Today is Yom HaShoah, or the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, which specifically commemorates the Nazis’ Jewish victims. This means that today antisemites will wax poetic about the so-called “lessons of the Holocaust” that its victims didn’t learn and draw endless comparisons between the Nazis’ targeted extermination of 67% of European Jewry and the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza.
I am a third generation Holocaust survivor, whose entire childhood was shaped by the reverberations of the Holocaust’s destruction, so I’m the last person that should dread Holocaust remembrance days. And yet, here we are: the Holocaust is wielded as a weapon to lambast the Jewish community. The unspeakable trauma of our own genocide is used against us.
What I find truly upsetting, though, is that in reframing the Shoah as nothing but a rhetorical tool, we leave its survivors behind. Because for the remnants of the Jewish community, the Holocaust didn’t end with liberation.
DEATH AFTER LIBERATION
For Jews, the nightmare did not end when the Americans, British, and Soviets marched through the death camp gates. It’s estimated that some 30,000 liberated prisoners, predominantly Jews, died in the weeks following liberation, particularly due to refeeding syndrome and continuing illness and malnutrition.
But there’s more. It’s estimated that at least 2,000 Jews were murdered by Polish citizens between liberation in 1945 and 1947, with hundreds of others murdered elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe. This happened in two contexts:
- When Jews tried to recover their old homes and possessions, they were frequently murdered by robbers or squatters.
- A number of post-Holocaust pogroms took place in Eastern Europe, the first being the Krakow Pogrom of August 1945, just five months after Krakow was liberated.
NO HOME FOR JEWS IN EUROPE
In 1939, there were approximately 9.5 million Jews living in Europe. Six years later, the Jewish population on the continent had dwindled down to about 3.5 million. The overwhelming majority of those 3.5 million Jews did not want to stay.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t necessarily the Nazi extermination campaign that convinced Jews that there was no home left for them in Europe, but rather, the indifference, complicity, or outright collaboration of their friends and neighbors.
Historians widely regard the 1946 Kielce Pogrom, when 42 Jewish refugees were brutally massacred by Polish locals, as the final nail on the coffin on the idea that Jews might rebuild in Europe.
"I would like to mention that as a former prisoner of concentration camps I have not gone through an experience like this. I have seen very little sadism and bestiality of this scale."
Witness to the Kielce Pogrom
FLEEING THE IRON CURTAIN
Of the 3.5 million Jewish survivors remaining in Europe, it’s estimated that around 2 million were in Soviet-controlled territory. Even before the end of World War II, the Soviets had begun a propaganda campaign that stripped the Holocaust of its specifically antisemitic nature, instead portraying all Soviet citizens and communists as the true victims of the Nazis. Meanwhile, Soviet or Soviet puppet authorities incited antisemitic violence or outright deported Jewish concentration camp survivors to Gulags in Siberia, deeming them “dangerous” or “traitors” to the Soviet war effort.
Jewish survivors knew that a future in Soviet-controlled territory was no future at all. Thus began a mad dash to slip past Red Army checkpoints and the newly developing Iron Wall to the Western zone, under British and American control. Some 300,000 Jewish survivors participated in this escape, among them my grandfather and great uncle, known as the Bricha, a mass clandestine migration from the Soviet zone to Western Europe, organized by Zionist youth movements, often employing the help of Haganah operatives in Europe.
NEGLECT IN THE DP CAMPS
Some half a million Jews in the Western zone were held in a network of hundreds of Displaced Persons’ camps, most of which were refurbished former Nazi concentration or death camps.
Initially, the Allies separated the refugees according to their nationalities, which meant that Jewish DPs were held in close quarters with non-Jewish DPs. This led to antisemitic incidents, in which former non-Jewish Nazi prisoners harassed, tormented, and/or abused the Jewish DPs. Eventually, the Allies created separate quarters for the Jews.
This didn’t entirely solve the problem. Oftentimes, DP camp guards – that is, American or British soldiers – mistreated the Jewish DPs, too. In the beginning, the Americans and Brits were tasked with seeing to the DPs’ food and medical needs, but at the request of the Jewish survivors, Jewish charities, particularly the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), took over. This drastically improved the DPs’ living conditions.
