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'The long road home' for Jews after the Holocaust
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Most people would not consider a mere five years to be an "era," that term generally being reserved for far longer spans of time. And yet, as is evident from Ben Shephard's masterful The Long Road Home, The Aftermath of the Second World War, published this month, the five years following the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of World War II in the spring of 1945, when hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors as well as non-Jewish erstwhile forced laborers from various parts of Eastern Europe languished in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, indeed constituted an era.
"The concept of the 'displaced persons,'" writes Shephard, "determined the shape of the Allied humanitarian effort after the war . . . because, as it turned out, the war's most important legacy was a refugee crisis. When the dust had settled and all those who wished to had returned home, there remained in Germany, Austria and Italy a residue of some 1 million people who were mot inclined to go back to their own countries - Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Yugoslavs."
By way of full disclosure, my father, Josef Rosensaft, who headed both the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany and the Jewish Committee that administered the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, is featured in The Long Road Home, and Shephard graciously refers to me in his acknowledgments.
The complex, often haphazard efforts by the Americans and British military to regulate humanitarian relief efforts in the context of rapidly changing geopolitical challenges are laid forth in comprehensive detail in the book. So is the inability of the victorious Allies and different relief agencies to adequately deal with the physical and psychological human condition of the men, women and children who found themselves stranded in a political, cultural and economic no man's land. The public anti-Semitic utterances of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, the decorated British Army officer who served as Chief of Operations of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, proved to be a major distraction until he was eventually fired from his post.
It took the Americans and the British quite some time to figure out that Jews who had emerged from death camps and whose families, homes, and communities had been completely destroyed had radically different needs and aspirations than Polish or Ukrainian Christians who had endured a far different plight. While the Jewish DPs strove to rebuild their shattered lives and played a critical role in the struggle to establish the State of Israel, the non-Jewish DPs had no clear ideological or other mission other than to exist while waiting, mostly passively, for the next chapter of their lives to unfurl.
Shephard's discussion of the critical rehabilitative function of Zionism for the Jewish DPs is especially instructive. David Ben-Gurion, who visited some of the DP camps in the fall of 1945, intuitively understood the public relations value of Jewish survivors of the death camps clamoring for a homeland. When Bartley Crum, an American member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, urged a young Jewish DP to have patience, the latter replied, "How can you talk to us of patience? After six years of this war, after all our parents have been burned in the gas ovens, you talk to us of patience?"
At the same time, Shephard neither idealizes the prevailing conditions nor ignores the obstacles faced by Jewish Holocaust survivors in their efforts to forge a destiny for themselves. When many of them ultimately decided to go to the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, Rabbi Abraham Klausner, a Jewish chaplain in the American Zone of Germany who had played a pivotal role in organizing the survivors there into a political force, argued that the DPs "should be forced to go to Palestine . . . They are not to be asked but told what to do."
In sharp contrast, Shephard vividly describes my father's disillusionment during an April 1949 visit to the newly independent State of Israel where he had been "received at the highest levels." "His presence," Shephard writes, "happened to coincide with the arrival of a transport of Jews from Belsen , and he was shocked by the living conditions in the transit camp they were sent to. A previous transport, forced to live in waterlogged huts, had even asked the Israeli authorities to send them back to Belsen." Upon his return to Belsen, Shephard continues, my father "gave a powerful speech to the Jews in the camp, telling them that Israel was a wonderful but difficult country. He urged them to go there as long as they were prepared for the harsh conditions they would encounter there. He also warned them that they would be on their own. 'Ben-Gurion will not meet you at the boat,' he said, 'and Eliezer Kaplan [Israel 's first finance minister] will not present you with a check.'"
With its a thorough and compassionate depiction of the DP era as a whole, The Long Road Home establishes beyond question the period's pivotal importance as an integral element of, rather than a mere postscript to, the respective, intertwined histories of both World War II and the Holocaust. It is also a book that should be required reading for anyone who seeks to obtain an insight into the capacity of ordinary individuals to confront and, for the most part, overcome the consequences of persecution and dire devastation.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School , Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law, and Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft |
February 22, 2011; 5:09 PM ET
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Posted by: theo301 | March 2, 2011 5:30 PM
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It appears that sharing and reposting others’ comments is becoming a trend. You can definitely copy, repost, or email mine to anyone including lobbying senators, state representatives and any other public officials who shape our country’s foreign policies.
The main Zionist claim is that they have a supreme right to some of Palestinian territory because they lived there thousands of years ago. Let’s examine the core and real nature of this claim.
