The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (53 page)

Camp inmates feared the Russians above all. While there are accounts of Russian generosity, there was also a higher likelihood of mistreatment at the hands of Russians than from the American soldiers, judging by the testimony of survivors. Yvette Levy, a Frenchwoman deported to Auschwitz in July 1944, was later transport-

ed to Weisskirchen, in the industrial region of eastern Moravia near Ostrava, where she toiled in a munitions plant. She was liberated by the Russians on May 9 or

10. By the time the Russians arrived, the SS guards had fled. She had great trouble with the Russians. “ We tried to tell them we were hungry but we couldn’t under- stand them and they had nothing to give us. We went to the town, but others had already beaten us to it and the houses were stripped bare.” After scavenging in the countryside, she and her companions returned to the camp, and found the Russians now installed in the prisoners’ barracks. “ They were boorish men. Savages. There were rapes. As no one came to our aid, we fled.” But according to Yvette, the British troops she encoun- tered were no better. “ The Tommies behaved just as bad as the Russians. A man in uniform loses all his dignity. The English soldiers said they would give us food only if we slept with them. We all had dysentery, we were sick, dirty…and here was the welcome we got! I don’t know what these men thought of us—they must have taken us for wild animals.” Yvette Bernard-Farnoux, freed from a camp near Prague called Litom ice, evinced horror at the Mongolians in Soviet uniform. She and her bunkmates painted, in large white letters, the Rus- sian word for “ TYPHUS” on their barracks to deter the Mongolians from coming into their camp. They “were a frightening sight: brutes, standing on their tanks, lash-

ing their horses…. They fired their guns everywhere, it was maddening.” When the “real” Russians arrived, two or three days later, they were very well behaved. “ They gave us great slaps on the back, offered us enor- mous slabs of lard, and invited us to drink the health of General de Gaulle and Guy de Maupassant.”
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Clearly, there was no one typical liberation story. Thou- sands of prisoners were freed from Hitler’s camps in the spring of 1945, but many others were liberated while on the death marches, and still others took matters into their own hands by escaping the marches, and hiding in woods, on vacant farms, or in sheds and barns. Some simply walked out of their camps after the guards had fled, and had to go in search of Allied soldiers. And those behind Soviet lines, such as those in Auschwitz, were freed from German captivity but not yet returned to safety. For all this variety, however, one theme unifies the many varying accounts of liberation: profound sor- row. The young Americans and Britons who entered the camps in the spring of 1945 were shocked and appalled by the scenes that greeted them, but perhaps could take some degree of satisfaction in their achievement. Upon first encountering the smoldering corpses at the small labor camp at Ohrdruf, General Eisenhower de- clared “we are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know

what he is fighting against.”
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Ike was right: for the sol- diers, liberation of the camps lent a moral clarity to the war. In dozens of war memoirs by U.S. soldiers, the dis- covery of the camps is said to have answered the ques- tion of what the war was all about. But for the surviving Jews, liberation brought not answers but questions. Why had these horrors happened? Who was respon- sible, and what must now be done? Liberation was not an endpoint but a prologue to a long discourse about how to plumb the meaning of these events, and how to bear witness to them. Here then lies a fundamental divergence in the meaning of liberation: while Ameri- cans have sought to use the atrocities to underscore the essential benevolence of their war, survivors have found nothing redeeming in their experiences. “I live in Auschwitz every day today,” said one survivor forty years later. “I am not liberated yet.” Liberation could not bring a release from the terrible burdens of experi- ence, after all. Perhaps it had come too late. Surely this is the meaning of Elie Wiesel’s remarks to a group of World War II veterans about his own liberation from Buchenwald:

