KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (114 page)

Adverse
reactions were not restricted to former members of the Nazi national community. Allied officials, too, showed little sympathy at times. Amid all the dirt and disease, they found it hard to see the humanity in survivors, who appeared to them (to use the words of a U.S. congressman visiting Buchenwald) like “absent-minded apes.” They were particularly troubled by the survivors’ behavior. Some liberators
had expected docile charges and now decried the inmates’ lack of hygiene, modesty, and morality. One British official in Bergen-Belsen complained that they made “an infernal mess of the camp,” and another recoiled at inmates fighting “for every morsel” like a “swarm of angry monkeys.”
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In part, the lack of empathy stemmed from the discrepancy between the norms of civil society, internalized by
the liberators, and the norms of the camp, deeply ingrained in survivors. “Organizing,” for example, had been a basic rule of survival, and inmates naturally continued to “organize” (as they still called it) in the early days of liberation. When a baffled British soldier confronted a Polish boy, who was carrying a large sack of food during the early looting around Bergen-Belsen, and asked him if
he knew that stealing was wrong, the boy answered: “Steal? We aren’t stealing, we’re just taking what we want!”
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Such tensions eased after the relief effort gathered strength and conditions gradually improved. In the largest camps, however, the situation remained critical for several weeks after liberation, as Allied officials struggled with the SS legacy of overcrowding, starvation, and epidemics.
In Dachau, as French inmates reported on May 8, 1945, some of the barracks, built for seventy-five men, were still packed with up to six hundred sick inmates, who wasted away with little medical help, their bodies entangled with the dead; by the end of the month, 2,221 Dachau survivors had perished.
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The greatest challenge was Bergen-Belsen, where British forces faced an “almost superhuman task,”
as Arthur Lehmann noted.
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Early on, they focused on the provision of food and water. Although the war was still raging, the British authorities quickly secured extra supplies. And as more relief workers arrived in late April, among them a group of British medical students, a more orderly refeeding routine could commence, using different diets. “Signs of humanity returning,” one student wrote
in his diary on May 5. By then, a special unit had already completed the dusting of barracks and inmates with DDT, an antityphus measure that began here and elsewhere within days of liberation. Despite all these efforts, some thirteen thousand survivors of Bergen-Belsen had perished by the end of May 1945.
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The expansion of medical relief was accompanied by growing Allied control over the freed
camps, though not all survivors welcomed this development. The greatest point of contention was the restriction on inmate movements. Several camps went into temporary lockdown, with the U.S. commander of Dachau threatening to shoot anyone who left without permission. The military authorities wanted to contain looting and infectious illnesses and prepare for orderly releases. The survivors, meanwhile,
felt like free men caught behind KL wire.
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To maintain discipline, the military relied heavily on selected inmates, building on the existing structures (even terms like “block elders” remained in use in some camps). During the first days, organized inmate groups—often emerging from the prisoner underground—played the central role in many freed camps. With the blessing of the beleaguered liberators,
they tried to distribute supplies, enforce discipline, and stop plunder. In Dachau, the camp elder proudly proclaimed the “self-administration of comrades” on May 1, 1945, which even envisaged the continuation of daily roll calls. Over in Buchenwald, armed inmates from the camp police guarded SS officials. They also patrolled the infernal “little camp,” seen by survivors outside as a source
of illness and criminality, thereby prolonging the suffering of those still trapped inside; the compound resembled a “concentration camp that has not been liberated,” a U.S. army report found on April 24, 1945.
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Even as more power passed to the Allied commanders, organized inmates—often led by an international committee, as in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen—remained a major force, working
with the new administration and enforcing its calls for order. “No chaos, no anarchy!” read an appeal of the Dachau committee on May 8, 1945.
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The international committees were dominated by former political prisoners, who would shape the memory of the camps for years to come; most stood on the left of the political spectrum, leading to enthusiastic celebrations of the Day of Labor (May 1) inside
the liberated camps. By contrast, social outsiders had no voice at all, and Jews were marginalized, too. Neither Allied commanders nor inmate leaders acknowledged them as a distinct group, at least not initially. In Dachau and Buchenwald, Jewish survivors had to fight for a place on the international committees. “We demand that Jewish affairs are dealt with by Jewish representatives,” a young
Pole wrote in his Buchenwald diary on April 16, 1945.
