Cruel World (85 page)

The U.S. Army did not particularly care what became of the 600,000 or so DPs left over after the initial massive returns in the spring and summer of 1945, as long as they left Germany, and it used every sort of inducement short of force to encourage them to go home. Repatriating the DPs took on even more urgency when the Allied leaders decided at Potsdam, in late July, to allow Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary to expel an estimated 6.5 million
Volksdeutsche
, all of whom would have to be absorbed into the already struggling German economy, starting in January 1946.
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To expedite the process, reluctant Poles were offered such incentives as several months of food rations if they would return to Poland. When the State Department, prodded by Truman, announced in late December 1945 that, for humanitarian reasons, it would set up consulates in or near DP camps to issue visas to those eligible under the American quotas, the Army reacted with dismay: “Expect announcement will abruptly halt present repatriation movements.… If [DPs] learn of prospects for going to US, it is strongly believed that they will not accept repatriation.”
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But it was already too late for such considerations. There had been early suspicions that many Soviet nationals were being executed as soon as they were out of sight of the American or British units that had escorted them to the borders of the Soviet zones of occupation in Austria and Germany. This had been confirmed in June 1945, during the repatriation of more than 20,000 Cossacks from the British Zone of Austria. These soldiers, many of whom were accompanied by their families, had fought with the Germans in an effort to rid Russia of Stalin. The Western Allies, wanting to assure the return of their own POWs from Soviet-held areas, had agreed at the Yalta summit conference to repatriate the Cossacks and all other Soviet nationals. When the fact that they were being sent back was revealed to the Cossacks, there was mass hysteria and active resistance to what was a virtual death sentence. One mother threw her two babies into a raging river and then jumped in herself. A Cossack father killed his whole family before committing suicide. The scenes during the loading and unloading of the repatriation trains were so horrific that some of the tough British combat troops involved were reduced to tears. This incident was not the only one. Similar scenes took place during the processing of Soviet POWs for repatriation from camps where they had been held in
the United States and Great Britain.
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These events led officers of both nations to devise means to circumvent the Yalta agreements by tacitly obstructing the access of Soviet liaison officers to POWs and DPs. All sorts of red tape was put into place. A top secret British memo in early 1946 stated that

Similar measures were taken by the Americans. This left a body of Russian nationals who would never go back but instead would become part of the “hard-core un-repatriables,” a group that would have to be gradually absorbed by other nations.

It had also become clear that hundreds of Poles, many of them the young people who had left on the flower-bedecked trains, were unhappy with conditions in Poland and were secretly returning to the camps in Germany. They were not alone. Large numbers of Eastern Jews who had never been in Germany before had also begun to “infiltrate” the American Zone. What began as a stream of 300 or 400 a day in November 1945 would rise to over 1,000 by December. More came into the U.S. sector of Berlin. The influx was not surprising. Polish-Jewish relations were still terrible and had included murders and pogroms. Things were so unsettled that some Polish families who had hidden Jewish children felt compelled to continue to do so in order to protect both the children and themselves.
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Word of the good treatment that could be expected in the U.S. Zone had spread, and much publicity had been given to an idea proposed by Jewish Affairs Adviser Rifkind to create a temporary refuge under Army protection in Germany for “the remnants” of Eastern Jewry. More diplomatic than Harrison, Rifkind declared in a later report that the Army had breathed the spirit of life into the “small heap of dry bones” to which the Jews of Europe had been reduced. Now, he said, the Army had “in its keeping not a group of discrete individuals but a ‘people,’ ” and that “destiny has called upon the military forces to preserve that people and to channel its migration.”
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UNRRA and other organizations, responding in part to the publicity surrounding Harrison’s accusations, were doing their best to “channel”
migration out of Germany, especially for “un-repatriable” and “unaccompanied” children. In the late summer of 1945, Britain had offered to take 1,000 and France a second group of 500. It was clear that most of these DPs would be Jewish. The groups in Britain organizing the transfer fully intended that the children, once rehabilitated, would go on to Palestine or other destinations, such as Australia.
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The transfers, sponsored by organizations such as the British Jewish Refugee Committee and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, aided by the Quakers and others, were elaborately planned to provide good accommodation, Jewish group leaders, kosher food, and religious instruction in the receiving countries. When the possibility of going to England was announced at Belsen, hundreds of “precocious and bitter” teenagers whose “only thought was to get out of Germany” mobbed the registration office, frequently lying about their ages, as anyone over sixteen would be rejected.
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No one in the aid community was prepared for the virulent reaction against these transfers from an entity called the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria. In a dramatic resolution passed on October 14, 1945, they declared that “the Remnant of Israel (Sharith-Ha-Platah)” was not willing to remain in “strange countries” any longer:

