This past year, I completed my thesis for an MA in Holocaust Studies at Haifa University. I was privileged to have the opportunity to research and write my thesis on the period right after the Holocaust, the return to life in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany. This year, as the world begins to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe we can take many lessons from our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, some of the darkest hours in the annals of humanity and began rebuilding their lives in the DP camps.
My own grandparents, Esther Bayla Mekler and Shraga Favel Balitsky z”l came from large families, but when I knew them, they each had only one living sibling. Their parents, brothers, sisters and extended families were all tragically murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators. My Bubby and Zaidy only shared a few short facts about how they survived, as their traumas were so difficult for them to verbalize and share, and perhaps they thought the specifics too frightening for children. Forced separation from their families, siblings sent to labour camps never to return, a beloved sister and baby niece transported and murdered in the concentration camps, my Bubby’s hiding place with her brother in a cellar or, as she referred to it, a kever, a living grave, and my Zaidy’s parents who were discovered and shot when he left their hiding place in search of food.
After their liberation, Esther and Favel made their ways individually to Deggendorf DP camp in the American zone of Germany, where they hoped to live in safety under the protection of the American army and eventually secure papers that would enable their emigration from Germany. They met each other in Deggendorf DP camp, quickly courted and married under a traditional chuppah, learned rudimentary English, started a small (black-market) trading business and gave birth to their first child, Yosef Shaya, who had his brit milah in the DP camp, continuing the ancient Jewish tradition of religious circumcision.
Esther and Favel were but two of thousands of Holocaust survivors that began to rebuild their lives in the DP camps; 250,000 in the American zone of Germany alone. How was it that they were able to quickly return to living, after surviving a genocide?
In the very first issue of the journal the Deggendorf Center Revue, issued by the Deggendorf DP Jewish Committee in early November 1945, Czech survivor Louis Lowy wrote the following describing the frame of mind of the Jewish survivors:
“We want to do everything in order to get out of the mental atmosphere of this war and to forget the cruel experiences and events as far as possible…. The narrowness of the mental slavery has benn (sic) destroyed, the way to a psychical (sic) liberty is opened… We want to rehabilitate ourselves. We want to become human beings again who contribute their shares in work and deed who are no more objects but subjects deciding for themselves and their fate.”
How did these Holocaust survivors rehabilitate themselves? How did they decide their own fates? How did they become human beings again? How did my own Bubby rise from her self-described kekver to marry and begin a family?
Holocaust researcher Ella Florsheim used DP camp newspapers to demonstrate how the Jewish DPs used Yiddish theatre to both tie themselves to the Yiddish culture of their past and help themselves recover from their traumatic Holocaust experiences through engagement with the arts. Philipp Grammes uses these same newspapers to show that participation in sports activities and other games such as chess helped the Jewish survivors heal physically and rebuild their psychological self-esteem and change their perspective of themselves from powerless victims to a strong people.
In my research, I found that the DP camp newspapers, including the Deggendorf Center Revue, were one of the first stages in the rehabilitation process of the Holocaust survivors. The articles reflect their activities, interests, challenges and accomplishments. The newspapers featured engagement, marriage and birth announcements. There were reviews of cultural and musical events in the DP camps, These publications covered developments and politics within the DP camps, as well as events happening around the world, with a particular focus on the political events unfolding in the British Mandate of Palestine. The survivors were interested both in their own affairs and news from the outside world.
Within Deggendorf DP camp, and the other Jewish DP camps, the survivors organized their own administrative structures. They also organized administrative organizations with representatives from each camp to lobby international organizations and the local governing bodies. The local camp committees developed intra-camp work programs and volunteer activities to help the survivors regain a sense of their former identities and build their self-esteem. In Deggendorf DP camp, the finance committee printed its own money, “Deggendorf Dollars” which the survivors could then redeem at the DP camp canteen. The committees also worked with outside agencies, such as ORT, to institute training programs for new jobs that were needed in the countries to which they planned to immigrate. The survivors created preschools and schools for children who survived, in order to pass on the traditions of their Jewish heritage and help children and teenagers make up for the years of schooling missed while the priority was survival. Zionists took upon themselves teaching Hebrew and preparing themselves and others for new lives in Palestine.
In every DP camp, there were engagements, marriages and births. Survivors rushed to find companionship and rebuild their family structures which had been decimated. While not all these marriages were successful, it was the need to develop emotional and physical relationships that is inspiring. The survivors sought not to continue their lives alone, but to find partners and bring new lives into the world. There are many photos in the archives of Yad Vashem and the USHMM of wedding ceremonies in the DP camps and of Jewish survivors proudly pushing their new babies in prams on the grounds of these camps.
When teaching about the Holocaust, educators often gloss over this period of rebirth in the DP camps. The focus is often on the actions and crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. The horrors of the concentration and extermination camps dominate the books and movies we read about the Holocaust. Or we focus on heroism and acts of physical and spiritual resistance, in order to change the German-centered narrative of Jews as victims who went passively to their slaughter.
Even our own parents and grandparents who lived in the DP camps after the Holocaust, may have either repressed that period or glossed over their postwar experience in the DP camps as a time in limbo between the tragedies they survived and the successful lives they built post-Holocaust. And as a nation, we often only focus on the historical bookends, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, two of the most significant events in recent Jewish history.
Now is the time to look at the resilience and the self-agency of the Holocaust survivors in the DP camps. The survivors did not depend on the US army, the UNRRA or outside agencies to return to life. They drew on their rich Jewish traditions, Yiddish culture, music, theatre, art, journalistic skills and skills as organizers and administrators. They boldly reached out to meet new people and develop relationships. They started small businesses, new families and built new communities, all within the confines of the DP camps.
This past year has been a year where many of us have lost loved ones to the pandemic; in Israel alone, among the 6,257 people who have so far died from the pandemic, there were 900 Holocaust survivors. Some of us have spent much of the year separated from loved ones, encompassed by feelings of loneliness and depression. Others have lost their businesses and jobs. Teenagers lost a year of developing their independence. And bar none, everyone experienced fear of the scientific unknown.
Some may consider it historic or cultural appropriation to say we can learn from the resilience of Holocaust survivors in the DP camps as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. I believe that my own Bubby and Zaidy would be pleased if we looked at how they relied on themselves, drew on their traditions and skills to start again after the Holocaust and rebuild their lives in the DP camps. As we take our first steps towards a post-pandemic life, we, too, must support the reopening of the arts to nourish our souls, rejoin our synagogue communities in person to restore our spirits, return to gyms and our local JCC’s, rebuild friendships that have faltered and develop new relationships to alleviate feelings of loneliness. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we take tentative steps forward towards a “new normal” or “back to life,” let’s also look backwards and take a few moments to learn about the high degree of self-agency that the Holocaust survivors had in rebuilding their lives in the DP camps in the months and years immediately following their liberations.
Tovit Schultz Granoff formerly of Tenafly, New Jersey, currently lives in Ra’anana, Israel with her husband Michael and four teenagers. She is a candidate for an MA in Holocaust Studies at Haifa University and attorney. Her thesis on which this article drew is titled “Influences on Rehabilitation in Deggendorf Displaced Persons Camp.”