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This was not the only clash between inmates under the frayed banner of international solidarity. Unresolved political conflicts poisoned the atmosphere, and would continue to do so in Cold War Europe, with entrenched battles between survivor groups over commemoration. Even more pronounced were the tensions between the national groups, yet
another legacy of the KL. Nationality became the main marker of the postliberation inmate community, with separate barracks, organizations, and newspapers; during the May 1 celebration, most former prisoners marched under their own country’s flag. Conflicts soon flared up over old resentments and new problems, though they rarely turned as violent as in Ebensee, where Soviet and Polish survivors
apparently shot at each other. Most precarious was the position of some German survivors, who faced intense hostility because of their comparatively privileged position in the wartime KL. “To be honest, we should be glad that they did not bash our heads in,” a German inmate wrote in Dachau on April 30, 1945.
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Even the timing of releases was determined by the inmates’ national background, at
least in Dachau. Within days of the German surrender on May 7, 1945, U.S. forces started to transfer former prisoners to better-appointed SS barracks and buildings outside the camp compound, with one national group following another. The final communiqué of the international committee appeared on June 2, 1945: “We depart happy and full of joy from this hell: it is over.”
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Other liberated camps
were quickly cleared, too. In Bergen-Belsen, British forces moved all survivors out of the main camp within four weeks, one barrack at a time, before burning the empty huts to the ground. The last one was torched in a ceremony on May 21, 1945; soldiers and former prisoners watched as the wooden hut, a large picture of Hitler pinned to one of its walls, was consumed by flames. Sick survivors, meanwhile,
had been washed and disinfected, and taken to a huge and reasonably well-equipped British hospital area nearby, with enough space for ten thousand patients. One of them was Arthur Lehmann. He was operated on twice, delirious with fever. But he slowly got better and took great pleasure in the hot baths and clean beds. Most important was the care of the medical staff, especially by the matron
on his ward, who sometimes sat down by his side and listened to his story. “I told her about my wife and my children,” he wrote the following year. “She stroked my head and told me that everything would be all right. And that made me believe it, too.”
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Survivors

Trapped in the nightmare of the KL, prisoners had often daydreamed about a happy future. Some inmates longed for a peaceful life in
the countryside, an Auschwitz prisoner wrote in 1942, whereas others imagined only parties and pleasure.
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After liberation, such visions of quiet contentment or hedonism quickly faded in the cold light of postwar Europe. The great majority of survivors were hoping to return home, though few were certain what would await them there. Once they left the compounds, they had to confront the reality
of rebuilding their existence, often from Allied field hospitals and assembly centers crowded with others displaced by Nazi terror. “I have to begin to live again, without wife and family,” the Dutch Jew Jules Schelvis, who had lost his loved ones in Sobibor, wrote in a French military hospital on May 26, 1945, a few weeks after his liberation from a Natzweiler satellite camp.
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At the end of
the war, the former territory of the Third Reich was awash with millions of uprooted men, women, and children. While some were making their own way home, the occupation forces discouraged such independent initiatives, concerned about obstructions of military movements, and about the spread of disease and social disorder. Instead, the Allies set a vast repatriation program in motion, moving fast to
reduce the number of DPs in their care. Among the first to return were former KL prisoners.
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Although the way home was hard for all survivors of the concentration camps, it proved harder for some than for others. On the whole, western Europeans had better prospects. True, their journey through the war-torn landscape was arduous, traveling on packed trains and trucks, but it rarely lasted for
longer than a few weeks. Renata Laqueur and her convalescing husband, for example, left a reception camp near Dresden on July 4, 1945; three weeks later, she was sitting on her sofa in Amsterdam, still wearing a Hitler Youth shirt she had “organized” in Tröbitz. By that time, Arthur Lehmann had been back in the Netherlands for a month, having been flown out from Germany because of his poor health
(he weighed just eighty-two pounds). The quickest to be repatriated were probably French inmates, almost all of whom were back home by mid-June, where many received a hero’s welcome. A large group arrived in Paris on May 1, 1945, and marched in formation down the Champs-Élysées—past a tearful crowd, as one of them recalled—to be greeted at the Arc de Triomphe by General de Gaulle, who used the occasion
to cement the image of a united “other France” of Nazi resisters, which became the focus of early postwar French national memory; later that year, de Gaulle appointed one of the survivors, Edmond Michelet, as his minister of armed forces.
