When Hope Triumphs Over the Past: Life After the Holocaust

The American journalist Tom Brokaw called the Americans who grew up within the hardships of the Great Depression and fought valiantly in World War II “the greatest generation.” The war had shaped them into caring fathers and devoted husbands, teaching them eternal values like personal responsibility, honor and faith. While they certainly grappled with battle scars, both physical and emotional, these disciplined veterans did so in a constructive manner that spared their loved ones. These soldiers, so the narrative goes, were widely celebrated. On May 8th 1945, Great Britain and the United States celebrated Victory in Europe Day: cities across the Allied countries celebrated the end of Hitler’s domination, on the streets with mass parades, dancing and drinking.

Iconic images from VE Day show British sailors and their girlfriends rejoicing in the fountains in London’s Trafalgar Square, trucks carrying merry decorated soldiers and cheering young women through Central London, and grinning children waving the Union Jack flag in the rubble. Allied soldiers celebrated and womanized in Paris to reward themselves.

The survivors of Hitler’s Final Solution called themselves the She’erit HaPleita, or the “Surviving Remnant.” They did not share in the West’s euphoria upon liberation. Many survivors liberated in Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz had experienced too much trauma to feel any joy, let alone any of the ecstasy portrayed by popular imagination. Many survivors were too sick upon liberation to even comprehend who these new troops were and that they had freed them.

Survivors had been living in terror for years. By the end of the war, as the Allied soldiers were nearing the camps, SS guards taunted Jewish prisoners that they would not live long enough to witness liberation. Moreover, many felt that their liberation had come too late, after they had lost entire families, communities, homes and often, their identities. After years of having no choice but to ignore their trauma and devastation in order to focus on their daily physical survival, the survivors were now forced to confront all that they had lost. While liberation is narrated as a jubilee in Western memory, Israeli historians like Anita Shapira and Irit Keynan in their book The Survivors of the Holocaust explain liberation day as the survivor’s first day of an often lifelong existential crisis.

Young orphans had no parental figure or even role model to comfort or protect them, to teach them how a healthy adult should behave. Left alone in the world, they were forced to rebuild, without anywhere to go. Many Jews who tried to return to their hometowns were killed by their old neighbors, dismayed that Hitler had not murdered every Jew in Europe. Even when Jews were not murdered or violently threatened by the local population, it proved too painful to see strangers living in their homes, often even using their exact silverware, or to be surrounded by reminders of murdered relatives and friends on every street corner. Poland and Hungary were certainly not the refuge that the She’erit Ha’pleita were craving: 76% of whom had lost all their immediate family members according to an official survey conducted by the Organization for Jewish Refugees in Italy.

Many of these Jewish refugees were forced to head West and seek a “safe haven” in Germany, of all places. The Western Allies established DP (“Displaced Persons”) camps across Allied-occupied zones of Germany, Austria, and Italy; many of these camps were simply former concentration camps, with the barbed wire installed by German soldiers still intact. Initially, while also continuing to suffer from insufficient food, clothing and medicine, Jewish DPs were sometimes forced to share the same living barracks as ideological anti-Semites and even Nazi collaborators who had actively harmed Jews in the war. Separate Jewish DP camps were gradually created, enabling the survivors to start defining their own identity and to advocate for themselves.

Author Yossi Klein Halevi explains that stripped of their voice and rights for years, the She’erit Ha’pleitah now built a fiercely independent political framework, one that was ardently Zionist in nature. Survivors saw that they were placed on the bottom of the list for U.S. emigration visas, labeled as far lower priority for entry into America than Nazi war collaborators from the Baltics and Ukraine where Jewish communities who had flourished for centuries were wiped out within a matter of days.  According to Klein Halevi, survivors - even those who ended up emigrating to countries like America, many of whom had to wait up to five years to receive their emigration visas - believed that Zionism was the natural response to the continuous apathy of the international community, who ultimately did not feel sufficiently guilty or ashamed of the Holocaust. In the DP camps, many young survivors formed the Young Pioneering Kibbutz movement. One particularly profound example of symbolic “revenge” in the survivors’ rebirth was Kibbutz Nili. The pioneers transformed the former estate of Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist who was known in Germany as “Jew-baiter Number One,” into a kibbutz that trained these survivors for a meaningful life in the Land of Israel. In 1946, while Streicher was in nearby Nuremberg on trial for his war crimes, Kibbutz Nili conducted their first Passover Seder as freemen, entirely in Hebrew. Survivors primarily in their twenties delivered speeches in the Seder’s theme “from slavery to redemption” late into the night.

The DP camps experienced a remarkable rebirth of diverse Jewish life. Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam, the Hasidic rebbe - or leader - of the Klausenburg dynasty who lost his wife and eleven children after miraculously surviving a fatal injury on a death march, established yeshivot, seminaries, and mikvahs across all DP camps. On the first Yom kippur in the Feldafing DP camp, where Halberstam had emerged as the spiritual leader, he served as a surrogate father for several dozen orphaned girls lining up for a bracha (blessing) before the Kol Nidrei prayer. Hundreds of girls attended the network of schools he established, despite struggling with his own colossal personal tragedy, in the first year after liberation. Halberstam personally counseled these traumatized girls, wrote a collection of weekly Torah sermons to guide them in their unique theological struggles, and found them loving husbands.

In 1976, Halberstam established Laniado Hospital in Netanya, the fulfillment of Halberstam’s vow to God during the Holocaust that if he survived the valley of death, he would build a hospital in the Land of Israel where every patient would be treated equally, because the medical staff would know this was the greatest mitzvah (religious or ethical obligation).

