Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (36 page)

There were many reasons why the Dutch authorities did not give returning Jews the specific help they needed and deserved. To begin with, they took their lead from the Allies, specifically the British, whose official policy was
not
to treat Jews as a distinct category. Jews made up only a small proportion of the returnees, and so were not regarded as a priority. The authorities also had to prepare for the return in something of a rush, since Holland was one of the last countries in Europe to be liberated.

If they had thought about the situation more carefully they would have seen that Jews, more than any other group, were entitled to special treatment – on both moral and humanitarian grounds. They had certainly endured incomparably more suffering than any other group in Dutch society: of the 210,000 Dutch casualties of the Second World War half had been Jewish – and this despite the fact that Jews had only made up just over 1.5 per cent of the prewar population.
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In most areas the community had been entirely wiped out, and even in Amsterdam only a small fraction had survived. While other returnees had communities to welcome them and to fall back on, many Jews had no one – not even family.

It was not only ‘officialdom’ that ignored these facts. Ordinary people also tended to be quite astonishingly insensitive. The historian Dienke Hondius has gathered together a whole series of examples showing the attitude of ordinary Dutch people to returning Jews. For example, Rita Koopman was greeted by a former acquaintance with the words, ‘You’re lucky you weren’t here. We suffered such hunger!’ When Ab Caransa returned to his former job he was denied an advance from his employer on the grounds that in Auschwitz, ‘You had a roof over your head and food the whole time!’ Most Jews did not try to explain the horrors they had been through but, like Gerhard Durlacher, merely ‘bought acceptance’ by listening to the stories of others and maintaining a ‘discreet silence’ about their own plight. ‘People didn’t understand,’ explains another Dutch Jew, ‘or else they didn’t believe you.’
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Many of these comments were born of pure ignorance. Unlike in eastern Europe, where the Holocaust took place right under the noses of the people, in the west many were completely unaware of what had happened to the Jews after they had been deported. Before the films from the concentration camps were released, stories of industrial mass-murder were often dismissed as exaggerations; but even after the films had been shown in cinemas there was a complete lack of understanding of what they actually meant to the people who had survived.

More important than people’s ignorance, however, was the sense of discomfort that such stories inevitably provoked. According to Frank Keizer, people in Holland reacted to his story of incarceration at Theresienstadt by saying, ‘I don’t want to know. That’s all over now; be glad you survived.’
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Jews who returned to other countries reported similar reactions. In France too, according to Auschwitz survivor Alexandre Kohn, ‘there was a general indifference’, and Jews were urged to draw a line under their experiences.
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In Hungary returning Jews were beaten if they dared to suggest that they had suffered more than their Christian neighbours.
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Even in America, Jewish survivors who immigrated were often treated with impatience: ‘the war was over: “enough already!”’
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A well-nourished French couple greet a returning concentration-camp prisoner: ‘You know, my dear boy, we too suffered terribly from the restrictions’ (
La Marseillaise
, 13 June 1945)

One must remember that ordinary Europeans had also suffered terribly during the war, particularly in the final year – but there was at least some comfort in the thought that they had all been through it together. After the liberation the whole continent began constructing myths of unity in adversity. These myths suited pretty much everybody, from former collaborators who wanted a chance to be brought back into the fold, to an exhausted public that was eager to put the war behind them, to the politicians who wanted to rebuild a sense of national pride. Even at an international level, the idea that all the different peoples of Europe had suffered together under Nazism was a convenient way to rebuild a common sense of brotherhood between battered nations. But the presence of the Jews made a mockery of such myths. Not only had they suffered much, much more than everyone else, but none of the other groups had come to their aid: the comfortable thought that Europeans had been ‘all in it together’ was demonstrably untrue.

Here perhaps is the key to why the plight of returning Jews was so commonly ignored in the aftermath of the war, not only in Holland but all over western Europe. While stories of resistance gave people the chance to feel good about themselves, and reassure themselves that they too had produced their fair share of heroes, the stories of the Jews had the opposite effect. They were a reminder of former failings at every level of society. Their very presence was enough to create discomfort, as though they might at any moment reveal an embarrassing secret. It was far easier, therefore, simply to pretend that what had befallen the Jews was really just the same as what had happened to everyone else. Far from being welcomed, they were ignored, sidelined, silenced.

The Fight over Jewish Property

Sometimes there were darker reasons why the Jews were not welcomed home. In the aftermath of the war, there was a joke doing the rounds in Hungary. It went something like this: A Jew who survived the camps returned to Budapest, where he ran into a Christian friend. ‘How are you?’ the friend inquired. ‘Don’t even ask,’ the Jew replied. ‘I have returned from the camp, and now I have nothing except the clothes you are wearing.’
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The same joke could have been told in virtually any city in eastern Europe – plus a good many in the west – and it would have been understood. The plunder of Jewish property during the war had taken place in every country, and at every level of society. The comprehensive nature of this plundering was sometimes quite astounding. In the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, for example, the houses were stripped of everything right down to the wooden window and door frames.
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In Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, Jewish land and property was often divided up amongst the poor.
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Sometimes people did not even wait until the Jews had gone. There are examples in Poland of acquaintances approaching Jews during the war with the words, ‘Since you are going to die anyway, why should someone else get your boots? Why not give them to me so I will remember you?’
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When handfuls of Jews began to come home after the war, their property was sometimes returned to them without any fuss – but this tended to be the exception rather than the rule. The historiography of this period in Europe is littered with stories of Jews trying, and failing, to get back what was rightfully theirs.
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Neighbours and friends who had promised to look after valuable items for Jews while they were away frequently refused to return them: in the intervening years they had come to regard them as their own. Villagers who had farmed Jewish land during the war saw no reason why returning Jews should benefit from the fruits of their labours. Christians who had been granted empty apartments by the wartime authorities considered those apartments rightfully theirs, and they had papers to prove it. All these people tended to regard Jews with varying degrees of resentment, and cursed their luck that, of all the Jews that had ‘disappeared’ during the war,
theirs
had to be the ones who came back.

