The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (60 page)

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OT ONLY DID the British seek to restore the bodies of the freed Belsen survivors, they also believed it was their duty to restore their “char-

acter.” This posed an awkward challenge. Derek Sing- ton, the intelligence officer who spent most of May and June in Belsen, felt it was imperative that the camp authorities make the inhabitants “feel, think, behave, and react as people in a normal moral society. For in the inferno they had come out of, corruption, supe- rior physical strength, cunning, evasion, plunder and illegal action had been the only means of survival…. Who can be astonished that these thousands of human beings who emerged from these years of terror were amoral and unsocial?” Consequently, “British troops were faced with a problem of mental and moral recon- ditioning.”
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Indeed, the leading Jewish newspaper in London, the weekly Jewish Chronicle, agreed: “no peo- ple,” its editorial page wrote, “who have lived through such an ordeal can possibly be normal.…Their sick- ness is no less real because it is of the mind.”
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But as a practical matter, how was such “moral reconditioning” to be undertaken? And who would guide it, along what lines?

For Sington and other British camp authorities, reha-

bilitation meant recivilization: “ There remained the task,” he wrote, “of re-accustoming 15,000 people to enjoyment in work, of teaching many of them to trust and respect authority rather than defy and outwit it, of persuading them to regard regulations and rules as benevolent and not diabolical.” To do so, efforts were made to create some sense of culture: a reading room was arranged and two hundred volumes were made available, including incongruous works such as “Macaulay’s Essays and the novels of Galsworthy, Os- car Wilde, Alphonse Daudet and Warwick Deeping.” There were, however, no Polish or Hungarian books, and as most DPs at Belsen could not read English, “the library was not used a great deal.”
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More successful was the staging of cabarets, featuring Polish dances, a choir of Russian girls singing partisan songs, a Yu- goslav women’s choir (“tough and Amazonian in blue slacks and white pullovers”), and violin and piano con- certos, staged under a great tent in the panzer training school grounds. The first of these debuted on May 24, a mere six weeks after the liberation of Belsen. A Quaker relief volunteer, Hugh Jenkins, recalled that after that evening’s concert, a dance was held, and the camp residents danced under the lighted tents for hours. A “bonny lass” reminded him that a month earlier, he had given her aspirin in a first aid post just days after the camp’s liberation. Jenkins danced with a Romanian

girl who had sung in the performance. “I never thought I’d know how to dance, sing, and be happy again,” she told him. Small comfort, perhaps, but evenings such as these, with their ability to suspend the unpleasant realities of camp life, became a constant feature in Belsen.
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In the Belsen hospital, which was run by UNRRA wel- fare staff, patients were urged to undertake needle- work, sculpture, and crafts of all sorts; in October, their work was put on display in UNRRA’s London headquar- ters. Ms. Erica Fischova- Gachova, the hospital’s chief welfare officer, explained the project in these terms: “a large percentage of the former slave laborers and war victims were not merely diseased skin and bones physically, but were like animals in temperament and action. Our welfare policy, however, called for treat- ing them from the first as if they still had the dignity, health, and mental balance of cultivated people…. I try to act with each one of them just as I would with English aristocracy or with the President or First Lady of the United States.” Ms. Fischova, herself a Czech Jew whose family was murdered in the gas chambers, be- lieved that working with their hands would give Belsen patients a chance to show their creative powers while also restoring to them a sense of self-worth and dig- nity.
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But for the Jews of Belsen, politics mattered more than the kind of cultural and intellectual self-improvement that seemed to preoccupy the British authorities. Within days of the liberation, Josef Rosensaft, a thirty- four-yearold Polish survivor of Auschwitz and a former left-wing Zionist organizer, headed up the formation of a leadership committee of Jewish DPs in Belsen; this remained provisional until September, when the Cen- tral Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone was founded. (Rosensaft remained its chairman until 1950).
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Rosensaft operated in an atmosphere of con- flict and rivalry with the British military authorities in the camp. No sooner had the provisional committee been formed than it made demands upon the British authorities: unrestricted emigration of Jews to Pales- tine; prompt improvement of living conditions, includ- ing improved cultural, educational, and vocational ser- vices; recognition of the committee as the legitimate representative of the Jews in the British zone; and the creation of Jewish-only camps. Grateful though they were for the humanitarian aid the British had delivered, Jewish leaders knew their priority lay in breaking this dependence upon the British and in redressing the bal- ance of power within the camps. The committee lead- ers in Belsen wanted to be self-governing, and wanted British authorities and regulations kept to a minimum. The committee supported the publication of what was

