Tragedy and Triumph

Front matter

TRAGEDY and

TRIUMPH karly eStores ol Jewish » ‘ee

Early Testimonies of Jewish

Contents

Introduction: The Early Testimonies of Sheerit Hapletah

Freda Hodge

By M.Y. Feigenbaum

Foreword

It took half a century to challenge the myth of the postwar silence of Holocaust survivors. Since then numerous publications and projects have retrieved the early voices. Freda Hodge’s collection of testimonies underlines this trend. Carefully selected and painstakingly translated, she has edited compelling survivor accounts, published between 1946 and 1948 in the Yiddish journal Fun Letzten Khurben (‘From the Last Destruction’) in postwar Germany. It is the first edition of its kind. The survivors were Yiddish-speaking refugees from Eastern Europe, classified as ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs). They were waiting in DP camps in the American Zone of occupation for the arrival of travel documents and visas in order to continue their long journey to freedom. ‘The title of the edition points to the dual nature of modern Jewish experience. ‘Tragedy’ refers to Khurben, the Yiddish term common at the time for the destruction of European Jewry. Others spoke of the Jewish Catastrophe, a term used since the beginning of the mass murder. The term Holocaust entered the discourse in the 1950s, in the English-speaking world, followed by the terms Shoah and genocide. Today there is a consensus that the annihilation of Jews during World War II was the ultimate act of genocide, unprecedented in history. “Triumph’ relates to the survival of the Sheerit Hapletah, the remnants of European Jewry. With few exceptions, they succeeded in rebuilding their shattered lives. Survivor historians in Poland were, after liberation, at pains to restore the continuity of Jewish historiography, initiating Holocaust documentation, research and writings. By 1947 the number of Holocaust books published amounted to 38.

Let me briefly relate a few historical vignettes to shed light on the emergence and significance of early survivor accounts.

In August 1944 a handful of survivors established a Jewish Historical Commission in the liberated Polish city of Lublin — on the doorsteps of the deserted Majdanek death camp. Its first and most important task was to collect eyewitness accounts and other material, documenting the Jewish catastrophe which was still unfolding. In summer 1944 the ‘Final Solution’ dictated the mass murder of Hungarian Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Birkenau. What started in Lublin continued in Lodz, Warsaw and other cities. From August 1944 to December 1945 some 1,500 testimonies were collected. By the end of 1947 the number had risen to 7,300. A country-wide network of Historical Commissions and branches, a bunch of officials and volunteers, among them the Zammlers, the collectors, created archival depositories preserving survivor accounts, German and Polish documents, Jewish records, letters and diaries, books and papers, pictures and photographs, songs and sayings, religious objects and other items. Relying on these sources, Jewish historians began to document and to reconstruct the history of the Holocaust, focusing on the annihilation of Polish Jewry. Having survived in ghettos and camps, or in hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side, they followed the patterns of their predecessors who had once established a flourishing Jewish historiography in Eastern Europe and fulfilled the ancient obligation of Zakor (Remember) — ‘To keep the memory alive”.

Efforts to collect records documenting the German persecution of the Jews were already made during the Holocaust. German Jews, exiled in England, opened the Wiener Library in London in the prewar years. Material assembled in London on the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands was sent after the war to Holland to be housed in the state-funded Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, known as NIOD (The Netherlands Institute of War Documentation). In April 1943 Isaac Schneerson founded the Centre de Documentation Juive Comtemporaine in the city of Grenoble in occupied France. Extensive record collections filled the archives of the Jewish Agency or the JOINT, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Secret archives were set up in Bialystok, Kovno, Vilnius, Lodz and other Polish ghettos. Emanuel Ringelblum’s underground Archive ‘Oneg Shabbat’ (Joy of Shabbat) in the ghetto of Warsaw assembled the largest record collection. Only fragments survived the war, hidden in containers, buried and unearthed in the rubble of Warsaw.