April 11, 1945. Buchenwald. The terrifying silence ter- minated by abrupt yelling. The first American soldiers, their faces ashen. Their eyes. I shall never forget their eyes. Your eyes. You looked and you looked. You could

not move your gaze away from us. It was as though you sought to alter reality with your eyes. They reflected astonishment, bewilderment, endless pain and anger. Yes, anger above all. Rarely have I seen such anger, such rage contained, mute, yet ready to burst with frustra- tion, humiliation, utter helplessness. Then, I remem- ber, you broke down, you wept. You wept and wept un- controllably, unashamedly. You were our children then, for we—the 12-year-old, the 16-year-old boys in Bu- chenwald and Theresienstadt and Mauthausen—knew so much more than you about life and death, man and his endeavors, God and His silence. You wept. We could not. We had no more tears left. We had nothing left. In a way we were dead, and knew it.
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9: Americans and Jews in Occupied Germany

T

HE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN Jewish Holocaust survivors and the Allied armies in the summer and fall of 1945 presents one of the most surpris-

ing, puzzling, and troubling episodes in the history of Europe’s liberation. It is a shocking and uncomfortable fact: the Jews who emerged from Hitler’s camps in the spring of 1945 were not truly free on the morrow of their liberation. The destruction of Hitler’s regime made it possible for surviving Jews to contemplate a life after the Holocaust. But it did not bring that life into being. Long before dreams of revival and renewal could be fulfilled, Jews experienced many new travails, long de- lays, and most appalling, many more months and even years of life in crude wooden huts and barracks, eating at soup kitchens and wearing borrowed clothes, await- ing a future they could only distantly glimpse.

Yet theirs is not only a story of disillusionment, of de- lays in returning to them their freedom. It is also a sto- ry of recovery of that freedom by the Jews themselves who, in the face of crushing odds, slowly carved out a kind of life in the heart of defeated Germany. Caught in limbo, between the nightmare of the camps and the distant prospect of emigration to Palestine, thousands

of Jews gathered in DP camps in Germany. In barracks used by the Nazis as Hitler Youth training camps, or officers’ quarters, or military bases, Holocaust survi- vors waited—and while they waited, they organized, agitated, and strategized. During the summer of 1945, when the heated brickwork of the crematoria still smoldered, occupied Germany became a safe haven for Jews, so much so that Jews from Poland and southeast- ern Europe began to flee—illegally—westward, seek- ing shelter and respite from rampant anti- Semitism. In the American zone, camps near Munich at Lands- berg, Föhrenwald, Feldafing, and Deggendorf, and at Zeilsheim near Frankfurt, evolved into Jewish settle- ments, hardscrabble encampments where prayers could be heard each Sabbath, where kosher kitchens served hot rations, where Jews published newspapers and organized elections, taught Hebrew, studied Scrip- ture, and where Yiddish folk songs could be heard on the evening air.

The Allied armies had almost nothing to do with this Jewish revival, at least in its earliest months. Through- out the summer, the British and American occupiers were focused chiefly on the massive problem of repa- triation, and coping with the strains this dramatic out- flow of forced laborers and POWs placed on transpor- tation, roads, and the security of the occupied areas.

Jewish survivors were not a priority for the liberating armies; it was assumed that Jews, like other DPs, would make their way home, after perhaps a brief period of recovery in makeshift medical facilities or camps. It is abundantly clear that the American and British mili- tary authorities were totally unprepared to deal with the particular issues presented not only by Jewish destruction but by Jewish survival. The liberation of Jews from concentration camps was done piecemeal and pell-mell. No serious preparation for the care and treatment of Jews had been arranged. The British and American armies were under orders to classify and house all DPs, regardless of religion, by their national origin. This was considered enlightened policy, for had it not been the Nazis who segregated people on the ba- sis of religious faith? Rather, the Allies sought simply to enable DPs to go home.