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The situation was very different for most eastern European survivors. Inside the former camp compounds, Soviet inmates heard alarming rumors about what would
happen to them, prompting a Dachau bulletin (run by loyal Stalinists) to issue an emphatic denial: everyone will be welcomed home “with care and love,” a Red Army captain promised. Even skeptics had little choice, however, as the western Allies, on whose territory most displaced Soviets lived, had agreed to repatriate them, even if it meant using force. Between spring and autumn 1945, tens of
thousands of KL survivors arrived in Soviet filtration and assembly camps, where they were received with suspicion and hostility. Alleged cowards, deserters, and traitors were quickly drafted into forced labor or sentenced to the Gulag. “It is difficult for me to talk about it,” recalled a Ukrainian survivor of Dachau, who had been sent to the coal mines in the Donets Basin upon his return. “We survived
the concentration camps and then some of our comrades died here in these mines.” Those who escaped punishment often faced prejudice in Soviet society and stayed silent about their experiences in the KL.
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Eastern European Jews also endured great adversity after they returned from the camps. Within weeks of being freed, many tens of thousands had come home (most of them to Hungary).
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Their first
goal was to find missing relatives, but all too often, hope turned to despair. Lina Stumachin, a survivor of several KL, walked back from Saxony to Poland as fast as her swollen legs would take her. “In my imagination,” she said later, “I saw my house, and those that I had lost would come back to me.” When she finally arrived in the spa town of Zakopane, where she had run a shop before the war,
goats were grazing where her house had once stood. There was no sign of her husband or child, either: “I waited for long days and weeks for nothing.”
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There was little local support for survivors like Stumachin. The Nazis had eradicated traditional Jewish culture, together with most Polish Jews. Local Poles, meanwhile, often refused to return homes and other possessions they had taken over after
the deportation of the Jewish owners (the same happened in Hungary and the Baltic States). A wave of anti-Jewish discrimination and violence soon drove many concentration camp survivors back to the west, mainly to the U.S. zone of occupied Germany, together with Jews who had sheltered on Soviet territory during the war.
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Almost all foreign KL survivors who still lived on German soil in 1946
came from eastern Europe, and some stayed in permanent DP camps until well into the 1950s. Many were organized in survivor committees—mostly along national lines—that documented their suffering and promoted their interests. Among those resisting repatriation were thousands of Ukrainian and Baltic nationals who had no desire to live under Soviet rule. The same was true for some Poles from areas swallowed
up by the USSR. Other Poles worried about the growing Communist domination over their country, which would eventually claim the lives of survivors like Witold Pilecki, who had played a significant part in the Auschwitz prisoner underground; arrested by the Polish secret police, he was executed in 1948 for his anticommunist activities.
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Then there were those Jewish KL survivors without anywhere
to return to. Most vulnerable were the children. Thomas (Tommy) Buergenthal was lucky, being reunited with his mother (herself a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück) in late 1946 in Göttingen, Germany. Many others never saw their parents again and stayed in orphanages. It was in one such home in Paris that Lina Stumachin worked, after she had left Zakopane and Poland for good. Looking after the
orphans, she told an interviewer in September 1946, helped her to fill the emptiness in her life and to forget “that you once had your own home, your own family, that you once had your own child.” As for the future, she wanted to accompany the orphans to Palestine. Other Jewish DPs also headed there, especially after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948; even here, though, they faced a
difficult start to their new lives, overshadowed by the past, poverty, and the mistrust of earlier Jewish settlers. Of course, by no means all survivors were Zionists, and many thousands were admitted to countries like Britain and the United States; among them was Buergenthal, who arrived in New York in 1951, now aged seventeen, and embarked on a distinguished legal career culminating in his appointment
to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
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