Firstly, this claim is mistaken and selfish in its core concept because Zionists fail to recognize that history is a continuum and that there were other people living in majority in Palestine before the Jews and also after the Jews. Zionists simply cut history at a convenient point for them and claim ancestral ties to the land as of that convenient point.
Secondly, whatever the claim, it is beyond absurd to try to shape modern world based on thousands of years old maps. Imagine if the rest of the world would be reshaped by who was on the land thousands of years ago. It would cause horrific wars, countless refugees, and unimaginable human suffering, exactly what is happening in Palestine.
Thirdly and most disturbing, Zionist goal was to establish a Jewish state wherever possible. Palestine may have been a preference, but Palestine was not the only location that Zionists planned as their state in modern times. Another location was Argentina where Jews have been migrating for hundreds of years for the purpose of establishing a state. Also, locations in Europe were on the list and that’s why the Catholic Church was killing/expelling Jews since Roman times (read the history of the Holly Inquisition). Whatever the location, Zionist plan was to simply occupy the people living on the land even if that would mean imposing a regime worst than Nazi Germany’s from which they escaped. And Zionists would just use a different ideological coloring than the one used in Palestine in the attempt to rationalize the occupation.
In conclusion, the main claim on which the Zionist regime is built in Palestine is erroneous, selfish, and a lie. I am categorically against generalizing, and recognize that many Jews are against the crimes the Zionist regime is committing and that many Jews are leading the global resistance to it. They should be proud.
Posted by: justice112 | March 2, 2011 8:46 AM
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All who oppose the Zionist regime please STOP calling it “Israel” Every time you do it you reward the occupation of Palestine. Name “Israel” implies a state on the occupied territory. Call the occupiers what they really are: the Zionist regime. This way, every time you refer to it, you will imply its temporary nature (the nature of all occupying regimes). Encourage your fellow comment posters to use the name Zionist regime as well.
We must also be categorically against generalizing, and recognize that many Jews are against the crimes the Zionist regime is committing in their names, and that many Jews are leading the global resistance to it. They should be proud. I wish that they finally find piece wherever they choose to live (including Palestine) through a peaceful democratic process as opposed to the Nazi-style occupation the current Zionist regime is using.
The only way to oppose the Zionist controlled media and Zionist paid bloggers is to take each other’s comments and copy, repost, email, and otherwise distribute them to other blogs, newspaper websites, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking websites. Please do so with this comment for justice to prevail.
Posted by: paece111 | March 1, 2011 2:17 PM
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Don't you have to be religious to hate Jewish folk? Weren't the Europeans who imprisoned Jews and stole their homes - basically Christians? Well of course they were. And didn't the German soldiers have belt buckles which said that God was on their side?
After centuries of religious wars - WW2 was another attempt to demonstrate hatred of the other, in particular the Jews. Yes, of course - world conquest was Hitler's main goal. But ridding the world of Jewish folk was also a very important goal, as was getting rid of Gypsies, homosexuals and other people who the Nazi's did not approve of. Religion does this to people; it makes them Hate.
Posted by: Rongoklunk | February 23, 2011 10:26 AM
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"The concept of the 'displaced persons,'" writes Shephard, "determined the shape of the Allied humanitarian effort after the war . . . because, as it turned out, the war's most important legacy was a refugee crisis. When the dust had settled and all those who wished to had returned home, there remained in Germany, Austria and Italy a residue of some 1 million people who were mot inclined to go back to their own countries - Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Yugoslavs."
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Here is the most egregious problem with this article, which, does have some excellent content.
Going "home" to Catholic Poland was made more difficult by the theft of Jewish homes by the Polish Catholics,not to mention the slaughter of formerly interned Polish Jews by the Catholics. Those mass murders created difficulties that could not be overcome for the dead, rabbi, I'm sure you will agree.
The Lithuanian thug Catholics similarly stole Jewish homes, Jewish everything, probably used menstrual rags, ditto the Ukranian Catholic Jew-killing cannibals.
How could they go home? "Home?" Morgan is hopefully rotting in hell with his fellow AngloBrit anti-Jewish racists past and present.
Now, ask yourself, sir, what do all these EuroChristians have in common. (Hint: Euro and Christian)
I am delighted that the French Jews are leaving their God forsaken country and pleased that an exodus is finally beginning among the Jews of the wily UK.
Let these people, the murderers, go to hell. Let them die unshriven and go to hell.
Posted by: Farnaz2Mansouri21 | February 22, 2011 8:39 PM
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Unfortunately and understandably and interminably, the Jewish holocaust will always be used to further present-day interests. I think EVERYONE has much to lose by citing history to back up their sins of today. Much better to treat everyone as one would like to be treated by everyone. Amen.