How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives: France, the United States, and Israel

By Françoise S. Ouzan

“Shines light to the world through the individual stories of people who came through darkness . . . a book of courage, strength and inspiration.” —The Jerusalem Report

Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Françoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism.

Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780253033963

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: RISING FROM THE ABYSS OF HUMILIATION

At most, it can be objected that exile is perhaps not an incurable disease, since one can make a home of foreign countries by a long life in them; that is called finding a new home. And it is correct inasmuch as slowly, slowly one learns to decipher the signs.

—Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 47

SPRING 1945—SIX YEARS of war had come to an end, leaving open wounds and shattered lives. The Nazi regime had been defeated, while throughout Europe, the disoriented Jewish survivors yearned to live normal lives. From where would they draw the strength to restore their own self-identity and dignity? How could the younger ones begin new lives while alone in the world? Where would they live when their houses had been destroyed or ransacked or when the local population was reluctant to give them back their former homes? What were their motivations for postwar emigration? What steps did they take toward integration into a new environment? Furthermore, how did the Holocaust impact their process of integration into their host countries?¹

This volume addresses major issues in the history of the Jews in the twentieth century: how survivors resettled in various parts of the world and often contributed to the development of the cultures of their countries of residence, and in some cases, of their Jewish communities. While much material can be found concerning what survivors endured in Europe during the war years, relatively little has been written about their experiences as returnees or immigrants after World War II, and even less about their reshaped identities. The subject of this book is, therefore, fairly new in the historiography of the Holocaust. It contributes to the recent field of research on Jewish life in the aftermath of World War II and to the changing conception of Holocaust survivor, which has not only evolved but also broadened over time.² This study unveils the tortuous life trajectories of various groups: displaced persons (Jewish inmates of postwar camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy, and those who lived outside these camps but were treated as displaced persons [DPs] by the Allies), partisan fighters, hidden children, or Jewish refugees who fled their native countries ruled by the Nazis, and those who remained hidden in France under assumed identities. Such an approach is called for to address and understand the complex issues of statelessness, rehabilitation, and resettlement after the Nazi genocide of the Jews. An emphasis on the voice of individuals adds a human dimension necessary to grasp both the mechanisms for coping with adversity and the long-term impact of the Holocaust on the new lives they rebuilt in three distinct contexts.

The insights from this multidisciplinary and comparative research emerge from some twenty-five years of ongoing conversations and collaboration with survivors that extended the bounds of my understanding, rather than from one-time testimonies.

Though multifaceted and complex, the historical context needs to be described as simply as possible. In the summer of 1945, there remained about one million DPs who refused repatriation and who languished in the DP camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.³ The Allies considered them hard core, since they encountered difficulties in handling these refugees. Most of them feared going back to countries under communist rule. It is estimated that Jews constituted 20 to 25 percent of the remaining one million DPs. Accurate statistics are impossible to provide. The most plausible figure of Jewish survivors in 1945 (some of whom were not DPs) is around 200,000 according to leading Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer.⁴ However, estimations varied between 100,000 and 300,000 Jewish survivors, as many died in the months following the liberation of the concentration camps. In a panic exodus, other groups of Jews fleeing postwar pogroms in eastern Europe entered already-crowded assembly centers in the occupied zones of Germany, Austria, and Italy. There, some survivors were transients while others stayed for years, waiting for visas.⁵ When attempting to understand what motivated their emigration, three elements must be kept in mind: the postwar, often murderous antisemitism, the survivors’ determination not to return to countries under communist rule, and their repudiation of Europe, where their families had been exterminated. These were all push factors in their decision to emigrate. It is generally estimated that two-thirds of the survivors went to Palestine/Israel, concentration camp survivors being the first to leave, followed later by wartime refugees in the Soviet Union. One-third of the survivors went elsewhere, most of them to the United States.

In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, three main groups of surviving Jews emerged, though not distinctively in the eyes of the Allied authorities charged with the difficult task of caring for them, after having been responsible for their repatriation. The first group comprised survivors of concentration camps and labor camps, who had often participated in the death marches and had been liberated in Germany. Most of those who returned to their native towns discovered that their families had been decimated and that anti-Jewish violence persisted.⁶ After the Kielce pogrom in Poland, on July 4, 1946, when seventy-five concentration camp survivors were beaten and forty-one massacred in the most barbaric way, more than 10,000 Jews fled the numerous pogroms in Poland to enter the overcrowded DP camps in the western zones of Germany. The process of dehumanization they had experienced during the war did not end with the liberation. In the DP camps, they again felt humiliated when they were contemptuously labeled infiltrees by the military and members of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.⁷ As refugees who had infiltrated after having already been repatriated, they were isolated while living under worse conditions.