really at first an underground Yiddish newspaper, Un- zer Sztyme (Our Voice), which the British authorities did not officially recognize until May 1947. Rosensaft used “devious” and “illegal” means, according to one Joint official, to help subvert British control of the camp, especially in registering Jewish camp residents, operating an unofficial tracing service, and running a mail service that circumvented the military.
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In further defiance of British regulations, on September 25–27, the committee hosted a meeting in Belsen of Jewish lead- ers from across the British zone; 210 delegates, includ- ing representatives of international Jewish aid organi- zations, convened and uniformly called for the prompt opening of Palestine to Jewish emigration.
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Certainly, any effort by camp authorities to encourage Jews to “respect authority rather than defy and outwit it,” as Sington had hoped, appeared hopelessly naïve.
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With such unequivocal Jewish demands, there could be little prospect of any easy Anglo-Jewish cooperation in the camp once the crisis of the liberation period had passed. The degree of antagonism between Jews and the British increased steadily as the summer changed into fall. The reason for this lies in the intransigence of the British government with respect to Palestine. Re- peatedly pressed by Jewish survivors to allow the cre- ation of Jewish-only camps, and Jewish self-govern-

ment in the British zone, the British army refused, fully aware that to relent would only make it easier for Jews to organize and exert greater pressure for emigration to Palestine. British officials opposed Jewish emigra- tion to Palestine and the creation of a national Jewish state because it complicated their colonial and strate- gic position in the Near East. Therefore, Britain refused to sanction the creation of any Jewish political institu- tions in Germany. The language that was used to state this policy is striking in its frank defiance of Jewish as- pirations. When Leonard Cohen of the Jewish Commit- tee for Relief Abroad in London sent an urgent letter to the British military government in early July asking that Jews be allowed to congregate in Jewish camps in order to find solace, community, and fraternity, his re- quest was dismissed in the following peremptory tone by Major- General B. V. Britten of the British military government in Germany: “segregation would result in a large body of Jews of many nationalities who would probably refuse repatriation and constitute a continu- ous embarrassment. It is considered that the policy should continue to be to emphasize a Jew’s political na- tionality rather than his race and religious persuasion. Preferential treatment of Jews would be unfair to the many non-Jews who have suffered on account of their clandestine and other activities in the Allied cause. It would also cause irritation and anti-Jewish feeling on

the part of the non-Jewish DPs which might well have far reaching results and give rise to persecution at a later date…. The cruelties and hardships to which the Jews in Germany have been subjected are appreciat- ed but the Jews have not been the only sufferers and a balanced view is necessary.”
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General Britten’s atti- tude was consistent with a widely shared view at the time within British official circles that Jews deserved nothing less but nothing more than other Europeans who also were struggling to rebuild their lives after the war. At the very least, this comment reveals a striking ignorance of what Europe’s Jews had experienced in the preceding twelve years, and how those experiences might condition Jewish demands.

General Britten was not alone in his sentiments. The British official records are permeated with this tone of irritation, annoyance, and downright hostility to the idea of treating Jews at all differently from any other group of displaced or distressed persons. The idea that Jewish DPs ought to have a special Jewish chaplain serve as a liaison to the Allied armies was considered by General A. V. Anderson in the War Office “to in- volve the creation of special preferential treatment for the benefit of a particular religious sect,” and there- fore unacceptable.
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When General Eisenhower an- nounced, in the wake of Earl Harrison’s visit, that Jews

