Year Zero (23 page)

Quite a few survivors actually dreamed of the United States as a new home. The streets in Föhrenwald, one of the largest Jewish DP camps in Bavaria, were given such alluring names as “New York,” “Michigan,” or “Wisconsin Avenue.”
⁵⁰
But however attractive, the United States did not welcome what was left of European Jewry, certainly not straight after the war. And it was the youth, the relative fitness, the discipline, the high morale, the idealism, the stress on sports, agricultural work, and self-defense, that gave the young Zionists from central Europe such cachet among the survivors. Ten days after the German defeat, Rabbi Levy, the British army chaplain, wrote a letter to the London
Jewish Chronicle
praising the Zionists in Belsen: “Shall I ever forget . . . those meetings within the huts when we sat and sang Hebrew songs? Will the world believe that such a spirit of obstinacy and tenacity is possible? Two days ago I met a group of young Zionists from Poland. They were living in one of the filthiest of the blocks but their own corner was spotless.”
⁵¹

The toughest of the tough guys in Belsen was a small, wiry man named Josef Rosensaft. He fit the image of the Jewish hero. Born in 1911 in Poland, he rebelled as a young man against the religious strictures of his Hasidic family and became a left-wing Zionist. In July 1943, he was rounded up with his wife and stepson in the
ghetto and shoved into a train bound for Auschwitz. Somehow he managed to escape from the train and jumped into the Vistula River under machine-gun fire.
Rearrested in the ghetto, he managed to escape once more, only to be caught again and sent to Birkenau, the death camp connected to Auschwitz. After two months of slave work in a stone quarry, he was transported to another camp, from which he escaped in March 1944. Captured again in April, he was tortured for several months in Birkenau, without revealing who had helped him to escape. By way of a stint in Dora-Mittelbau, where prisoners were worked to death in dank underground tunnels constructing V-2 rockets for the German military, he ended up in Bergen-Belsen.

Rosensaft was not a member of the educated urban Jewish elite. He could only speak Yiddish, but that was not the only reason why he insisted on Yiddish as the language of negotiation with the Allied authorities—much to the annoyance of his British interlocutors. It was a matter of pride. As the leader of the Central Committee of liberated Belsen Jews, he wanted Jews to be treated as a distinct people with a common home, which in his mind could only be Palestine. Jews needed to be separated from prisoners of other nationalities, should be allowed to run their own affairs, and should get ready to move on to the land of the Jews.
⁵²

Similar sentiments were voiced in other camps too. Major Irving Heymont was often irritated by the demands of the Jewish committee in Landsberg. But in a letter home, he quotes from a speech by one of the camp representatives, an agronomist from Lithuania named Dr. J. Oleiski, which he finds “very illuminating.” Dr. Oleiski recalls his time in the ghetto when the Jews, “looking through the fences over the Vilna to Kovno and other Lithuanian towns,” sang “I Want to See My Home Again.” But today, Oleiski continued,

after all that, after the concentration camps in Germany, after we stated definitely that our former home was changed into a mass grave, we can only grope and clasp with our finger tips the shadows of our dearest and painfully cry: I can never more see my home. The victorious nations that in the 20th century removed the black plague from Europe must understand once and for all the specific
Jewish problem. No, we are not Polish when we are born in Poland; we are not Lithuanians even though we once passed through Lithuania; and we are neither Roumanians though we have seen the first time in our life the sunshine in Roumenia. We are Jews!!

Heymont was neither a Zionist nor, it seems, a religious man. In fact, he never divulged his family background, since he feared this might complicate his delicate task in Germany. But despite his many irritations, he was not unsympathetic to Dr. Oleiski's aspirations, including the goal of “BUILDING A JEWISH COMMONWEALTH IN PALESTINE” (capital letters in the original text). Indeed, wrote Heymont, “the more I think about this, the less angry I become with the committee. As a group, the committee is vitally interested in protecting the rights of the people and in getting them out of Germany. By rights of the people, I mean their treatment as a free people and not as wards or charity cases.”
⁵³

The idea of transforming Jews from being a persecuted minority, abject and eager to please the majorities amongst whom they lived, tempted into hopeful assimilation yet forever looking over their shoulders, from “charity cases” into a proud nation of warriors working their own sacred soil—this ideal existed long before the Nazi genocide. The ideal came in many varieties, socialist, religious, even racialist. And the different factions were in constant and sometimes acrimonious competition. As soon as people were well enough to vote, political parties were formed in Belsen and other camps. David Ben-Gurion, another Polish tough guy and leader of the Zionist movement in Palestine, saw early on how Jewish suffering could help the project he so fervently believed in. In October 1942, he told the Zionist Executive commission in Palestine: “Disaster is strength if channeled to a productive course; the whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.”
⁵⁴

This sounds more than a little ruthless, the earliest instance of “instrumentalizing” the Holocaust. A firm rejection of softness was certainly part
of Ben-Gurion's style, necessary perhaps to foster a new heroic story for the Jews. A practical man, he saw displays of sentiment as unproductive. But in 1942, Ben-Gurion, too, was still unaware of the scale of the Jewish catastrophe in Europe. Very few people were. One of the first men who seemed to have understood was a Zionist member of the Rescue Committee for European Jewry named Apolinari Hartglass. Already in 1940, he warned that the Nazis were “exterminating the [Jewish] population in Poland.” However, even Hartglass, when refugees from Poland confirmed his worst suspicions in 1942, responded: “If I believed everything you're saying, I'd kill myself.”
⁵⁵
Ben-Gurion knew facts. Like most people, he could not yet imagine the truth.

