Yet one nation did not take part in the general euphoria – the Jewish people. For them, victory had come too late. The day of liberation, the one for which Jews had longed throughout the years of the Holocaust, was for the most part a day of crisis and emptiness, a feeling of overwhelming loneliness as the sheer scale of the destruction was grasped, on both a personal and communal level.
At war’s end, it became apparent that some 6 million Jews had been murdered – more than one-third of world Jewry. Those who had survived were scattered throughout Europe: tens of thousands of survivors of the camps and death marches, liberated by the Allied armies on German soil and in other countries, were in severely deteriorated physical and emotional condition. Others emerged for the first time from various places of hiding and shed false identities they had assumed, returned from the countries to which they had fled, or surfaced from the partisan units and Allied armies they had joined and in whose ranks they had fought for the liberation of Europe. In the wake of international agreements signed at the end of the war, over 200,000 Polish Jews began to make their way back west from the Soviet Union, where they had survived the war years.
With the advent of liberation, probing questions arose for the survivors: Where could they feel secure? Who had survived somehow from their families and communities? How would they be able to go back to living a "normal" life, to build homes and families – and where? On European soil or elsewhere? How should the legacy of the murdered be preserved and commemorated? How would the perpetrators of the heinous crime be brought to justice? Were the survivors to seek vengeance, or to channel the intensity of their feelings into life-affirming endeavors?
Prior to liberation, many Jews had lived with the sense that they were the last Jews left. Nevertheless, after liberation survivors searched far and wide for their family members, friends and loved ones who might have also survived against all odds. Many decided to go back to their prewar homes but found that they could not cope with the loss and devastation they encountered there. In many places, survivors were met with revulsion and continued persecution, and even in Denmark survivors encountered antisemitism, despite the fact that most of Danish Jewry had been rescued by non- Jews. In Eastern Europe many Jews were attacked, and in Poland more than 1,500 Jews were murdered by locals in the initial postwar years. The most appalling episode was the Kielce pogrom– a violent massacre in July 1946 in which 42 Jews were murdered, some of them the sole survivors of entire families, and many others were wounded.
The Kielce pogrom was a turning point in the history of the She'erit Hapleta (surviving remnant) in Poland, and in the eyes of many, it illustrated the hopelessness of rebuilding Jewish life there. During the months following that pogrom, the flow of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe multiplied: In any way they could, Jews tried to make their way westward and southward. Young Jews joined in assisting this exodus that came to be known as the Bricha (escape), focusing mainly on moving as many Jews as possible to territories controlled by British and US troops in Germany, with the goal of their immigration to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). Upon arrival in these areas, the refugees joined the tens of thousands of Jewish survivors already liberated in Central Europe, and together they amassed in the DP camps across Germany, Austria and Italy. Often, these camps were established at the sites of former Nazi concentration camps, among them Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald.
The activities of the She'erit Hapleta in the DP camps were a powerful expression of the survivors' efforts to return to life after the war. As early as the first days and weeks after liberation, survivors began to recover and organize themselves, despite the grief, physical weakness and extensive hardships. They formed new families and an independent leadership, set up educational and foster-care facilities for children and youth, published dozens of newspapers and magazines, collected testimonies on the fate of Jews during the Holocaust, and became a significant factor in the Zionist movement's activities. Other survivors returned to their countries of origin, despite everything, and commenced the struggle for property restitution and to locate Jewish children who had been hidden and orphaned during the war.
At the same time, while some Jews remained in Europe, many survivors sought to leave the continent and move to places where they could safely rebuild their lives and their homes. About two-thirds of the survivors who chose not to stay in Europe after the war set their sights on Eretz Israel. Yet going to Eretz Israel was a formidable struggle, due to the policies imposed by the British Mandate, barring Jewish refugees from entering the country. As part of the effort to circumvent these obstacles, the Bricha joined forces with the Ha’apala illegal immigration movement that had been established before the war, in order to facilitate the passage of survivors to Eretz Israel via Mediterranean ports. Approximately one third of the survivors who chose to leave Europe immigrated to the US, Latin America, Canada, Australia and other destinations.
The Ha’apala, as well as immigration to other countries, was a pivotal stage in the survivors’ rehabilitation. However, not all the survivors succeeded in rising from the ashes and building their lives and futures anew. Some were too sick, or could not muster the emotional strength to reenter a society and humanity that had betrayed them. Their voices were not always heard, and they remained isolated, prisoners of their own anguish.
In numerous ways, Holocaust survivors contributed to building a better world for themselves, for their children and for future generations, so that others would never experience the horrors of the Holocaust. They raised families, established communities, and were active in a variety of fields and professions. Among their numerous endeavors, they established organizational and legal frameworks designed to prevent the recurrence of crimes such as the Holocaust.
"Although the memory of the Holocaust is replete with devastation, evil and dehumanization that threaten to inundate all human values, we, the survivors who marched through the valley of death and saw our families, communities and people being annihilated, did not wallow in despair and did not lose faith in humankind. We wish to extract from the horror engraved in our flesh, a positive message for our people and the world - a message of humanity, of human decency and of human dignity."
(Excerpt from the Survivors’ Manifesto, read out for the first time by Holocaust survivor Zvi Gil in April 2002 at a ceremony concluding an international seminar held at Yad Vashem on the topic, “The Legacy of Holocaust Survivors: The Moral and Ethical Implications for Humanity”)
Indeed, many survivors left an indelible mark on the communities they joined or those they established, and their imprint is still apparent in multiple fields, in Jewish and general contexts: Holocaust research and commemoration, academia and science, security and defense, health and welfare, communications and journalism, social and educational frameworks, culture, literature, art, the judicial system, industry and economy, as well as the restoration of the Torah world and Jewish religious life in its many forms.
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