The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (56 page)

their behalf.

It is clear that Jews did complain most bitterly about their circumstances. They viewed their continued in- carceration in DP camps as an outrage, a mockery of the promises of liberation that had opened up such hopeful vistas in May 1945. The visible failure of the Army, UNRRA, and the Joint Distribution Committee to bring about immediate improvement in their lives struck them as an unforgivable failure. In November, food rations were actually cut in many DP camps; as the weather grew colder and the need for winter clothes, firewood, and adequate housing grew, DPs began to despair about spending yet another winter in a camp in Germany. Quite naturally, their complaints took on a new edge and sharpness. Warhaftig sensed among the displaced Jews in the fall of 1945 “a terrible disappoint- ment…a bitterness, nervousness and depression, be- cause of the unclear prospects for their future.”
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Yet at the heart of Jewish anxieties lay not just concern about housing and clothing. There was also something in the worldview of the Jewish DP that placed a distinct bar- rier between him and those who were prepared to of- fer help and succor. For example, Koppel Pinson, who spent a year in Germany as educational director for the Joint, observed that the Jewish DP is preoccupied al- most to the point of morbidity with his past…. He is

always ready to recount in minutest detail the events of his past or the past of his relatives. In their entertain- ments and in the education of their youth there is the constant preoccupation with their experiences under the Nazis—gruesome recapitulation of concentration camp incidents combined with vows of undying loyalty to these memories and hopes for vengeance. It is es- pecially depressing to see young boys and girls of 8–12 years of age, whose rehabilitation to normal childhood should emphasize obliteration of these memories, par- ticipate in and be encouraged to share in such demon- strations.
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Here is one clue to the yawning chasm that had opened up between Jewish survivors and the community of relief workers: the Jews were beginning to construct a narrative of their fate in which history, memory, com- memoration, and retelling of the persecution they en- dured would accompany and condition their recovery. There was to be no “new” life, but a conscious carrying of the recent past into the future. This insistence on placing the catastrophe at the center of Jewish iden- tity did not mesh with the American idea of liberation and its insistence on a clean break with the past. And it consciously placed the community of UNNRA person- nel and relief workers at a distance: as Pinson noticed, “the relief workers from the USA and from England…

no matter how hard they worked, no matter how effi- cient they were, no matter how much thanks and def- erence was given to them officially, none the less re- mained outsiders. A wide gulf separated them from the DPs. Most of them knew no Hebrew, but a smattering of Yiddish, had no background of Jewish culture, had no understanding of the civilization and way of life of East European Jews, and hence could never find a common intellectual or emotional basis with the DPs.”
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The DP camps, then, became a site of conflict between two sets of priorities: the American Army offered shel- ter and aid to stateless Jews but in return demanded order and compliance, and expected the Jews, now lib- erated, to act like “civilized” people again. The Jews, of course, wanted security and safety, too, as well as tol- erable lodgings; but above all they wanted freedom— the freedom to organize political activities, to publish appeals to world Jewry, and to agitate on behalf of that elusive goal, emigration to Palestine.

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T

HESE CONFLICTING TRENDS were all patently visible in Landsberg, the largest Jewish DP camp in the American zone, where in September 1945,

a twenty-seven-year-old major named Irving Heymont

took over command. The Lansdberg DP camp was lo- cated in Landsberg am Lech, about thirty-five miles from Munich; as Major Heymont described it in his diary, it contained about 6,000 people, and 5,000 of them were Jews; by October, as repatriation continued, the non-Jews left and virtually all the remaining resi- dents were Jews. The inhabitants lived in former Weh- rmacht army barracks, originally built to house cavalry units in the First World War. The camp comprised large brick buildings and a series of seventeen requisitioned houses and apartment blocks adjacent to the camps. The camp was under the command of the Army but staffed by a poorly prepared UNRRA team; as the JDC noted, the UNRRA personnel only arrived at Landsberg in mid-August, and no one on the team was Jewish; only two members of the ten-member team spoke Ger- man or Polish, and so they had no way to communi- cate with the inhabitants. An UNRRA inspection report noted that the JDC officers were far more connected to camp residents and tended to marginalize the UNRRA staff—the “dual machinery” had developed “into a competition” for status within the camp.
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Major Hey- mont’s arrival marked the start of a new period for the camp. His leadership brought stability and continuity, as well as a significant improvement in living condi- tions, and Landsberg soon grew to become the largest all-Jewish camp in the American zone of occupation.

Yet, as Heymont explained in his diary, the challenge of running a DP camp was filled with difficulties and setbacks.

Major Heymont’s initial assessment was that the camp residents were “demoralized beyond hope of rehabili- tation.” Upon his arrival in mid- September, the Lands- berg camp was in a terrible state. “ The DPs sleep in bunks of rough, unfinished lumber that are often dou- ble and even triple decked. Mattresses are straw filled sacks. Bedding consists of shoddy gray Wehrmacht blankets or US Army blankets.” It was also surrounded by a fence of barbed wire. “ The outside perimeter is patrolled by soldiers from the battalion. A soldier and a member of the camp police are stationed at the en- trance gate…. I saw large numbers of DPs lolling along