After liberation, survivor historians such as Philip Friedman and Josef Kermisz, Rachel Auerbach and Leib Koniuchowski, Yisrael Kaplan and Nachman Blumenthal were the driving forces in developing a new distinct historiographical genre, termed at the time kAurben forshung (destruction research, a Yiddish term) and Vernichtungswissenschaft (annihilation science, a German term). Philip Friedman introduced these terms to indicate that the persecution and murder of the Jews was a specific German crime. Indeed, the perpetrators never used the term ‘murder’. They spoke of Vernichtung, as Dan Michman puts it, turning the Jews into ‘nichts’, nothing. Laura Jockusch defines the kAurbn forshung as a Jewish ‘Historiography in Transit’ based on the early voices of survivors and the first historical studies. ‘The survivor historians laid the foundation for Holocaust scholarship. They speedily brought to an end their time ‘in transit’. Many left Poland in the xii

FOREWORD late 1940s and continued their work in the newly established state of Israel or in the United States. Arrangements were made to transfer archival material to other documentation and research centres abroad — to the YIVO Institute in New York and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Those who stayed in Poland were forced to teach, research and publish under the strict control of a Stalinist state system. The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Warsaw ceased to exist. A new, smaller Jewish Historical Institute was permitted to preserve archival holdings and to conduct research. It still exists today.

Collecting survivor accounts and other documents served many purposes. First and foremost, they were a response to Nazi persecution, culminating in the ‘Final Solution’. They offered a window into the destruction of Jewish life and recorded the experiences of suffering and survival. At the same time they were testament to the fact that the German murderers and their collaborators had not entirely achieved their final aims: to annihilate all Jews, to eradicate the ‘Jewish spirit’, to erase the evidence of the heinous crimes committed. Testimonies created ‘substitute gravestones’ (Laura Jockusch) for the murdered Jews who were denied a place in a Jewish cemetery, as well as a ‘lighthouse’ providing guidance for remembrance. Names and places contained in the early eyewitness accounts assisted the search for missing relatives and friends — a search which continues to this very day. Years later descendants of survivors relied on this data when tracing their family history. Apart from providing the groundwork for historical research, recollections later supported claims for compensation and restitution. Statements and affidavits of survivors, made in police investigations and war crimes trials, played a vital role in tracing perpetrators and bringing them to justice. The compilation of documents was also crucial to prevent denial or distortion of the Jewish tragedy. Jewish historians were convinced that the writing of the Holocaust should not be left in the hands of non-Jews alone. They shared the view that neither the Allies nor others, let alone Germans, could comprehend and explore the true nature of the Jewish catastrophe. Their documents, in particular perpetrators’ records, did not permit the re-construction of Jewish history and reveal the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust.

‘There was yet another factor for the creation of archival depositories. Early survivor accounts could not capture post-Holocaust life in a way that recollections of later years could. However, many testimonies display at the very end, often in the last lines, a Zionist perspective, the desire of the stateless and ‘Displaced Persons’ to turn their backs on war-torn Europe and to xiii rebuild their lives in the new Jewish state of Israel. Control of a people’s own records has also been an expression of state sovereignty. The transfer to Israel of archival material gathered by Jews ensured ongoing access by Jews to their own history.

What happened in Poland also occurred in other countries. Wherever survivors were liberated and registered — in DP camps or refugee houses, in Jewish communities or relief organisations — they were asked to tell their stories, to sign protocols or fill in questionnaires. Altogether, almost 30,000 testimonies were recorded in the immediate postwar period — not only in Polish cities but also in Bucharest and Budapest, Bratislava and Prague, Paris and Amsterdam, London and Jerusalem and, most notably, in Munich.

Munich — a stronghold of National Socialism — became a hub of the She’erit Hapletah. Before the spring of 1945 the Allied forces conquered and divided Germany into four zones of occupation, they encountered a flood of almost 10 million displaced people, among them at least 80 000 Jews [available data varies considerably as it was almost impossible to register a constantly moving population. This number refers only to those who had survived the concentration and annihalation camps.] They had been liberated from overcrowded concentration camps, on roads and at railway tracks or at other sites marking the end of their death marches. With the help of members of the Jewish Brigade and Bricha [a clandestine organisation established by former Jewish partisans and soldiers from the Jewish Brigade to help Eastern European Jews to enter the Occupied zones and eventually to reach Palestine] the numbers of Jewish survivors in the DP camps eventually reached about 300 000. Jews in the Yishuv [the Jewish population in British Mandated Palestine] aided illegal Jewish refugees to leave Europe and to be smuggled into Palestine illegally.