"As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them."
Report of Earl G. Harrison
POLITICAL ORGANIZING
The segregation of Jewish DPs ultimately cultivated an environment of Jewish self-governance and political organizing. Though the pre-Holocaust Jewish community in Europe had been divided over their politics – Marxists, Bundists, Zionists, and more – by 1945, Jewish support for Zionism was all but unanimous.
The 1945 Harrison Report detailed the Jewish DPs’ urgency to be evacuated to Palestine. The reasons cited included: (1) disillusionment with European society, after their neighbors and friends had turned on them, (2) support for the “Zionist ideal,” (3) fear that there was no place left for them in Europe, and, for a minority, (4) the belief that they wouldn’t be admitted into any other country anyway.
The Harrison Report was corroborated by other surveys of Jewish DPs. In one survey of thousands of survivors, 97% stated that they wished to immigrate to Palestine. Asked to list a second choice, thousands wrote “crematorium.”
IMMIGRATION DOORS (STILL) SHUT
Many of us are familiar with the fact that the United States shut its doors to Jewish refugees in the lead up to the Holocaust. But few are aware that this policy remained intact well after liberation.
The American government still shut its doors to Jewish survivors in 1945, despite the fact that Congress handpicked thousands of Nazi and Nazi collaborator scientists for resettlement in the United States, with the idea that they would help the U.S. fight the Cold War.
In 1948, the U.S. House and Senate finally passed the Displaced Persons Act, which would allow 200,000 DPs to immigrate to the United States. But the Displaced Persons Act discriminated against Jewish refugees, as it strategically made a December 1945 arrival to DP camps the “cut off” date for prospective immigrants. But, as mentioned, most Jewish DPs had arrived at the camps in 1946 and 1947 after fleeing violence in the Soviet occupied zone.
THE RETURN TO LIFE
In 1945, as the Allies closed in on Nazi Germany and a German defeat seemed inevitable, the general German population feared Jewish retribution more than anything else, thanks to years of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, which portrayed Jews as a genocidal threat to the German nation. In other words, they feared that the Jews would do to the Germans what the Nazis had done to the Jews. In reality, Jewish acts of violent revenge were exceedingly rare, which stands in sharp contrast with other groups, such as the Russians and Poles, who carried out acts of anti-German vengeance much more liberally.
Instead, Jews were preoccupied with rebuilding whatever was left of their lives. In DP camps, Jews scoured newspaper notices, registration cards, and orphanage records to try to find their missing relatives. The Jewish Agency set up Search Bureau for Missing Relatives, and Jewish survivors listened to radio programs like “Who Knows, Who Has Heard?” for traces of their loved ones.
Meanwhile, Jews in DP camps married quickly, eager to rebuild their lives and the Jewish people, a phenomenon that was noted in Jewish and non-Jewish media alike. Jewish DP camp zones experienced massive baby booms, as well, at one point boasting the highest birth rate in the world.
TODAY
For Jews, the Holocaust is not a rhetorical concept, a morality lesson, or a point of comparison. It’s our living, breathing, every day experience. It is a communal, collective trauma and an intergenerational trauma. Today, over 80 years after our mass extermination, the global Jewish population has yet to recover: in 1939, worldwide Jewry stood at over 16 million; today, we barely scrape 15 million, even though the global population has grown by 200%.
Aging Holocaust survivors in Israel, the United States, and Eastern Europe experience disproportionate rates of poverty, as well as disabilities and other health conditions often exacerbated or caused by their experiences in World War II.
Psychological studies have found that repeated exposure to Holocaust imagery and discourse triggers mental health conditions in survivors, and yet, instead of engaging with the memory of the Holocaust responsibly, politicians, celebrities, activists, and NGOs alike use our genocide as a measuring stick, a point of comparison, and a rhetorical tool to demonize Jews or the Jewish state, where most Holocaust survivors made a home.
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