parents stayed still in Germany,” he explained erroneously, more than forty years later in Berlin. Asked why they had not tried again, he speculated that “all their money must have been gone.”
The more complicated truth was that Aaron and Lea had become involved in a different kind of life in Germany. They had become German Zionists—Jews who lived among Jews in Germany and campaigned to get them to move to Israel. It was becoming clear that this was not a finite task but a permanent struggle. Some Jews were going to stay in Germany for some time, and it would be Aaron's job to try to convince them to leave. At the same time, Israel, “the land of milk and honey,” was turning out to be the land of war and deprivation. Many refugees, including Lea's parents, returned to Germany.
Instead of going to Israel, the Wakses moved to another DP camp, Forenwald, near Munich, where Lea's parents joined them. It was the only camp that hadn't yet been closed down. All the remaining refugees from around Germany were sent to Forenwald. Moishe was born there in 1952. That year, with twelve thousand DPs still in Germany, the International Refugee Organization announced that its DP activities had come to an end. Lea's parents went back to Israel to give it another try. But two thousand Jews refused to leave Forenwald, and Aaron Waks decided to stay with them.
Finally in 1955, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the Joint—agreed to support the remaining one thousand camp DPs. At this point Aaron had finished his Zionist camp work, even though many of the DPs were still in Germany, and he was free to make aliyah. But instead, he decided to move to Dusseldorf. The Jewish Community leader from Dusseldorf had visited him at Forenwald and urged him to come there. In Dusseldorf Waks came across a German-language Jewish newsletter that told its readers in boldface type, “Learn Hebrew!” Their community meetings, like those in many other German cities at the time, were under the influence of the Eastern European Zionists who had settled there and therefore always ended with singing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli anthem.
It wa
s a small community, and Aaron Waks thought he could work with Zionist organizations and help Jews leave. This had become his way of working for Israel, and Germany was where he did it. It offered familiar comforts and certainties after twenty years of upheavals. Israel, the war-torn impoverished dream, would remain a goal for some time in the future.
9
From
the Lowlands
to Palestine
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE WAR, RELATIONS AMONG THE various Jewish groups in Antwerp were so harmonious that it almost seemed un-Jewish. Working with international Jewish organizations, they quickly established a system of kosher food, two Jewish schools, an orphanage, and a working synagogue. Jewish leaders began to hope they could stay united in a single organization. But as Sam Perl said, “When things got better, everybody started acting like Jews again.”
One of the most divisive issues was the movement to establish an Israeli state. The British, who still controlled Palestine, had promised to reverse their 1939 policy of tightly restricting Jewish immigration. The policy reversal had been a campaign promise of the Labour party. But once in power, Labour enforced the old policy with even harsher measures against illegal immigrants. The British hold on its Middle Eastern oil fields concerned the Labour government far more than the party's historical commitment to Zionism.
After the Kielce pogrom, when the population of the DP camps surged into the hundreds of thousands, pressure on the British to let Jews into Palestine increased. The British and American governments formed the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which recommended that a hundred thousand refugees from DP camps be quickly let in. But again, even in the face of recommendations from its own committee, the British Labour government refused.
In Palestine the Haganah decided that it would undertake a massive smuggling of Jewish refugees. The Haganah, whose name means “defense,” had been founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Jew from Odessa who had organized a Jewish Legion in the Middle East to fight with the British in World War I. When the British attempted to disband it after the war, Jabotinsky held it together as a clandestine Jewish defense militia. Now the Haganah set up a network of agents throughout Europe who helped move Jewish refugees across borders onto rusting ships docked in Mediterranean ports and through British blockades to Palestine. More ships were intercepted than made it through, and their cargoes of concentration camp survivors were placed in a British camp on Cyprus.
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