The partisans, the Jews in hiding, or those who had assumed an Aryan identity formed the second group. However, each group was not a tightly closed one in the war’s aftermath. The third group was the largest, composed of approximately 170,000 Jews who had fled to the Soviet Union during the war and were repatriated to Poland, only to find that they had to flee again, this time to DP camps in Germany because of the postwar pogroms and overt antisemitism. Although these wartime refugees have since been recognized as survivors, they had not been under direct Nazi domination.

The narrative lens has long been used in the social sciences, especially in anthropology, as a means to link the personal to the cultural and as a tool to explore social relations and cultural meanings.⁸ As an analytical tool, life history is therefore useful in understanding the various processes and strategies employed by these social actors to make sense of their experience after the genocide of the Jews. Such an approach also requires an act of interpretation when, for instance, narrative analysis turns out to be an important tool for uncovering meaning that is not explicit in historical data.

Besides their historical, social, and psychological interest, the life stories chosen in this study raise crucial existential questions that reflect those aptly formulated by Hannah Arendt after she experienced the life of a pariah as an inmate of the infamous French internment camp of Gurs. Later, she faced the challenge of starting from scratch in America. From her knowledge of the history of the Jewish people, she understood the possibility for Jews to exist as a minority. That is what led to her affection for the United States, which, unlike France and Israel, is not a nation-state. From her American experience, too, emerges her paradoxical relationship with Zionism, which she criticized but nevertheless understood as a Jewish individual response to antisemitism. A number of survivors who participated in this project admitted that their Holocaust experiences helped guide their major decisions. In France, they adapted their individual Jewish identity to the requirements of the nation-state and often valued the secular ideals inherited from the Third Republic that helped them recover a normal life. Republican ideals meant that everything could be granted to Jews as long as they ceased to identify as Jews in the public sphere. In America, a country permeated by an atmosphere of religiosity and where ethnicity flourished from the 1960s onward, the commitment to one’s Jewish identity, whether religious or secular, was not contradictory to the American ethos. The young state of Israel embodied hope in the context of the disappearance of lost Yiddish worlds alongside the repudiation of a blood-soaked Europe. In Israel, the problem of the statelessness of uprooted Jews would be solved. For the survivors interviewed, it was the last stop of Jewish identity, whether secular or religious.

The processes of rehabilitation are examined from immediately after the end of World War II, in some cases even beginning in the DP camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Some narratives highlight the often understated actions of the Jewish resistance in Europe and of the OSE networks working together with the Quakers (American Friends Service Committee) to facilitate immigration of children to the United States. A long-established organization, the OSE was founded in 1912 by Jewish doctors in St. Petersburg to ensure the health of needy Jews. Its French branch was created in 1933. As the most important Jewish child welfare organization it rescued European refugee children during the war by hiding them in foster homes, and in the aftermath it housed some 2,000 Jewish children in some twenty-five children’s homes. They were mostly funded by the American Jewish Distribution Committee, also known as the Joint—the major Jewish relief organization engaged in the reconstruction of Jewish communities. For OSE educators, Jewish collective living was perceived as a remedy for wartime uprooting and for life in hiding in Catholic foster homes or convents.⁹ The Buchenwald children, whose life stories are considered in this study, resettled in France, the United States, and Israel. Their road paths demonstrate the necessity of a surrogate family, offered by communal life in the OSE homes. A recovered sense of belonging was crucial for their return to normal life.