the fence and watching the Germans walking freely along the opposite street.” Food supply was disorga- nized, with no central mess. Each family used a hot plate for cooking. Wall lockers were stuffed with cloth- ing and personal supplies. “ The number of idle peo- ple is surprising. Many of the beds were occupied by people either dozing or just lying there listlessly. One could sense an air of resignation.” Heymont was ap- palled at the lack of basic sanitation. “ The toilets beg description. About half the bowls were inoperative but full of excrement. Toilet seats, while not entirely lack- ing, were smeared with excrement or wet with urine. No toilet paper was in sight…. In the washrooms, most of the sinks were out of order.” The kitchens were filthy. “I asked one cook, who was kneading dough, to extend his hands. His fingernails were encrusted with dirt, and his hands looked as if he had been greasing a wheel bearing.”
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Heymont was well aware of the Jewish demands for self-government, and sympathetic to their plight. The Jewish leaders “keep after me hammer and tongs to permit complete self-management of the camp. The word they use over and over is autonomy…. They natu- rally resent being treated as wards of foreign benevo- lence rather than full free citizens. After their sacrifices and sufferings, they undoubtedly find it galling to be

objects of charity…. They must surely find it rankling to have their private lives regulated and subjected to constant inspection while the Germans lead a relative- ly free life. I am sure they still feel like prisoners.”
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Yet Heymont remained reluctant to grant the Jews greater freedoms. A camp population that exhibited such poor hygiene, such disorganization, such uncivilized behav- ior, surely could not administer itself, he reasoned. He periodically hectored his camp inmates in astonish- ingly condescending tones: “Now is the time to relearn the habits of work and industry,” he told them in a speech in late September. “Now is the time to relearn how to be self-respecting civilized persons. No man can ask you to forget what you and your families have been through. However, you can’t live in the shadow of the past forever…. This is the time for relearning hab- its of work and smiling, to live again as a proud people, unashamed and unafraid before the world. You have only to prove that you are capable of handling it.”

And when the Jews failed to live up to these expecta- tions, Heymont expressed deep distress. In early Oc- tober, the new corps commander, General Horace McBride, visited Landsberg to inspect the progress made since Harrison’s report. For Heymont, this was “a day I would rather forget…. The camp was dirty and filthy. It was almost as bad as when we took over….

The living areas and latrines were horrible…. We had all worked so hard trying to help the people—and they even fail to keep just their own living areas and latrines tolerably clean. Even after concentration camp life, it is not too much to expect people to flush toilets that are in working order. Is it too demanding to ask that they use the urinals in the latrines and not the floors?…I feel so discouraged because I thought we had made some progress.”
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Heymont also professed to be shocked by the absence of personal modesty among the prisoners. “ The morals of these people are amazing,” he wrote with dismay. “Concentration camp life seems to have completely destroyed the normal inhibitions as we know them. Here, men and women mix and sleep in the same room in a manner that would be considered scandalous back home…. Many couples live together without the sanction of wedding rites. This practice is accepted in a very matter of fact fashion.” Heymont’s diary, like the accounts by soldiers who had helped lib- erate the concentration camps, reveals the tension be- tween a genuine desire to provide comfort to those in his care, and a profound revulsion at the apparent un- willingness of these survivors to demonstrate the obe- dience, loyalty, and self-respect of a people that aimed at collective autonomy and indeed statehood.
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Heymont, as camp commander, worried incessantly

about the little things: cleanliness, order, the black market, and so on. Leo Srole, who served in Landsberg throughout 1946 as the welfare director of the UNRRA team installed in the camp, took a longer view and at- tempted to explain some of the behavior of Jewish DPs that so irked Heymont. Srole was a prominent Ameri- can sociologist who took a leave of absence from his academic post at Hobart College to work in the DP camps. After five months in Landsberg, he prepared a report on the psychological outlook of the Jewish DPs at Landsberg, and expanded the report for publication in Commentary magazine. Srole believed that the Jews in Landsberg were suffering from what he called an “anxiety state” similar to combat fatigue or shell shock. They exhibited excessive perspiration, disturbed sleep, impaired memory, impatience, irritability, depression, and “regression to a more childlike personality.” Srole readily acknowledged that these troubled Jews had ac- complished a great deal while at Landsberg. They dem- onstrated an “almost obsessive will to live normally again, to reclaim their full rights as free men.” Srole believed that their frequent intractability derived in large part from their lack of freedom and dignity in the camps. Srole reported that one Jewish DP had told him that the food he was given in the camp was “the bitter bread of charity” and asked, “ When will I be able to buy my own bread and say to myself, ‘I am a man again

like all men. I am free—I earn my own bread!’” Jew- ish DPs, Srole concluded, lived under “a heavy weight of anxieties and strains.” Their dependent status em- barrassed them; the evidence of German recovery and even of comfort infuriated them; and the closed doors of Palestine drove them to bouts of despair and anguish over the prospect of a prolonged period of sequestra- tion in the camps. Even the strongest of souls would be worn down by such travails; yet these were survivors of a massive onslaught against their faith, their villages, their families, themselves. The superstructure of nor- mality these Jews attempted to build stood on the shift- ing, shallow soil of personal loss, grief, and despair.
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This inner emotional turmoil makes the modest achievements within Landsberg so much the greater. It is important to stress just how much effort the Lands- berg committee expended on creating institutions of a communal life. They established a profusion of schools in Landsberg—a kindergarten, an elementary school, a technical high school, an adult education program for camp residents, and a yeshiva for fifty students prepar- ing for the rabbinate—and this despite the overwhelm- ing difficulties of securing reading materials and textbooks, paper, pencils, and chalkboards. Cultural activities, including a theater and library, even a café, and the successful weekly newspaper, Landsberger

Lager- Cajtung, with a circulation of 15,000, demon- strated the determination of the resident Jews to live dignified and full lives while awaiting the longed-for emigration to Palestine. Under Jacob Oleiski and the innovative programs of the World ORT Union, Lands- berg benefited from an extensive program of job train- ing in practical skills that would not only serve the needs of the camp but also prepare Jews for a trade when, at long last, they should be allowed to settle in Palestine.
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