Survivors in Munich quickly established a Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria to deal with the problems of Jewish survivors in the DP camps. The Central Committee, setting up 50 branches, represented all Jewish DPs in the US Zone. On 1 December 1945 the Central Historical Commission was formed, headed by Yisrael Kaplan, a Lithuanian survivor of the Kovno ghetto, and Moshe Joseph Feigenbaum, a survivor from the Polish town of Biala Podlaska. A manifesto was dispatched urging survivors to collect documents and to write and submit their stories of survival. Six months later, in August 1946, a historical periodical was launched entitled Fun Letzten Khurben (‘From the Last Destruction’). The subtitle explained its mission: A Periodical for the History of Jewish Life during the Nazi Regime.

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FoREWORD

Kaplan and Feigenbaum served as editors assisted by Philip Friedman who had taken up the headship of the Education and Culture Department of the JOINT operating in Bavaria. At that time the number of the She’erit Hapletah was constantly rising as tens of thousands of ‘new arrivals’ sought temporary refuge in Germany. They had escaped the anti-Semitic campaigns and pogroms unleashed in Eastern Europe, altogether some 250,000. The DP camps in Bavaria attracted the largest number — around 170,000.

After overcoming some barriers — shortage of paper, printing problems and internal disputes — the journal Fun Letztn Khurben attained a circulation of 12,000 copies. Sold for 4 deutschmarks, it was sent to all DP camps in the US Zone as well as to Jewish communities and organisations both in Germany and abroad. It had to compete with other products of a booming survivor press which printed more than 100 periodicals in Yiddish and Hebrew, in Polish and German. Many DP camps had their own newspapers which contained hundreds of articles and reports on the Holocaust. Landsmanschafin, representing survivors from the same city or geographic region, developed their own network of communication. The same applied to other Jewish groups and organisations. Last but not least, the publication of survivor memoirs commenced.

The activities of the Munich Jewish Historical Commission bore fruit. When it closed its doors at the end of 1948, 10 volumes of Fun Letsten Khurben had been distributed, covering more than 1,000 pages. The archival depositories kept a treasure trove of material (Ada Schein): 2,500 testimonies, 28,000 German documents, 1,081 photographs, 1,074 anti-Semitic books, 284 items of ghetto and camp folklore, 62 artefacts. As the survivor historians saw no future in Germany, the collections were placed in storage and later transferred to Yad Vashem. By then the early voices had already fallen silent. They had come against an impenetrable wall of indifference erected by postwar societies. In 1961 the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem caused international headlines. Survivor voices resurfaced when testifying in court to the horrors of the Holocaust. Several years later, as part of the explosion of Holocaust history and memory, a new massive wave of personal testimonies emerged.

‘The eyewitness accounts, translated by Freda Hodge, represent only a tiny fraction of the huge, largely unexplored, dispersed and fragmented body of early testimonies. Collected in German DP camps and published between 1946 and 1948, they were part of the second wave of survivor accounts. ‘The first wave started in August 1944 and lasted until spring of

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1945. The so-called Bucharest Testimonies serve as an example. In the spring of 1945 over 1,000 survivors arrived in the Romanian capital, representing the mosaic of nationalities within the She’erit Hapletah. They came from The Netherlands and Norway, France and Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Poland and Lithuania, Latvia and the Soviet Union. Accommodated in a ‘refugee house’, they were asked to tell their story of survival — in their mother tongue. The ‘protocols’ were typed and signed, often translated into English or other languages. Only copies of copies have been traced. Efforts to find the originals have been in vain.

Freda Hodge’s collection mirrors Fun Letzten Khurben’s focus on the destruction of Jewish family ties and communities, located in Yiddish centres of the “Blood Lands’ of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. Written by men, women and children, they reflect episodes and experiences of deportation and ghettoisation, forced labour camps and death camps, death marches and liberation. There is no mention of the Warsaw ghetto uprising — the most significant act of Jewish resistance and heroism — nor any reference to the underground activities of Jewish youth organisations. No voices are recorded criticising the Jewish Councils. Emphasis is placed on smaller ghetto rebellions and Jewish partisans fighting in forests. The centrality of Yiddish-speaking Jews excluded the incorporation of eyewitness accounts from Jews persecuted in Western Europe or other occupied territories. Only two testimonies from a German and Hungarian survivor are included. Finally, there was no place in the periodical for recollections of Jews who on the eve of the Holocaust had been deported by the Soviets in Eastern Europe to remote settlements or forced labour camps in Inner Asia. Many of them arrived after the war in Germany as “Displaced Persons’. Labelled at the time often as ‘Asiatic’ Jews, they formed the largest group among the Yiddish-speaking DP population. Research on the fate of this distinct survivor group has recently commenced.