For other survivors, transition to normal life was facilitated by their stay in the DP camps, if the prolonged internment was not too lengthy.¹⁰ Some DPs felt and expressed a clear division between German civilians outside the camp and the Jewish postwar refugees. This holds true for Bert Lewyn, a former slave laborer for the Nazi Reich at the age of eighteen and a native of Berlin, who remained in the Feldafing DP camp in Bavaria for four years, living among the murderers and still feeling humiliated and demoralized. His case exemplifies both the absorption into a new postwar reality in DP camps and, later, adjustment in a country of immigration—the United States: I did not feel comfortable in the Feldafing DP camp. We were still in enemy territory and the Germans would still take any opportunity to show displeasure and disdain for the Jews.¹¹

However, recent research focusing on the social interactions between Jews and German civilians shows that the reality was more complex, as the former enemies were present in everyday life both inside and outside the camps.¹² An examination, through personal narratives, of both the transitory state of the immediate postwar period and the refugees’ assembly centers, is necessary to emphasize the fact that DPs were not the apathetic people described in early reports and newspaper articles.

For survivors whose physical or mental health impaired a quick return to normalcy, DP camps—also called assembly centers—were often conceived as a waiting room for emigration. Yet, psychologists emphasize that it was a necessary transition since, for instance, nearly everyone spoke Yiddish in the Feldafing camp, and Lewyn had to learn the language.¹³ Though he did not specifically mention it, this created a beneficial link with the Jewish culture the Nazis strove to extinguish. He finally immigrated to America, where he became a successful entrepreneur, even though he had seriously considered resettlement in Palestine.¹⁴

For this study, I attempted to provide a broad cross section of life stories reflecting major historical events and representative experiences of survivors. Most of them were either prominent or vocal in high schools or in the public sphere at large, although classifications sometimes overlap. Current political or societal circumstances provided them with the opportunity to react to various events in the media, revealing something previously untold about the meaning of their experience. This is the case with Boris Cyrulnik, who was invited to speak on a French TV channel on January 10, 2015 in the wake of two bloody terrorist attacks: one at the offices of the French journal Charlie Hebdo, resulting in the deaths of twelve people, and the other at a kosher Parisian grocery shop, which led to the deaths of four Jewish hostages. While comparing Nazi and Islamist totalitarianism, Cyrulnik interjected that he had become a psychiatrist in order to understand and explain Nazism. In similar fashion, Serge Klarsfeld publicly stated that all his life was devoted to hunting down Nazis; that is why his best weapons were his skills as a lawyer and a historian. In this light, his life story and achievements may also be read as a redemptive social narrative.

By becoming a renowned international lawyer, Samuel Pisar had a political impact on the migration of Russian Jews and a social impact on commemorations of Holocaust survivors at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, where he was an honorary ambassador. Seemingly contradictory statements occurred in our interviews conducted over the years. To point to but one example, Pisar first insisted that his achievements were largely attributable to the education he received at Harvard. In 2014, during the course of a later interview, he stated, echoing Primo Levi, Auschwitz was my university, thus pointing to a redemptive social narrative apt to alleviate psychic trauma. He was trying to imply that extreme trauma had been a launching pad for him. When I insisted that he would have been a successful professional anyway, he replied that I was mistaken on that point. Similarly, psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik stressed the fact that his resilient process had greatly helped him make something useful out of his wound and become a respected scientist.

A few themes have been developed in the course of in-depth interviews. Among them, the (subjective or objective) impact of the Holocaust on professional choices, the role of the spouse in the adaptation or readaptation process, or the centrality of family life have emerged as crucial. Emotions, which account for a number of actions and decisions, are more difficult to fathom.

Humiliation is a central issue that helped to fill in the missing parts of some of the survivors’ narratives. In the former French minister Simone Veil’s writings, it is a theme approached with modesty. Her resilient strategies and optimism transformed the frustration created by humiliation into hard work and determination to succeed as a social response. As a former undesirable Jewess in the French social landscape (as with all Jews who were deported from France), Simone Veil needed strong determination not to succumb to despair and feel bitterness toward a society that not only rejected her but also proved it could function without the Jews. Twice as much energy was then required for a woman to succeed in the political arena in the immediate postwar period. The identities of both the woman and the pariah mingled to transform the feeling of humiliation into an emotion assuming the role of a springboard from which to achieve successful integration. With a long history of persecution, Judaism considers the act of humiliating someone as a crime, and is sensitive to how painful an experience of humiliation can be. In that perspective, new historical research on World War II and its aftermath brings to light the fact that a theory of emotions related to the Holocaust as a life-changing tragedy is called for.¹⁵

Since humiliation led to a loss of dignity, recovering from it may be turned into a lifetime endeavor, depending on the extent of the outrage, the age at which it occurred, and the sensitivity to such a loss of dignity. In that context, it is worthwhile to quote Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi: In order to live, an identity—that is dignity—is necessary. . . . Whoever loses one, also loses the other.¹⁶

From that perspective, dignity and identity are interchangeable. Redressing the loss of identity that occurred during the Holocaust—when men, women, and children were considered either numbers or nonentities or bore assumed identities—implied an individual dynamic related to the requirements of a certain social environment and a specific country.