in the American zones would now be housed together in Jewish-only camps, the Foreign Office denounced the policy in these terms: “ We are strongly against the idea, sedulously fostered by many Jewish organiza- tions, that Jewry enjoys a supranational status, and it would indeed be disastrous for the Jews themselves if they were accorded special treatment on this basis in comparison with the people of the country where they live.”
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Major- General G. W. R. Templer, the army’s chief of staff in the British zone of occupation, believed that “segregation of Jews as a special race…would be in accordance with the theory propounded by the Na- zis and all other organizations which have persecuted Jews in the past.”
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The cabinet agreed with this view, and the Foreign Office conveyed its displeasure to the United States government: “ To accept the policy ad- vocated by Harrison is to imply in effect that there is no future in Europe for persons of Jewish race. This is surely a counsel of despair…. Indeed it would go far by implication to admit that Nazis were right in holding that there was no place for Jews in Europe.”
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The Brit- ish seemed eager to take the moral high road, arguing that segregation of Jews in camps was a policy against which the Allies had fought and one that should not now be practiced in occupied Germany. But at the heart of the British policy lay a profound and shocking denial of the realities and the scope of the Jewish catastrophe

that had just unfolded in Europe. The British opposed both a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Jewish camps in Germany. The future for Jews, it seemed, could be secured only if Jews ceased to be Jews, and simply melted away into the landscape of postwar Europe.

An example of this official self-satisfaction is evident in an exchange of letters between the Marchioness of Reading, head of the British section of the World Jew- ish Congress, and British military officials. Lady Read- ing wrote to Field Marshal Montgomery in late Septem- ber, beseeching him for help in improving conditions for Jews still in Germany. “I feel sure,” she implored, “you cannot be cognizant of the conditions that still exist in the camps today,” such as “lack of bedding, overcrowding, insufficient diet, an atmosphere of im- prisonment, total lack of occupation, breeding a spirit of despair among the captives who hoped for so much from their liberation.” She concluded: “I find it difficult to write with restraint when I think of these things, for I can so vividly imagine all the hopes that were focused on the liberation during the hell these people passed through: of their intense desire to leave the scene of their anguish forever, to walk out into the world free men and women.”
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Lady Reading received a detailed reply and memoran-

dum from General Templer, thanking her for her let- ter but refuting entirely its contents. “In no case are camps quite as bad as your letter might lead one to believe.” Admittedly, the army had focused initially on repatriation, “possibly at the expense of the welfare of DPs who could not be repatriated,” in other words, Jews. Yet since the summer, housing, food, clothing, and quality of life in the DP camps had all improved, he asserted. Postal links between camps had been set up, a tracing service begun, educational facilities put in place; DPs were even getting a weekly ration of ciga- rettes “greater than that of British troops.” An attached memorandum sent to Lady Reading underscored these broad points, insisting, among other things, that Jews were not living in Belsen, which had been burned, but in a new camp called Hohne; that levies had been made upon German citizens to provide blankets, food, and clothing for DPs; that DPs were now accommodated in “German barracks…or in wooden huts properly wa- terproofed and with heating arrangements.” Above all, DPs in the British zone were assured of 2,000 calories per day in foodstuffs. As to claims of an atmosphere of imprisonment, the memo stated that the barbed wire that encircled camps was “purely to prevent any Ger- man civilians wandering around the camp.” The real problems that camp authorities faced were due to the inclination of DPs to sell their clothes, cigarettes and

rations to Germans on the black market, and to the unwillingness of Jewish camp residents “to work and help themselves.” In short, the British occupation au- thorities had persuaded themselves that Jews, like all other DPs, were being treated fairly, and what troubles did arise were largely due to their own impatience and frustration.
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Lady Reading’s anxious letter was but one in a chorus of voices in Britain and the United States that raised pointed and embarrassing questions about the Brit- ish government’s handling of the DP problem, and by the fall of 1945 it became increasingly difficult for British officials to dispel such criticism. Whereas the Americans after Harrison’s visit had embraced the idea of Jewish-only DP camps in their zone, the British oc- cupation authorities resisted it, and Jewish leaders kept up a barrage of criticism that soon turned into a bitter standoff. The Jewish Chronicle kept up a steady drumbeat about the fate of Jewish DPs. Belsen featured prominently in its pages in May and June, as report- ers, Jewish chaplains, and relief workers toured the camp. Reports stressed the grave humanitarian crisis, the deplorable conditions, and the need for concerted Jewish action in Britain to provide food, medicines, and supplies to the camp. The early editorials stressed common cause with the military authorities—”the Al-