Despite these limitations, the selected testimonies share the features of other early survivor accounts. They graphically reveal the brutalities, barbarism and extreme terror survivors encountered. In their immediacy and rawness, they often show their authors’ aggression and anguish at their recent suffering and loss. They are also testament to courage and endurance, resilience and resistance. The eyewitness accounts, collected in the immediate postwar period, constitute, as Feliks Tych points out, the most important body of Jewish documents pertaining to the history of the Holocaust, at a time when memory was still fresh. These features make the early voices profoundly different — and historically more significant — than xvi

FOREWORD later recollections gathered in ‘oral history’ programs or the monumental Spielberg audio-visual project. Today more than 100,000 testimonies have been collected, dispersed throughout numerous archival depositories. With the passage of time there will be no living witness of the Holocaust left. Here, Freda Hodge presents 30 voices of Yiddish-speaking survivors, retrieved from the largely unexplored depths of Holocaust history.

Konrad Kwiet

Emeritus Professor

Resident Historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum xvii

pag a

Front cover of the journal Fun Letzten Khurben, in which the survivor testimonies appear written in Yiddish

The Early Testimonies of Sheerit Hapletah in the Aftermath of World War II

Freda Hodge

I have selected and translated these captivating and, very often, harrowing stories of survival because each one is a reflection of the indomitable courage and endurance of the Jewish people during a period of their unparalleled suffering at the hands of the Nazis, together with their collaborators, during the German occupation of 21 European countries in World War II. These eyewitness testimonies, which were originally published in Yiddish, have lain in obscurity for too long and cry out to be read and remembered and to find their place in the history of the Holocaust. It is our responsibility to pay homage to survivors who were courageous enough to give their testimonies to the world so soon after having survived Nazi atrocities. These testimonies, together with the others published in the same journal, Fun Letzten Khurben, stand as a memorial to the living and the dead, and will always serve to remind us of the role played by ordinary people in the nightmare of World War II. In his report about the first conference of the Historical Commission in Munich, Moshe Feigenbaum, Chairman of the Organisation of Liberated Jews in Bavaria, stressed the importance of recording the tragedy of the Holocaust, putting it above every other concern: “The generation of the catastrophe is no longer alive, and we survived only by a miracle; we are the witnesses of the tragedy ... Therefore we must not refuse to document it ... While creating the documents we must not be afraid that this will reopen wounds in many people. The duty to document everything is greater than individual sorrow.”

The early testimonies are characterised by their immediacy, the detailed nature of their narratives and their matter-of-fact, even detached tone. The fresh memories provide a more reliable perspective of what occurred il The conference took place over a two-day period in Munich from 11-12 May 1947.

and for the historian they are a mine of information. Later testimonies do not duplicate these characteristics. They are affected by the the temporal distance from the actual experiences and the changeable nature of recall. Confusion about what the survivors have personally experienced and what they have absorbed over a period of time from the media and from other testimonies can influence the veracity of the testimony. Sometimes there is an obvious desire on the speaker’s part to present themself in a favourable light or even to shape the discourse with an element of self-aggrandisement. This can and does affect the accuracy of the testimony.

‘The testimonies were originally written in Yiddish, the /ingua-franca of the majority of the Holocaust survivors. This, no doubt, made the testimonies inaccessible to large numbers of historians and researchers who did not know Yiddish or were not aware of the testimonies as a significant source of historical information. There exists a vast corpus of work about the Holocaust and World War II in general, but the individual tales of survival in the face of impossible odds tell us far more than just the facts of what took place. They demonstrate the spirit that enabled people not only to survive but to rebuild their lives after liberation. The Jewish survivors felt the need and the moral responsibility to document their experiences during the Holocaust, both as evidence against the perpetrators, and to record this agonising period in Jewish history for future generations. Their testimonies stand as a memorial to the murdered six million Jewish victims of Nazi hatred.

