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Abstract
Based on the interviews David Boder conducted with Holocaust survivors in 1946, this article explores the realm of migration choices that were available to Jewish survivors in European Displaced Persons camps. The article argues that, aided by Jewish philanthropic and self-help organisations, many Displaced Persons had already established long-term strategies for their postwar lives by 1946.
Keywords:
Notes on contributor
Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.
Notes
1. The term “displaced person” was coined by Eugene Kulischer in The Displacement of Population in Europe and later came to apply particularly to those in the DP camps that came into being after the war. One of the first studies of Jewish life in the DP camps was Pinson, “Jewish Life in liberated Germany.” Pinson, who based his study on his own observations working in the camps, estimated there were about 200,000 Jewish DPs in Germany at the time. More recent studies have put the figure at closer to 182,000. These figures, however, only account for the DPs located within Germany. There were another 70,000 Jews living in various DP camps in Italy and Austria, as well as additional transitory communities in camps in France and Switzerland. Another early but still relevant work on displaced persons after the war is Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers in Europe. For an analysis of the impact of these works see Ferrara, “Eugene Kulischer, Joseph Schechtman and the Historiography of European Forced Migrations.”
2. Recent scholarship on the DP camps which has focused on the role of the Zionist movement includes: Brenner, After the Holocaust; Patt, Finding Home and Homeland. Other works have focused on families and children in the DP camps, demonstrating the conflicts between individual rights and national rights that played out in the camps. See Zahra, “Lost Children;” Baumel, “DPs, Mothers and Pioneers;” Cohen, “The Politics of Recognition.” For some other studies of Jewish DPs, many of which focus on Holocaust memory, see: Patt et al., “We Are Here”; Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany; Grossman, Jews, Germans, and Allies; and Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope, 99—110.
3. Michael Brenner notes that in an April 1946 survey of 138,320 DPs, asking which country they would prefer to emigrate to, 118,570 answered Palestine. See Brenner, After the Holocaust, 37.
4. The archive, along with accompanying biographical information on Boder, is available online through the Voices of the Holocaust project: voices.lit.edu. See also Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices.
5. Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany,” 110.
6. For the Jewish experience in immediate postwar Eastern Europe see: Gross, Fear; Gross, Golden Harvest; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina; Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl, 232–89.
7. Interview with Nechama Epstein-Kozlowski, 31 August 1946, Tradate, Italy: http://voices.iit.edu/interviewee?doc=epsteinN. All the English translations I have used in this paper were recorded by Boder on audiotape and transcribed by the Voices of the Holocaust Project, although I have made some minor amendments to Boder's translation based on the original Yiddish-language audio recordings, which are also available on the Voices of the Holocaust website.
8. See the testimony of Saba Fiszman (now Sarah Saaroni): http://digitalassets.ushmm.org/photoarchives/detail.aspx?id=1117814; and the testimony of Hela Iwaniska (now Helen Ptashnik): http://digitalassets.ushmm.org/photoarchives/detail.aspx?id=1137297.
9. Cited in Zahra, “Lost Children,” 75. See also Patt, Finding Home and Homeland.
11. On Boder's attitude towards Oleiski see Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices, 71–5. On Oleiski's activities see Oleiski, Jacob Oleiski.
12. Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany,” 110.
16. Gatrell, “Trajectories of Population Displacement,” 18.