A Chosen Few (18 page)

I
t did not take a pogrom in Kielce 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 Łódź, 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 Łódź 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 Łódź. The few Jews who remained in their Łódź 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, Lea’s 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 François 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 Waks’s 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, Förenwald, 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 Förenwald. 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 Förenwald, 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 Düsseldorf. The Jewish Community leader from Düsseldorf had visited him at Förenwald and urged him to come there. In Düsseldorf 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 was 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.

I
mmediately 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.