‘The Allied forces in the West, under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, defeated the Nazi regime in the spring of 1945, the official conclusion to the war being VE Day, 8 May 1945. The Allied forces liberated different areas in Germany at different times, as they came from four directions: the Soviets from the East, the Americans from the West, the British from the North West, and the French from the South West. When they arrived at the Nazi concentration and extermination camps they were completely stunned by the unspeakable scenes which greeted them. The troops, in most cases, were ignorant of the true nature of the Holocaust and the extent of its bestiality. They were also unaware that, not only the Germans engaged in violent actions against the Jews, but that they were aided and abetted by Ukranians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians and Poles in addition to others. The liberators saw thousand of bodies piled one on top of another, discarded as if they were refuse, while the victims who were still alive wandered aimlessly in their striped uniforms or stared unbelievingly at their saviours. The stench in the camps assailed the soldiers like a poisonous miasma. When General Eisenhower entered Dachau, he issued the order to his troops: ‘Get it all on record now — get the films, get the witnesses — because somewhere down the track of history, some bastard will get up and say “This never happened”?

Liberation would bring temporary relief for the survivors, but soon enough the stark reality of their position made the future look bleak. The anguish of facing an uncertain future, without family, without a home, without a country, was perhaps made bearable by the spirit inherent in their narratives as they looked to the future. The Allied forces had to face the enormous task of caring for the almost 10 million Displaced Persons of different nationalities who had been uprooted by the war.’ The number of Jewish survivors was an estimated 300,000, most of whom were deemed to be stateless.* As Michael Brenner notes, “The Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were in reality stateless people, desperate to begin a new life, hopefully, with family. * For them Europe, particularly Poland, was a graveyard where all that had been dear to them, their families, their homes and possessions, and their culture of many hundreds of years, had been consumed by the Nazi hell. Even though Poland was the country of origin of most of the survivors, they refused to be repatriated to a land where, even after the Holocaust, they were not welcome. When some made an effort to return to Poland in order to search for family, they were met by anti- Semitism, which culminated in many pogroms and other acts of violence. For many Jewish survivors, the murder of 47 Jews in Kielce in July 1946 was seen as the final act of horror in a country which had been home to most of them. The majority of the Jewish survivors came to believe that the future of the Jewish people lay outside of Europe; the further away the better. They would have to find new directions in an unknown future. Their lives which had been for centuries Euro-centric had now to be focused elsewhere, hopefully on a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel. The survivors

2 See www.teejaw.com/eisenhowers-prediction-some-bastard-will-say-this-neverhappened.

3 AJ. Patt and M. Berkowitz, We Are Here: New Approaches to Displaced Persons in Post- War Germany. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010.

4 Margarete L. Myers, ‘Jewish Displaced Persons Reconstructing Individual and Community in the US Zone of Occupied Germany’. Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 42:1, 1997, 304. However, as Myers notes, ‘there is often some disparity between the figures quoted by historians. The numbers constantly fluctuated as the survivor population frequently moved from one camp to another or wandered from place to place searching for family members’.

5 Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

called themselves collectively ‘She’erit Hapletah’, a biblical term meaning the ‘Surviving Remnant’.

After the war, Germany was divided into zones of occupation, the American Zone containing the largest number of Displaced Persons and DP camps. Five-hundred DP camps were established in the American and British zones.’ The Americans were at first determined to repatriate as many refugees as possible, regardless of their experiences during the war and the unwillingness of Jewish survivors to return to their country of origin. They refused to recognise the Jews as a separate ethnic group which had been the victim of discrimination based purely upon their ethnic origin. Ironically, General George Patton, a virulent anti-Semite, was placed in command of the American Zone, where the majority of the ‘She’erit Hapletah’ were. Among the many derogatory comments made by Patton about the Jewish survivors, his diary entry for 17 September 1945 reads: ‘we entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about halfway up, the head Rabbi ... was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy ... The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted’. Referring to Earl Harrison, Dean of the Pennsylvania School of Law, who had been appointed by President Truman to report on conditions in the DP camps and the treatment of the Jews by the American troops, Patton declared: ‘Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals’.®

