Cruel World (86 page)

The aim of the gathering-up exercise in Poland was to get the children to the U.S. Zone of Germany or other starting points, from which, it was felt, they would have the best chance of emigration to Palestine. Families were persuaded not only that unaccompanied children were more apt to be allowed to emigrate than whole families, but also that having a child go ahead and be accepted would facilitate entry for its relations. The UNRRA people dealing with this flood of arrivals realized very soon that the infiltration was not spontaneous. Camp director Helen Matouskova observed, “Emissaries from here are traveling openly to Poland, Hungary and Romania and organize whole trainloads … the whole issue is a definitely political one, with the aim to break through in the Palestine question.” But all were aware that it was “impolitic” to mention this fact.
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Meanwhile, the waves of children kept coming in, requiring the establishment of ten more camps and the hiring of Yiddish-speaking staff that included representatives of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. A special transit center was opened at Rosenheim, where the always unheralded groups could be registered and directed to the proper permanent camps, which after a time were made up exclusively of one kibbutz denomination or another. For the camp directors, generally trained child welfare workers,
these camps were unlike anything in their experience. Most of the small refugees refused to have anything to do with the UNRRA teams, whose authority was widely ignored, and the social workers had trouble establishing any rapport with individual boys and girls. The children in the kibbutz groups were cared for and controlled entirely by their leaders (
madrichim
), who were often only sixteen or seventeen themselves. Two weeks after it opened, Rosenheim had nine different kibbutz groups. They ate, played, and spent their free time totally separated from one another, and resented the appearance of new groups in the camp. They wanted their own kitchens, and actively proselytized one another’s members. Clothes in each group were owned in common and carefully parceled out to whoever needed them most. At all-camp activities organized by UNRRA, such as concerts and theatricals, where attendance was required, it was noticed that the “spark was missing” and that communal facilities such as playrooms were completely ignored. This exclusivity, plus the constant appearance and disappearance of groups, also made camp schools difficult to organize. All aspects of group life were decided in discussions within the subdivisions of each kibbutz, with the result, one UNRRA worker felt, that “frequently the time for action is long past while the pros and cons are still being discussed.” But she did admire the feeling of a “happy, well united family” engendered by the evenings of singing and dancing the children put on. Most UNRRA workers were upset by the political orientation of the kibbutz groups. One wrote that this was “contrary to the elementary principles of democratic education,” noting that it was “very disturbing to see that children actually are considered as part of the political group already at age of 4–6.”
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The kibbutzim often went further than separating themselves within the camps. One group of eighty simply picked up and left Rosenheim for another camp, which had no facilities for them. Orders to return were resisted at first, but after a time forty of the children and all the
madrichim
went back by train. The other forty boys adamantly refused to board trucks sent for them, saying that “the Army would not force them to go since the American Army was not the Gestapo.” That was true, but the thirteen MPs called in to deal with the situation knew obstreperous kids when they saw them and simply picked them up and put them in the trucks. Once under way, the officer in charge reported that “instead of crying, they began to laugh and sing.”
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The fact that an estimated 70 percent of the infiltree children had one or both parents alive but were not with them violated the principles of many UNRRA workers, who were above all dedicated to reuniting families.
The aid workers spent much effort compiling lists of children that could be matched with the inquiries of parents searching for family members. They also felt very strongly that the children should be informed of other living relatives who might be found and have a say in their own placement: some children had said, for instance, that they did not want to go to Palestine and be farmers but preferred to be jewelers or dentists “in the USA.” Children were sometimes released by the kibbutz groups to join their families, but this was not easy to achieve. Five boys who wished to return to their parents in Poland were not permitted to do so until they circumvented their leader and went to UNRRA representatives with their request. The
madrichim
apparently were afraid that letting the five go would start a trend. Three other children who found relatives in the United States, and applied for emigration, asked to be sent to another camp as soon as this became known, as they knew that the fact that they no longer planned to go to Palestine would make life “less pleasant in the same surroundings.”
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There was also controversy about letting youngsters leave the children’s centers to join relatives in the big DP camps. An entity called the Jewish Child Care Committee argued that they would be living “in slum conditions,” and further urged that parents be allowed to send their offspring from the camps to the children’s centers, which under Army and UNRRA rules were only for “unaccompanied children.”
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Faced with such determination, most UNRRA workers soon gave up trying to deal with intra-Jewish relations and concentrated on facilitating resettlement, if not always to Palestine, noting in one report that “the answer to the Jewish problem is emigration, not case work, not make work projects, but emigration from the lands of blood and infamy … they deserve a chance to build a new life.”
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By late 1946, greater efforts were made to coordinate activities with the Jewish organizations, and as time wore on and it became clear that departure to Palestine was not imminent, all sorts of educational and athletic programs did flourish. But the focus of the kibbutzim on the Promised Land and the building of a Jewish national state, to them the only answer to anti-Semitism, was never lost.