Among Jewish intellectuals in France, the tension between the particular character of the various types of Jewish identities and the universality of their aspirations led them to play down its display in the open to meet the requirements of secularity in the public sphere. This is notably the case of Simone Veil, philosopher André Glucksman, historian and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, and writer Georges Perec. For the latter, Jewishness was expressed in the context of Ellis Island, on American territory, along with the central concepts of exile and Diaspora. The noted author managed to turn a deep wound into literary achievements, thus finding his place in the French cultural landscape from which his parents had been rejected as undesirable Jewish foreigners. His recorded interviews on a French radio station shortly before his untimely death also testify to the redemptive character of his social narrative.

The young survivors whose narratives I have examined are often the children of foreign parents who struggled to be integrated into a new homeland. In other instances, they were postwar migrants whose strategies of integration were no different from those of other groups in that same period. Such was the case in Israel.¹⁷ Several of them did so as historians, professors, sculptors, businessmen, medical doctors (surgeons and psychoanalysts, in particular), writers, politicians, and eminent international lawyers.

For this study, I conducted thirteen in-depth personal interviews in France, ten in the United States—where existing oral archives are considerable—and fourteen interviews in Israel—where survivors are the most numerous—who formed about 70 percent of the immigrants during the first years of the Jewish state.¹⁸ When possible, these narratives have been cross-referenced with published documents and archives. Noteworthy is the case of ten former Buchenwald boys who immigrated to these three countries. I interviewed five of them in Paris and two in Israel, while Elie Wiesel—with whom I corresponded—left vivid published memoirs, as did the brothers Naphtali and Israel Meir Lau, who became prominent public figures.¹⁹

Social psychologists and mental health professionals often marvel at the high rate of success in this cohort, despite many documented cases of failure.²⁰ The immigration of survivors to the United States turned out to be an unexpected blood transfusion for American Jewish communities. It reinvigorated Jewish culture and had an impact on Orthodox Judaism in particular.²¹ The DP problem and the immigration of young refugees to the land they called Eretz Israel were instrumental in the emergence of the State of Israel in May 1948.

In the aftermath of World War II, social workers were deeply concerned by the lost identities of children.²² A number of relief organizations, Jewish ones such as the Joint, the OSE, and the National Council for Jewish Women (NCJW), and non-Jewish ones such as the American Friends Service Committee, were confronted by that crucial issue.²³ The primary objective was the return to normality. In France, numerous writings about the 1953 Finaly Affair, a sensational custody battle in France, reflected a postwar preoccupation with the fate of hidden Jewish children who had been secretly baptized. Our interviews with pediatric surgeon, Robert Finaly, who resettled in Israel, illustrate one facet of this question: is it possible to completely erase a previous identity?²⁴

Other cases of postwar achievements shed light on integration and cultural impact on more than one country, as is the case with Israeli and Polish-born sculptor, Shelomo Selinger, who has been living in France since 1956. Despite all that he endured in the concentration camps, he chose to fight for the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, as did former Buchenwald boy, Lolek (Elie) Buzyn, who became a surgeon, and Jo Wajsblat, a tailor and successful businessman, who was scheduled to die at age sixteen in an Auschwitz gas chamber. Although they all eventually resettled in France, Israel remains an inseparable part of their secular Jewish identities and turned out to be the home in which their hearts dwell.