Such bucolic notions were meaningless for Jews in oc- cupied Germany. Most Jews in the DP camps in 1945 had national origins in countries that had openly em- braced the ideology of anti- Semitism or where hatred of Jews was part of the fabric of daily life: Poland chiefly, but also Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and indeed, Germany itself. Though anxious to connect with loved ones in their hometowns and villages, most Jews had few illusions about resuming their prewar

lives. They had seen their families uprooted, perse- cuted, and destroyed. Their villages, as many testified after the war, were now nothing more than cemeteries, full of ghosts and awful memories. For these Holocaust survivors, their only hope lay in their faith, their only comfort came from being among those who believed as they did, who shared common religious rites, and above all, who hoped soon to embark for the promised land of a Jewish national home in Palestine. It is no indict- ment of the stalwart Anglo-American liberators to say that all this baffled them. They did not know what the Jews had experienced, nor did they now know what the surviving Jews wanted. The scene was set for a painful dialogue of the deaf: between a brisk, businesslike mil- itary occupation that sought to sort out the DP problem quickly, and a small but resilient, resourceful Jewish remnant that interposed itself between the Allies and any tidy end to the war.

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A

S THE FLOOD of DPs began to recede—almost six million people had left Germany by the start of September—a few thousand Jews remained

behind, spread out in vulnerable groups like tidal pools on a muddy beach. The formation of what Jewish survivors would soon begin to call She’erit Hapleitah—

the surviving remnant—started in the waning days of the war, and gained momentum in June and July.
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The precise numbers of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Germany at the end of the war can only be estimated. Contemporary sources suggest not less than 50,000 and not more than 70,000 Jews remained in Germany by the late summer of 1945. Roughly 45,000 of these were in the American zone of occupation, and 15,000 or so were located in the British zone. A small number resided in camps in the French zone. Perhaps 15,000 Jews had been accounted for in Austria. The precise number of Jews was in flux in any case, as some Jews were repatriated and others, fleeing the lethal anti- Semitism that still stalked Jews in postwar Poland, sought the relative security of the occupied zones of Germany and Austria. This exodus of the few remain- ing Eastern European Jews swelled the numbers in the DP camps, so that by the end of 1946, there were per- haps 130,000 Jewish DPs in the American zone alone, with much smaller numbers in the British zone, and in Austria. By that time, the international community had been well-informed of the particular plight of Europe’s surviving Jews. In those first few weeks and months af- ter liberation, however, the surviving Jews in Germany were largely left to themselves.
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In the American zone, which included Bavaria, small

pockets of Jews began to stir in the spring of 1945. At a Benedictine monastery outside of Munich, for ex- ample, one of the founding episodes of Jewish revival took place. In the confusion of the last days of the war, when the Germans were still transporting Jews out of the reach of advancing Allied armies, a trainload of Jews from Dachau en route to the Austrian border was strafed by American aircraft, and disabled. The Ger- man guards having fled, a small band of Lithuanian Jews, survivors of the Kovno ghetto, sought out medi- cal attention for those injured by the strafing. Dr. Zal- man Grinberg, a thirty-three-year-old physician from Kovno, strode into the nearby town of Schwabhausen and demanded from the burgermeister immediate aid, on the grounds that the American Army would soon be arriving with orders to lock up any German mayor who failed to assist the wounded. Remarkably, the bluff worked, and the wounded Jews were transported to the monastery of Saint Ottilien, a picturesque, tranquil retreat that had been serving as a German military hos- pital during the war. As soon as the American troops arrived, Grinberg was able to secure Saint Ottilien as a Jewish hospital and within days, some 400 Jews from Dachau and nearby camps were receiving medical at- tention there. Three weeks later, on May 27, a gather- ing of 800 Jewish survivors met at Saint Ottilien. Dr. Grinberg presided over a somber ceremony marked by

speeches, Kaddish, or Prayer for the Dead, and a musi- cal concert performed by survivors of the Kovno ghetto orchestra. These were the first stirrings of a commu- nal Jewish life in postwar Germany. By late August, the Jewish hospital at Saint Ottilien, staffed by seven Jew- ish DP physicians, fourteen German doctors, and 120 nurses, had emerged as the central medical facility for critically ill Jews in Bavaria.
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