The general was soon removed from his command by Eisenhower for trivialising the US policy of de-Nazification and for his scandalous statements about the Jews, whom he regarded as vermin. In the DP camps Jews frequently found themselves together with former SS guards and kapos [Concentration camp prisoners selected by the Gestapo to supervise fellow inmates in return for privileges. Their treatment of the other prisoners was very often extremely brutal], even SS men who masqueraded as former prisoners in order to escape justice. Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians continued to openly treat the Jews with great hostility. A number of camps were surrounded by barbed wire and were guarded by the military. For the Jews,

6 Ezra 9:14; 1 Chronicles 4:43.

7 A. Grossman, Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 133.

8 ‘General George S. Patton on the Jews & Conquering Bolshivism’ (sic), www. churchoftrueisrael.com/identity/patton.html (accessed 5 February 2017).

this was reminiscent of the concentration camps, an unwelcome reminder of what they had been forced to endure. While Jewish DPs attended a Sabbath service in the DP camp of Hohne-Belsen, Polish DPs demolished the newly created Jewish prayer house, destroyed the Torah Scrolls and fired shots at the Rabbi.’

Conditions in the DP camps were intolerable in many other respects as well. There was overcrowding and shortages of food, clothing and medical supplies. The Jewish DPs sometimes encountered violence from non-Jewish camp inmates and, in addition, they had to cope with the inherent anti- Semitism among many of the American soldiers who had grown up in the ‘WASP’ climate of the United States during the interwar years. American troops were primarily young men of 18-25 years of age, who found the ragged and fractious Jewish DPs strange and even repulsive. The Germans seemed to them to be civilised and polite by comparison with the loud and frequently uncooperative Jewish survivors.

For some months organisations such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT) had to struggle against the chaos in their own organisations before meaningful relief could reach the DPs. Apathy and disorder characterised the DP camps in 1945, and members of the She’erit Hapletah felt disappointed and aggrieved at the lack of understanding and insight into their situation by their American liberators. Not surprisingly, the survivors were not willing to work for the benefit of Germany, nor did they wish to undertake the necessary work in the DP camps. They felt that it was now the turn of the Germans to work for them. They focused on their first concern which was to look for family members who might have survived, and the leaders of the She’erit Hapletah realised that the demoralisation, anger and frustration among survivors must be channeled into affirmative action which could bring about new hope. They saw ‘a future-oriented Zionist political’ path as the way forward.’ Though their immediate concern was to improve conditions in the DP camps, their central commitment was to a national rebirth of the Jewish people with their own country in Palestine. When David Ben-Gurion, who would

9 M. Brenner, After the Holocaust. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 10 White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, deemed by some to be the elite in American society. 11 JOINT was also known as the JDC, dedicated to giving aid to refugees and other victims of disasters worldwide.

12 A. Grossman, Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 158.

become prime minister of the newly formed state of Israel in May 1948, visited the DPs in 1945, he ‘was unabashed about the survivors’ significance for the future of Zionism’ and he inspired the survivors by referring to them as ‘a political force’. Zeev Mankowitz records ‘the willingness of tens of thousands of survivors to vote with their feet’, willing to brave the British blockade of Palestine in fragile and makeshift boats, facing the strong possibility of being incarcerated by the British in Cyprus. To the She’erit Hapletah their task was to ‘bear eloquent witness to their affirmation of life and their undiminished humanity’.

In the American sector it did not take long for the Jewish survivors to organise themselves for the purpose of representation and advocacy, especially vis-a-vis the Americans. They needed a voice to convince the Americans that the Jews were a separate ethnic group whose needs were different from those of the other DPs. The indifference of many of the postwar governments to the plight of the Jews, frustrated in their attempts to obtain entry visas for emigration to other countries, further galvanised the Jewish leaders to fight for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Most of the Jewish DPs continued to adhere to the same political ideologies which they had followed before the Holocaust, as is clearly illustrated by the emergence of a DP press in the camps which reflected the survivors’ many political ideologies. However, the appeal of Zionism to the She’erit Hapletah was strengthened by the apparent indifference of the world to their plight. It seemed that only a separate and independent homeland in Palestine could offer the Jews any security and a sense of belonging in the future.