Even so, both Hartglass and Ben-Gurion could be accused of exploiting human misery to their own political ends. In a memorandum to the Rescue Committee in 1943, Hartglass stated that seven million European Jews would probably be killed, and that there was nothing much the Jews in Palestine (the
Yishuv
) could do about it. However, he wrote, if only a handful of Jews could be rescued, “we must at least achieve some political gains from them. From a Zionist point of view we will achieve this political gain under the following conditions. A: If the whole world knows that the only country that wants to receive the rescued Jews is Palestine and that the only community that wants to absorb them is the
Yishuv
.”
⁵⁶

In October 1945, Ben-Gurion decided to see the former concentration camps in Germany for himself. He made short, dry, factual notes in his diary. About Dachau: “I saw the ovens, the gas chambers, the kennels, the gallows, the prisoners' quarters, and the SS quarters.” In Belsen: “Until April 15 this year 48,000 Jews were here . . . Since then 31,000 have died . . . (of typhus, tuberculosis)”
⁵⁷
Ben-Gurion's goals, according to the biographer Shabtai Teveth, were more in the heroic mold. He envisaged “the survivors of the death camps fighting their way onto the shores of Palestine, breaking through a blockade of British soldiers.” Teveth remarks drily, “His examination of the skeletal survivors must have been like that of a commander reviewing his troops before battle.”
⁵⁸

Word of Ben-Gurion's tour soon got around, and he was mobbed by DPs wherever he went. Heymont knew he was in Landsberg only when he “noticed the people streaming out to line the street leading from Munich. They were carrying flowers and hastily improvised banners and signs. The camp itself blossomed out with decorations of all sorts. Never had we seen such energy displayed in the camp. I don't think a visit from President Truman could cause as much excitement.”
⁵⁹
To the people in the camp, Heymont observed, Ben-Gurion “is God.”

The most famous speech Ben-Gurion gave on this trip to Germany was at a hospital for camp survivors in the old Benedictine monastery of St. Ottilien near Munich, not far from Dachau. For once, at the sight of the Jewish orphans, his eyes welled up with emotion. But he swiftly pulled himself together: “I will not try to express the feelings within me . . . such a thing is impossible.” Instead he put it to his audience, some of them still in striped prisoners' garb:

I can tell you that a vibrant Jewish Palestine exists and that even if its gates are locked the
Yishuv
will break them open with its strong hands . . . Today we are the decisive power in Palestine . . . We have our own shops, our own factories, our own culture, and our own rifles . . . Hitler was not far from Palestine. There could have been terrible destruction there, but what happened in Poland could not happen in Palestine. They would not have slaughtered us in our synagogues. Every boy and every girl would have shot at every German soldier.
⁶⁰

Strong . . . power . . . our own rifles . . . These heroic words offered by the Zionist leader were precisely what the British didn't want to hear, even though in 1917 the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour had promised to make Palestine into “a national home for the Jewish people.” The British were in a bind, for in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the government had promised the Arab population of Palestine that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Since the Arabs made up 91 percent of the roughly seven hundred thousand people in Palestine, this was going to be a problem. Hence the White Paper, issued by the British government in 1939, limiting Jewish emigration to Palestine to ten thousand persons a year between 1940 and 1944, to which twenty-five thousand might be added in case of an emergency. The emergency came; just enough Jews made it to Palestine to fill the utterly inadequate quota. Ben-Gurion now insisted on moving at least a million Jewish survivors there by all possible means, legal or not. President Truman, shocked by a report on the condition of Jewish DPs in Germany,
⁶¹
argued in a letter to British prime minister Clement Attlee that at least one hundred thousand Jews should be permitted to emigrate. He added: “As I said to you in Potsdam, the American people, as a whole, firmly believe that immigration into Palestine should not be closed and that a reasonable number of Europe's persecuted Jews should, in accordance with their wishes, be permitted to resettle there.”
⁶²

What Truman did not say in his letter was that he did not wish those hundred thousand Jews to settle in the United States. The reason why the British actively tried to stop Jews from moving to Palestine, sometimes with the use of force against people who had barely survived Nazi death camps, was practical. Palestine was still a British mandate. Britain, even under a Labour government, wished to keep its influence in the Middle East as the gateway to India. The Arabs, towards whom British Foreign Office sympathies tilted anyway, would be up in arms if too many Jews were allowed to settle in a majority Arab land. From the British point of view this would be inopportune. And so Jews who tried to land illegally were liable to be clubbed by British soldiers, shoved back onto their ramshackle boats, or even shot.

But British arguments were not always practical, and frequently disingenuous. If Zionism was formulated as a battle for Jewish identity, the British put forward an alternative idea of identity. In response to the special U.S. report on DPs in Germany by Earl G. Harrison, American envoy to the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, the British Foreign
Office argued that it was wrong not only to segregate Jews from other DPs, as the report recommended, but also to conclude that there was no future in Europe for Jews. After all, “it would go far by implication to admit that [the] Nazis were right in holding that there was no place for the Jews in Europe.” It was up to the Allies “to create conditions in which [the Jews] will themselves feel it natural and right to go home rather than to admit at this stage that such conditions are impossible to create.”
⁶³

Quite how the British Foreign Office proposed to create those conditions in such countries as Poland, Lithuania, or Ukraine was not spelled out. Not that Jews were all agreed on the proper route to Zion. There was an intense rivalry between the Jewish Agency, incorporating all Zionist groups in Palestine, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, JDC, or “Joint” for short. Joint officials, trying to help Jewish refugees and DPs as best they could with money, food, and other necessities, disliked the Zionist indoctrination, which they found authoritarian and counterproductive. There were even cases of children being obstructed by the Jewish Agency from finding homes in Europe or the United States, since this might discourage “ascent” to the Jewish homeland.