The situation was so tense that the authorities had to conceal the names of the children cleared to go to Britain. On the day of departure, a passionate confrontation in the registration office between the Jewish committee in Bavaria and the Jewish agencies in England was only resolved when the military commander intervened and ordered the children to board the waiting trucks. This first transfer did take place, but on November 4 the Bavarian committee, declaring that it had no confidence in the British as they were using force against Jews in Palestine, demanded that no more children go to England or anywhere but Palestine. Two days later committee
agents broke into UNRRA offices and destroyed the dossiers of the children who had been chosen to leave for England. When UNRRA officials told the committee chairman that the children had gone very willingly, he retorted that they had done so because they were from a camp “where they had been isolated and inaccessible to the influence of the Jewish leaders within the camp,” a situation that had now been “remedied” by sending “an educator” to that location.
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Meanwhile, a delegation of children had appeared at the central UNRRA headquarters for Germany with a petition demanding that they be permitted to migrate to England and stating that they were prepared to fight those in the camp who opposed their movement.
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The dismayed UNRRA staff now appealed to Judge Rifkind to reason with the Jewish committee so that the “opportunity for living a normal life in England while resettlement plans are being worked out” would not be denied to the children.
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Rifkind, clearly distressed, spoke to future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion at the Jewish Agency for Palestine in London, saying that the camps should not become an “open battle ground” and that the transfers should either be allowed to proceed or be abandoned. Ben-Gurion promised to send someone to “appraise” the situation.
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In the end, all the children already scheduled to leave for England were allowed to go, but in late November UNRRA was advised that no more unaccompanied children were “to be sent out of the US Zone of Germany for temporary or permanent care in other countries” until further notice, unless they had relatives in the other country.
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This was unfortunate, as, unbeknownst to the American authorities, many thousands more were about to arrive in their zone.

When the flood of Jewish child “infiltrees” began, the UNRRA organizers had no warning at all that any were coming, much less how many there were or where they had come from. It was not unusual to find a large number of children in a camp in the morning who had not been there the night before. Although there had been sporadic appearances of groups of unaccompanied children ever since the end of the war, the first major “infiltration” took place on December 16, 1945. A train had arrived in Munich bearing 360 unaccompanied children from Budapest. Refugee authorities received a series of anonymous calls with conflicting information and could not find the children, 120 of whom, escorted by a Hungarian doctor, suddenly appeared at an overflowing DP transient center set up in the Deutsches Museum. The boys and girls, forty-eight of them between two and ten, “dazed and fatigued beyond speech” but still proclaiming that they were “on their way to Palestine,” were processed and “settled on army cots hurriedly thrown up in a large corridor.” After a few days they
were taken to one of the adult Jewish camps. Within the next four weeks there were six other surprise arrivals totaling about 600 children, some as young as six, and usually escorted by young adults. It was not clear how many, if any, were orphans, as in the early batches at least 20 percent referred to living parents.
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By January 7, 1946, UNRRA had managed to open a special camp for infiltree children at Strüth, near Ansbach, and there would soon be more. These camps would not be run according to UNRRA’s usual methods, as it quickly became clear that the groups coming in were not random, but were controlled by young leaders of varying philosophies who planned to keep the children together in separate kibbutz settlements when they arrived in Palestine. The Army ordered that the infiltrees be kept separate from the “regular” DPs “pending firm policy” regarding them, but unlike the British they did not refuse them entry into the U.S. Zone.
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The overwhelming majority of infiltree children were from families that had fled to or lived in eastern Poland and then been sent to Siberia or other remote locations in the USSR. Large numbers also came from Hungary, where conditions even after liberation were horrendous. One group of Polish and Czech orphans had been gathered together in Budapest before the German occupation in 1943 by a doctor who had escaped from the camps. They had pretended to be a Christian children’s home, but no one was deceived, and the house was raided by the Nazis. Some of the orphans escaped and regrouped elsewhere. More children, some as young as six months, were brought in from cellars, woods, and caves to another house disguised as belonging to the International Red Cross. After the Russians came, some of the children found their parents and others were sent to Palestine. The remainder, left with few resources, had nearly starved during the winter of 1945, and many had died: every morning those who were bedridden were shaken to see if they were still alive, and often they were not.
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Smaller numbers of the infiltrees were children who had been hidden in Poland, lived with partisans, or had survived the camps. They had been gathered up by Zionist and other organizations both during and after the war. After the fall of Germany, representatives of these organizations met repatriation trains coming into Poland from Russia and scooped up children who were alone or persuaded arriving parents to release them. Other workers scoured the towns and villages looking for hidden children. All agree that some foster parents were paid when the children were given over to the organizers. Whether the money is characterized as a demand by the foster parents before they would release the child, or as a “reward”
encouraging them to do so, depends on the point of view of the reporter.
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But it is clear that those who came for the children were viewed with suspicion by those who had hidden them. The decision to hand over a child was often an agonizing one for the caretaker, particularly if the so-called relative claiming the child had no proof whatsoever of any connection, or if the child was frightened and reluctant to leave. In some cases, particularly where adolescents were concerned, the children absolutely refused to leave their protectors. Even if the retriever was a parent, many visits might be necessary to re-create the relationship and to persuade the child to depart from the place where he felt safe. There were many who did remain in Poland and managed to live quite well, either as Jews or as converts to Catholicism, though many of the former later emigrated to Israel.
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Among these was Jerzy Frydman, the boy whose wanderings had begun when he was eight, and who had lost his arm. He was not found by the Jewish searchers until 1948, and the wild, illiterate child was only persuaded with great difficulty to leave the primitive farm where he was working. But kindness prevailed at the children’s home to which he was taken; the staff soon found traces of the boy’s family, and his long-delayed education progressed quickly. Jerzy became a mathematician and worked for some years in Lodz before emigrating to Israel, where he married and had two children.
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