The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (54 page)

Similar scenes played out in other collection points for surviving Jews. When the American military authori-

ties emptied Dachau of its prisoners, they transferred many of the Jews to a complex of military barracks in the town of Landsberg (in whose town jail an impris- oned Adolf Hitler had written Mein Kampf in 1924) and to a Hitler Youth school at Feldafing, on the shores of Lake Starnberg. Though not yet restricted to Jews, these two camps now had large Jewish populations, and attracted Jews located in other Bavarian DP cen- ters. At Deggendorf, a small community of 700 German Jews, all survivors of Theresienstadt camp, found shel- ter, though only after a harrowing journey by military truck to Prague and into Germany during which road accidents claimed a number of lives and left the sur- vivors holed up in a disused army barracks in Winzer, forgotten by the military authorities. In an act of shock- ing insensitivity, American authorities initially housed these Jews alongside a thousand Yugoslav DPs and a group of notoriously anti- Semitic Hungarian Volks- deutsche—many of whom had been voluntary labor- ers in the Reich; only later were they separated. And in addition to Jews in camps, perhaps 6,000 Jews were living outside the DP centers in towns and villages in the Munich area. Freed from the dehumanizing experi- ence of camp life, these Jews were nonetheless vulner- able, because they had no special access to the rations given to DPs nor could they gain access to rudimentary medical care.
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It is remarkable to observe how quickly this disparate, unfortunate community of survivors gathered strength and built the foundations of an effective political or- ganization. On the first of July, a group of forty-one Jewish leaders met at Feldafing and elected a Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria. They named Dr. Zalman Grinberg chairman of its executive com- mittee. Three weeks later, on July 25, the Central Com- mittee organized a conference at the Saint Ottilien monastery; ninety-four representatives from forty-six DP centers across Germany and Austria attended. Al- though this conference received no official recognition from the Allied armies of occupation, a representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine was present.
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The accomplishment of these men cannot be overstated: without resources or official recognition, still housed in dire conditions in DP camps, still bearing up under the intense strain of their own personal losses in the war years, these Jewish leaders had managed to lay the foundations for an organization that would press Jewish interests with the Allied armies and with the public in the United States, Britain, and around the world. They could not possibly know just how much of a struggle lay ahead.

Much of this early organization can be credited to the extraordinary activities of First Lieutenant Abraham J.

Klausner, a thirty-year-old Reform rabbi from Mem- phis, Tennessee, who had been serving in the 116th Evacuation Hospital Unit of the Seventh Army at the end of the war. He arrived at Dachau in May, and dur- ing the course of his duties, which involved presiding over funeral services at mass burial sites, he visited the nearby DP camps that the Army had hastily established. He was shocked to find Jewish survivors still in camps, without resources, contact with the outside world, or a helping hand inside the U.S. military establishment. One of Klausner’s first actions was to draw up a list of as many Jewish survivors as he could find in all the DP camps, and then distribute this list as widely as possi- ble, in order to make reunions between dispersed fam- ily members possible. Klausner, who appears to have maintained only a tenuous connection to his official Army unit, gave his heart to the plight of the surviving Jews, and used his status to press the military authori- ties to attend to their needs.
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It was Klausner who or- ganized the first transports of Jewish survivors from Dachau to nearby camps at Feldafing and Landsberg, thus establishing their reputation as Jewish camps— in direct contradiction to official U.S. military policy. In mid-June, Klausner also secured a headquarters for Grinberg’s Central Committee in the partly ruined Deutsches Museum in Munich—the storied museum of science and technology, founded in 1906 as a showcase

of German scientific achievement and later used by the Nazis for, among other things, the grotesque 1937 ex- hibition on “ The Wandering Jew.” Badly damaged by American bombing in 1944, the building housed UN- RRA headquarters and became a hub of activity for DPs in southern Germany. (DPs founded the “ UNRRA University” at the museum, which was a continuing education program for transient peoples; by October 1945, 1,267 students of twenty-nine nationalities were enrolled in courses there). In recognition of his efforts, the Central Committee invited Klausner to serve on its executive committee as its honorary president.
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Yet Klausner’s methods were not to everyone’s liking. In particular, Klausner crossed swords with the Ameri- can Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the inter-

national humanitarian organization set up in New York by Felix M. Warburg at the start of the First World War to aid Jews in distress. The Joint, as it was universally known, had hoped since the last months of the war that it would be allowed to send its representatives into lib- erated areas and organize relief and medical aid for Jews. But the U.S. military was extremely reluctant to give civilians access to the DP camps. Thus the Joint did not get its representatives into the camps until Au- gust, and even then was slow to produce results. This would change quickly: by 1946 the Joint was a major player in providing millions of dollars’ worth of goods, food, clothing, and educational materials to Jewish DP camps. But in that critical summer of the liberation, leaders of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews felt abandoned by the American Jewish community.