DPs entertained themselves in their down time with tennis and chess matches. Although typewriters were almost impossible to find, and paper was strictly rationed, almost every DP camp had its own newspaper, primarily in Yiddish, with articles covering sport competitions, weddings and births, as well as opinion editorials on politics, depictions of Eretz Yisrael. The Yiddish press was also one of the first opportunities for survivors to publish their personal stories and commemorate the entire families and towns they had lost. There was also flourishing Yiddish theater in the DP camps, enabling the audience to both reconnect with Jewish classics they grew up on before the war and to process their trauma from the ghettos and camps. The many renditions of Eretz Yisrael provided DPs who felt that Europe would never be a home again, hope and motivation to not give up on Aliyah. Committees were established to memorialize destroyed communities in the form of Yizkor (memorial) books. Similar to the Warsaw Ghetto’s underground Oyneg Shabes, they vowed to fulfill the commandment of remembering what the genocidal Amalek did to the Jewish people. They urged survivors to offer their testimonies out of their obligation towards posterity to write the history of the latest destruction.

More than anything else, both the profound resolve to rebuild and the ultimately lifelong trauma are reflected in the weddings and baby boom in the DP camps. During the first year of liberation, lonely single people - who had lost their parents, spouses, children and siblings - paired up and married quickly. The bonds formed in the DP camps were no Hollywood romance or fairy tale. They do not resemble the excitement and carefree attraction in photos of American soldiers kissing girlfriends or an appreciative stranger on V-E Day. Many couples did not question whether they sufficiently “loved” each other to wed. Rather, they were desperate to live again, to carry their family’s name, and frankly, to not feel alone in such a devastated world. A common proposal recognized the following harrowing truth: “I am alone. I have no one, I have lost everything. You are alone. You have no one. You have lost everything. Let us be alone together.”

It was very common to attend six or more weddings on a DP camp in a day, even fifty in a week. Professor Havit Lavsky cites 1,070 weddings in 1946 alone. The entire DP camp - the secular and religious from across the political-ideological spectrum - would unify to attend these weddings, out of a deep familial love and devotion towards the bride and groom. The entire community rejoiced in each new Jewish home, the most meaningful retribution in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah. But there was also a very dark side to this story; often the community had to assume the role of the couple’s family in their simcha (celebration) because they had no parents to walk them down the aisle. Wedding invites were sometimes signed by a single surviving distant relative, underscoring the astounding tragedy behind the simcha and courageous choice to live.

Abraham and Shoshana Roshkovski’s story is a strong testament to why this daily, recurring decision to live and rebuild cannot be sugar coated and romanticized. Avraham had survived by hiding with a Christian family, and Shoshana had survived three concentration camps. In May 1945, Shoshana was volunteering in the Bergen-Belsen DP Camp Hospital where she met Avraham when he was treated for a broken leg. Several days after they first spoke, Avraham proposed to Shoshana and they immediately got married, joining six other couples in Bergen-Belsen on May 19th who vowed to build a bayit ne’eman b’Yisrael, or a “faithful” home among the Jewish people. Hardly the glamorized image of a bride dressed in white, Shoshana walked down the aisle in a black skirt and a baggy oversized shirt she borrowed from a fellow DP, and instead of a traditional vail, she wore a gauze bandage.

Decades later, Shoshana would solemnly recall: “We stood up to dance and forget our sorrows. We danced until dawn. Though we are smiling today, the ceremony and the memories of our wedding in the camp take us back to those terrible times... we lost our families, but we created a new family and got on with our lives.”

The story of the dramatic baby boom in the DP camps is arguably even more complicated than the wedding ceremonies of orphaned brides and grooms. The She’erit Ha’Pleita had the highest per capita birth rate of any population in the world at that time. A running joke amongst the DPs was that in the first year following liberation the camps were full of lonely single people but by the second year everyone had a baby carriage. Many saw it as “biological revenge,” as the clearest proof that the Jewish people are still here, rejecting the world embodied by Auschwitz that was designed entirely for Jewish death and exploitation, choosing instead a world where Jewish children could grow up and even flourish. Not only did many survivors seek to continue their family’s names, they also wanted to prove to themselves that they were still “human” or “normal” enough to have children.

In Bergen-Belsen in 1946 alone, 555 babies were born. Yet, on the other hand, many women were also terrified to bring Jewish children into a ravished world that had proven to be so evil. Not only did these survivors no longer have their mothers, sisters, grandmothers or any other traditional female role model to give them practical advice and emotional support or to share in their joy, many also felt too traumatized to be healthy, supportive parents. Shoshana Roshkovski’s story is yet again emblematic of the emotional crisis survivors faced in their rehabilitation. Shoshana explains: "During and after the war, girls didn't get their periods. I got married and became pregnant, I didn't know I was pregnant. [...] [The doctor] examined me and said, 'You're three months pregnant.' I jumped off the table like a mad woman, 'Doctor, I'm pregnant?' He said, 'You're not married?' I said, 'I'm married, but I don't want a baby, I want an abortion, I don't want a child. I can't hear a baby crying, I heard babies screaming in Auschwitz, I don't want it.' I cried terribly.”

Shoshana was a penniless concentration camp survivor so she could not afford the sum the doctor demanded for an abortion. As a result, she tried to abort the baby herself. Thankfully, Shoshana was unsuccessful and when her son was born, she prayed that God would keep him healthy, so that she would get to raise him. That same week, six other children were born in the DP camp. The Roshkovskis later had a girl and this resilient family emigrated to Israel.

Two thirds of survivors would leave the DP camps - the soil of their systematic oppression and alienation - for the ultimate second chance at life: the new Jewish state. After years imprisoned in ghettos or hiding, concentration camps, and DP camps, the Surviving Remnant could now rebuild as free Jews, shaping a strong and secure Jewish state. It would become the natural home for the new link in their family chain.

An online exhibition on Weddings during and after the Holocaust: https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/weddings.html