A good example of how Jewish property ended up being dispersed during the war – and the frightening consequences this could have – occurred in Hungary, in the small town of Kunmadaras. At the beginning of the war 250 Jews had lived here, out of a population of about 8,000. All had been deported in April 1944 – some to Auschwitz, some to Austria - and only seventy-three of these unfortunates survived. While they were away their property was ‘confiscated’ by local officials, who used it firstly to enrich themselves, but also to distribute to the poor. Some homes and businesses were looted wholesale by the community, with the implicit blessing of the authorities. Others were taken over by the various armies that passed through, and items of furniture and so on were dispersed amongst the local community. When the Red Army arrived they in turn plundered the homes of the upper and middle classes, where many of the more valuable items had ended up. Some of the property they acquired was used to barter for food, or simply abandoned when they moved on, and thus – by a circuitous route – it found its way into the possession of local peasants. To complete this tangled web, the incoming Communists also requisitioned property for their own use or for the good of the Party, and this too was occasionally traded locally.
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Thus, through a combination of confiscation, plunder, theft and resale the property of Jews was dispersed all over the town. In larger cities like Budapest the confusion often rendered it impossible for returning Jews to trace their property. But in a small town like Kunmadaras finding one’s property was not difficult – it was getting the new owners to return it that was the problem. Some people refused outright, and thereafter regarded the presence of the Jews as both a reproach and a potential threat. Others were ordered to return property by the police, but even those who complied voluntarily did so reluctantly, and were resentful ever after. The poor felt especially aggrieved, particularly if they were forced to return property to previously wealthier Jews. ‘When the Jews returned they had nothing,’ said one Kunmadaras woman when interviewed by a local newspaper, ‘but now they are eating white bread and even though I plough the fields with my nose, I still have nothing.’
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Through the winter and spring of 1946 a tense, anti-Semitic atmosphere began to build in Kunmadaras. It came to a head towards the end of May when a group of women attacked a Jewish egg vendor named Ferenc Kuti at the Kunmadaras market, and smashed all the eggs on his stand. The woman who led the attack was Eszter Toth Kabai, who invoked blood libel to justify her actions – that is, the ancient myth that Jews sacrificed Christian children in their rituals. Absurd rumours had been circulating the region that Jews had been abducting and killing children, and then selling ‘sausage made from human flesh’. As she beat Kuti with her wooden shoe, Kabai began shouting, ‘My sister’s child has been taken away by the Jews.’ Some of the other, non-Jewish stall holders came to Kuti’s aid, but when they too were attacked Kuti abandoned his stall and fled home.
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Kuti’s house quickly became surrounded by a mob. For a while the crowd refrained from entering because they were afraid he might have a gun. But when the police went in and discovered that he was in fact unarmed – and made the mistake of announcing this to the crowd – the rabble surged inside. Kuti apparently begged the intruders for mercy but was killed by a man named Balazs Kalman, who beat him to death with an iron bar, shouting ‘I’ll give you sausages made out of the flesh of Hungarian children!’
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The attack on Ferenc Kuti marked the beginning of a pogrom in which at least one other Jew was murdered, and fifteen more seriously injured.
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Jewish homes were broken into and plundered, and Jewish shops were also looted. The rumours of child abduction and blood libel were invoked again and again during the pogrom, and rioters were heard to shout a variety of slogans along the lines of, ‘We must beat the Jews because they will steal our children!’ The real motive behind the rioting, however, appears to have been to loot Jewish property. When the crowd broke into a clothes shop they demanded the return of three children who were supposedly imprisoned there – but rather than look for the missing children they immediately began helping themselves to the stock of clothes. One Jewish woman, a Mrs Rosenberg, was attacked by a woman called Sara Kerepesi, who bore her a special grudge because she had been forced by the courts to return Mrs Rosenberg’s belongings to her after the war. Mrs Rosenberg remembered her attacker shouting, while beating her, ‘This is for the eiderdown!’
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What happened at Kunmadaras is a particularly violent example of a phenomenon seen all over Europe in the aftermath of the war. It was not only returning Jews who had trouble regaining and retaining their property – but the anti-Semitism that existed throughout the continent made them much more vulnerable than any other group. In other parts of Hungary the courts ruled that horses and other livestock plundered from Jewish farms should remain with those who had ‘saved’ them.
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In Italy the authorities not only hesitated to return Jewish businesses to their rightful owners, but then tried to charge a ‘management fee’ for ‘looking after’ them during the war.
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In Poland, any ‘abandoned’ property formerly owned by Jews was taken into local authority control – in other words, the local authorities had a vested interest in making sure that Jews who returned after the war were driven away again.
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Such examples can be found in almost every European country.