Klausner used his position as something of a public figure in occupied Bavaria to give voice to the rage of the Jews over the perceived failure of the Joint to pro- vide them aid and assistance. In a memo he prepared in June for general distribution to American Jew- ish leaders, he attempted to survey the conditions in which 14,000 Jews in Bavaria lived: some were still in camps behind barbed wire and under curfew; almost all lacked basic supplies for hygienic living conditions, including plumbing or clean water; their food gener-

ally consisted of bread, coffee, bean soup, and tinned meat. Klausner meant for his words to bite: “Liberated, but not free—that is the paradox of the Jew,” he wrote. “In the concentration camp his whole being was con- sumed with the hope of salvation. That hope was his life, for that he was willing to suffer. Saved, his hope evanesces, for no new source of hope has been given him. Suffering continues to be his badge.” He contin- ued: “the greater percentage of the liberated are still imprisoned in the striped uniform forced upon them by the oppressor. UNRRA, supposedly the organiza- tion to assist in this matter, has thus done nothing.” In the seven weeks since liberation, “missions and rep- resentatives of varying hues have trekked through the misery of the liberated, offering verbal balm for their wounds…. The Jew has been constantly asking, most times with tears, ‘where are our representatives?…Can they not send word to sustain us in this bitter hour? A word of reassurance?’”
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Whenever he addressed American soldiers in his ca- pacity as a spiritual leader, Klausner ferociously criti- cized the Joint, and instructed servicemen to write home and ask their families to put pressure on the American Jewish community. In the Joint archives, one finds numerous letters, passed on to the Joint from the anxious parents of GIs who had heard Klausner’s stem-

winding orations. “Dear Florence,” began one GI’s let- ter home.

I just returned from services where we had a Jewish chaplain to speak to us. He gave us the most astound- ing and horrifying story I’ve ever heard and spoke for over an hour. He is the head of a small organization here in Bavaria to help the Jewish displaced persons here. He told us stories of what was and is still being done with the Jews in Germany, Poland, and these other countries. The people at home think that when the Americans came in, all the Jews were liberated and everything was just fine from that moment on, but this is anything but the truth…. He asked us to write home about these things and see to it that this information is disseminated to as many people as you can possibly tell it to.
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Sergeant Edward Mayer of Chicago wrote home to his congregation’s rabbi to say that he too had met Klaus- ner and toured Saint Ottilien hospital. Klausner, Mayer reported, had to “scrounge enough odds and ends from captured enemy stores to keep the patients alive…. Since these people have been liberated, some three months ago, not one single bit of help has come, noth- ing from the International Red Cross, nothing from UNRRA, and what hurts worst of all, nothing from the

‘great’ Joint Distribution Committee.” Staff Sergeant L.

P. Brewster of the 2nd Armored Division wrote home in agony to his parents: “ Why haven’t the Jews in the USA helped? Where is the fellowship spirit toward a human being?” And Chaplain Klausner himself wrote to his teachers, friends, and associates in the United States, underscoring the failure of the American Jewish com- munity to act with haste.
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Not surprisingly, the leaders of the Joint found Klaus- ner exasperating. They dutifully replied to these vari- ous letters with careful explanations for the delays in getting aid to surviving Jews. But in their eyes, Klaus- ner had become a menace. A telegram from the Joint’s headquarters in New York to the office in Paris stated that “critical letters from chaplains particularly Klaus- ner doing great damage fundraising efforts throughout country…. Many communities and prominent leaders aroused but in direction withholding support cam- paign rather than providing for increasing activities which essential to help meet some of the dire needs referred to by chaplains.”
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And indeed, much of Klausner’s criticism of the Joint was misdirected. The Joint, explained Executive Vice Chairman Joseph Hyman in a letter to one of many in- quiries he received, was constrained by the military.

“Several months before the war ended,” he wrote, the JDC negotiated with SHAEF in Germany to secure ad- mission. After repeated exertion and pressure the JDC finally reached an understanding in June that when the Army commanders in the field called up the JDC, i.e., actually invited the JDC field teams, the JDC would be permitted to come in under the auspices of the UN- RRA. The UNRRA itself gained admission in early July. They also had to wait for Army invitation. We made the most insistent demands of Army Corps commanders to come in and we began toward the end of July, after heartbreaking delays on the part of the Army to send in a few teams. We gained admission through plead- ing and negotiating, all of which we did in the most pa- tient, thorough and persistent way, both in Washington and Europe.

Implicitly deflecting the criticism of Klausner, Hyman wrote that “the GIs and the Jewish chaplains, because they were in the US military uniform, naturally were able to enter those camps long before the JDC could be permitted…. The JDC is a civilian agency which can go into the camps only under Army control.”
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Hyman had every reason to feel aggrieved by Klausner’s criticisms. Yet from inside the camps of liberated Germany, where Jewish suffering was so pronounced and so ubiquitous, it was hard to accept these excuses. Klausner demon-

strated his disdain for the Joint when its first represen- tative arrived at the Deutsches Museum in mid-August, empty-handed. Klausner told his assistant to steal the gasoline out of the visitor’s truck. “I told him, ‘Just re- cord it as the first contribution that the American Joint Distribution Committee is making to the liberated of Germany.’”
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F

ROM INSIDE THE DP camps, it appeared that the plight of the surviving Jews was being callously disregarded by the American occupation author-

ities. In fact, however, the American government was not entirely complacent about their fate. In early June, in response to the urgings of Jewish advocacy organi- zations, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau persuaded the U.S. Department of State and President Harry Truman of the need for a high-level investigation of the problem, and on June 22, the president named Earl G. Harrison, the dean of the University of Penn- sylvania Law School and a former commissioner of immigration and naturalization, to lead a fact-finding mission to Europe. Perhaps it was predictable that in response to a desperate plea for food, shoes, and medi- cine, Washington would send a blue-ribbon panel. But in the long run, the Harrison mission had a dramatic