In April 1946, a large group of children and adults with legal entry certificates was finally sent to Palestine via Marseilles. UNRRA workers escorted the children on the train from Germany, a journey that, like most such trips, suffered from lack of planning. The children, who had started in high spirits, cheering and singing and defiantly flying flags at every station in Germany, became more and more exhausted and subdued. The train was cold and food service on board difficult, as it was impossible to
get from one car to another. At Marseilles, where no advance preparations had been made, the children, along with a large number of adults, were required to spend four days in an inadequate camp with the familiar lack of sanitation and cooking facilities. The UNRRA workers, by now quite attached to their nervous charges, were worried that most of the children would be “placed in the hold” of the ship, where no mattresses were in evidence. These were “to be provided” and placed on long tables, but an hour and a half before departure none had arrived, nor was there any evidence of meals being prepared. The children complained of “being herded like cattle” onto the boat, and the UNRRA observers felt that little concern was shown for them “individually rather than collectively.” This they attributed to excitement and to the fact that for the young representatives of the Jewish agencies “the movement of the group was the thing that mattered most. Inconveniences … had to be taken in stride … in the endeavor to attain their goal. To be able to send close to 900 persons from a land of persecution to a land of promise, that was a feat to accomplish and this the JAFP [Jewish Agency for Palestine] has accomplished against all odds.” And indeed, as the ship sailed, the children “in quest of a new life” swarmed onto the decks. Cheering and singing, tentative at first, soon “mounted the wave of enthusiasm emanating from those who made their departure possible.”
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On April 13, just before this voyage, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Jewish Problems in London had recommended that 100,000 refugees be admitted to Palestine immediately. This stimulated thousands more infiltrees to pour into Germany, among them many more groups of children. Once again their leaders viewed the UNRRA camps merely as way stations where they would be given food and shelter. These basics were harder and harder to provide as Europe’s food supply system struggled to revive. In August, the Army had to resort to setting up tent cities holding 5,000 each to shelter the infiltrees, who were coming in at a rate of 1,000 a day. An estimated 13,878 children, 2,500 of them verified as “unaccompanied,” came into the U.S. Zone between June and November 1946, bringing the total under UNRRA care to about 26,500.
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Unknown thousands were not included in this official total. According to one camp director, “There is little we can do to control or even keep track of their movements. I am convinced that we cannot stop this exodus from Europe, nor delay it, and there is little sense trying too hard to manage these people who have only one goal in mind and who recognize no law or rules but their own.”
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Nothing exemplified this passion more than the voyages undertaken by illegal and often fatal means. These were countered with growing ferocity by the British, who were trying to enforce Jewish immigration quotas into the Palestinian Mandate, which would be their responsibility until 1948. In the most famous of these interdictions, the British Navy, in July 1947, would forcibly turn back 4,700 people without visas who had sailed from France on a rickety American passenger boat that had seen better days as a Chesapeake Bay steamer. Bought in the United States by the Haganah, the Palestine-based Jewish underground army, it had been renamed the
Exodus 1947
. Defying warnings to turn back, the
Exodus
was rammed and boarded at sea. After a fight in which several people died, the vessel was towed into Haifa. The voyagers were searched, disarmed, deloused, and immediately transferred to three British transports that sailed back to France. There they refused to disembark. Trying to force them off, the British kept them jammed on the stifling ships for over a month, but only a few gave in. Finally, the vessels were sent to Hamburg, where the defiant travelers, among them hundreds of children, were, once again, put into a camp.
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The gates of violence-torn Palestine would not open until May 1948, after which some 650,000 Jews from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East would emigrate to the newly founded state of Israel,
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where, sad to say, they would not soon find the “peace and quiet” they had sought for so long.

The Zionists were not the only ones who complicated the running of the camps. Passions ran just as high among Poles, Yugoslavs, and Russians. The Iron Curtain was falling fast, and the Great Powers had shifted frontiers about in complex wheelings and dealings that affected the nationalities of millions of people. American and British pressure for repatriation was countered in the camps by representatives of governments in exile whose supporters would be in dire peril under the new Communist regimes that had taken over their countries. The Polish government in London was aided in its efforts to keep people away from the Warsaw government by several hundred thousand members of the Polish armed forces who had fought with the Allies, and who had not returned home. According to a British report, 75 percent of the 20,000 Yugoslavs in DP camps in Germany would “like to repatriate, but are prevented from doing so by terroristic and anti-repatriation activities of the other 25 percent.” The situation was so tense that Yugoslav repatriation officers could only enter the camps accompanied by armed British MPs.
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Adults, of course, could make up their own minds, but the unaccompanied children were, once again, up for grabs, and the child welfare workers, who were required to adhere to the Allies’ recognition of the Communist-dominated governments of both Poland and Yugoslavia, would again be caught in the middle.

A repatriation convoy leaving for Poland
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(photo credit 15.4)

From the beginning there had been difficulties with groups of Polish boys arriving from the concentration camps. A group of fifty-five, sent to Auschwitz with their families after the Warsaw insurrection, had been separated from them and moved to the Mauthausen camp. There, they were secretly organized into a Polish Boy Scout troop by a man rightly worried about their moral decline in the camp atmosphere. After liberation they had stayed together with this leader, who was trying to educate them to be honest, helpful, and above all, proudly Polish and anti-Communist, teaching them such slogans as “Poland, freed from Swastika, has been captured by the Sickle and Hammer! Dachau and Buchenwald have been replaced by the ice of Siberia!”
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In these educational efforts he seems to have succeeded, and in so doing to have attracted the attention of the émigré Poles, who wished to move the boys from the UNRRA camp in Germany where they had settled, and where their leader had become one of the staff, to another camp in Italy controlled by the émigré Polish Red Cross. The Warsaw Poles were not in favor of this unless it could be shown that the boys were “Polish Catholic children who no longer have any ties in
Poland but have relatives in other countries.” UNRRA also required that the status of the parents or relatives be determined. Meanwhile, the boys were to remain at the special UNRRA Polish children’s camp that had been installed in a castle at Regendorf. The decision did not please the Scout leader, clearly not of the Warsaw persuasion, who was soon dismissed by UNRRA. Before he left, he gave a dramatic farewell speech to the children, “whereupon all [of them] disappeared from the center.” It seemed that they had been collected in trucks, taken elsewhere, and been billeted with émigré Polish families.
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These boys were retrieved, once again with help from the Army, but that was not the end of the issue.