The Last Hundred Thousand

 On June 22, 1945 President Harry Truman sent Earl Harrison, the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, to Europe to evaluate the condition of displaced persons in Europe. Harrison assessed military and government effectiveness in providing aid to the DPs. Harrison reported back to Truman that “‘[we are] treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them'” (Berkowitz and Patt 106). The alarming conditions still facing the European Jews at the end of Nazi regime horrified many American authorities. Since the European Jewry had undergone war horrors unlike any other ethnic group, they began advocating to be seen as a unique entitlement group. The question of how to respond and aid the displaced persons at the end war was further complicated by the question of how to aid the displaced Jew at the end of the war. The displaced person was not always a Jew, but by the end of the war, the European Jew always identified as a displaced person.

Notes from Harrion’s diary when he visited DP camps in Germany. 1945.

Shortly after the end of the war the European Jewry began to separate themselves from the rest of the DPs. The Harrison report helped illuminate the mistreatment of Jews by the United States military. This mistreatment contradicted the American mantra of supporting world humanitarianism. In Gerard Cohen’s book, In War’s Wake, Cohen discusses the uniqueness of the Jewish cause; “Harrison argued that the tragedy of the Holocaust called for renewed Jewish distinctiveness: not based, to be sure, on the dubious concept of “Hebrew race” but on the peculiarity of the Jewish wartime experience” (135). Cohen argues that Jewish question arising at the end of war was not based on race, but rather, the experiences and persecution of the Jewry during the war. The surviving Jews found themselves in a unique situation because the remaining Jewish population was predominately youths under the age of thirty (Berkowitz and Patt 103). This disproportionate number of youths was caused primarily because they had been the ones healthy and fit enough to survive war and forced labor ( Berkowitz and Patt 103).

The skewed representation of Jewish youths post war lead to radical ideology, such as Zionism, to take hold. Zionism supports the belief that the Jewish population should reside in the homeland (Palestine) or current day Israel. This radical thought developed in the turn of the 20th century. Zionist leaders advocated for relocation to Palestine during the early months of Hitlers regime, but received little backing (Segev 17-18). The Jewish youth established communal farms with in their DP camps to prepare for life in Palestine. These farms (kibbutzim) offered a sense of ethnic community for the remaining Euopean Jewry. Contrary to the notion that the farms were designed solely for preparation for life in Israel, Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz argue in their article, “‘We are Here’: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany”,  that the farms offered more than goods and preparation for the promised land. Patt writes, “the youths who joined the kibbutzim tended to stay because of the psychological support they derived from the communal structure, which proved highly therapeutic for many of the survivors because it placed them with a similar community of youths who had undergone wartime trauma” (116). Contrary to the common belief that the kibbutzim only purpose was to foster Zionism beliefs, the kibbutzim also served as structural sanctuaries outside of the DP camps.

A common theme discussed amongst scholars of the Jewish DPs is the uniqueness of the Jew compared to other ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic groups. The Jews quickly separated themselves from other persecuted groups of the war. Even during the war, Jews highlighted their ethnic background. For example  Jewish Soviet photographer, Evgenii Khaldei, documented the proud Jewishness of the Soviet Jew. He took photos for the Soviet Yiddish newspaper, Unity. In one instance he photographed a Jewish couple standing in the war-town streets of Budapest wearing their yellow stars. The photograph appeared in Unity during the war to inspire ethnic sentiment. The photograph was later reprinted in the 1960s (Shneer 40-42). This time it was trying to focus on the general destruction of the war rather than the Jewishness of the couple. This change in perception over time illustrates how the memory of the war became less about the individual and more about the collective as time passed .