The war experiences of Jews detained in concentration camps were very different from those who spent these years in hiding. For a long time, hidden children did not consider themselves survivors and some of them still do not give priority to such an identity. The professional success of the famous French singer Régine is obvious, despite the difficulties she had to overcome. Presenting herself as the First Disc Jockey and retaining first-name-only status was a somewhat unbelievable feat for a Jewish child formerly hidden in a convent.²⁵

Various aspects of the cultural and scientific impact of survivors can be seen in the personal histories of neuropsychiatrist, Boris Cyrulnik, whose Jewish identity is secular, and that of Serge Klarsfeld, whose professional choices have been clearly influenced by the genocide of the Jews. In contrast to them, pediatrician and psychoanalyst Ida Akerman’s narrative depicts a religious woman who made an impact on the French medical milieu and on tormented Jewish souls in postwar France. Her unconditional faith and attachment to the Jewish people triggered her immigration to Israel in 1990.²⁶

The children and young adults who had nowhere to return to stayed in DP camps with the legal status of DPs awaiting resettlement. For them rehabilitation began behind barbed wire in the assembly centers established by the Allied military authorities and run by teams of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Refugee Organization. In the immediate postwar period, inmates often felt that they were liberated but not free, as exemplified by the Harrison Report about the Jewish Displaced Persons plight, and confirmed by the narrative of Bert Lewyn, who spent four years in the DP camp of Feldafing.²⁷ The encounters of teenagers and young adults with soldiers of the Jewish Brigade often instilled in them a sense of national pride and identification. The sight of a soldier with a Star of David insignia on his sleeve not only replaced the memory of the yellow star of shame worn by European Jews, but also created a warm contact between the survivors and the Palestinian Jewish volunteers from the yishuv (the organized Jewish community in Palestine) who had joined the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. Once again, the Magen David became a symbol of its literal meaning: the shield of David.

A few surviving young partisans (such as Miles Lerman, who later immigrated to America), ghetto fighters, and those who had escaped to the forests, wanted to return to their Eastern European countries in search of their relatives and friends. There, they were often confronted with active postwar antisemitism. Indeed, during the war it had been common to kill Jews or persecute them, and such violent treatment did not cease overnight with the end of hostilities. The flight of Polish survivors after the Kielce pogrom in July 1946—which had begun spontaneously—evolved into a mass exodus organized and led by young Jews who had survived the Holocaust. The Brichah underground movement aimed at bringing the survivors to Palestine, directing a flow to the Jewish homeland that they had not initiated, as the movement was conditioned by anti-Semitism and economic deprivation, by the mass murders that preceded it and their political and psychological consequences, as described by Yehuda Bauer.²⁸

After liberation day, the gates of the United States, Canada, and other Western countries remained either half-open or closed. The Truman Directive (December 22, 1945) had a limited impact on the immigration of Jewish orphans, though it gave priority to those who had suffered most. Together with the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, amended in 1950, these pieces of legislation enabled the immigration of about 140,000 Jews to the United States, giving priority to orphans and non-accompanied children as well as to refugees engaged in agricultural pursuits, indirectly discriminating against Jews as the Jewish population was known to be mostly urban.²⁹

In the United States, the fear of communists among European Jews reinforced isolationist attitudes among the population and within Congress. As a consequence, clandestine immigration to Palestine resumed in 1944. According to polls conducted in DP camps, the majority of survivors there sought to join the Jewish community in Palestine, motivated either by Zionism or instinctive Zionism.³⁰ Through the immigration network established under the leadership of the Mossad le-Aliyah Bet and availing themselves of the Brichah underground network, they left the DP camps and other places in eastern Europe to assemble in gathering points in port cities in Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. There, they boarded overcrowded old cargo ships.

A third organization, the Haganah, operating through the Palyam—the maritime unit of its Palmah commando forces—was responsible for escorting the ships and disembarking the immigrants on the shores of Palestine. But the survivors’ ordeal was by no means over, as they were intercepted by the British forces, which brought them to detention camps in Atlit and Cyprus.

The problems this book sets out to solve include the following: first, it provides answers to the enigma of the paradoxical success (professional and/or personal success) of Jewish children and young adults who were doomed to suffer socially and psychologically because of their fate during World War II. From this perspective the study examines the factors that contribute to success in various fields. Second, it challenges our understanding of postwar rehabilitation and lasting trauma, while throwing light on the transnational aspects of the lives survivors rebuilt. Third, it reveals the contributions they brought (in almost every field) into the countries in which they settled or resettled. In so doing, this comparative study seeks to clarify the physical, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of success in three distinct contexts. Whether it is an unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself, to borrow Viktor Frankl’s words, or the result of a single-minded effort to achieve one’s goals, as Samuel Pisar suggests, success remains a key concept in societies in which material success tends to overshadow other existential needs.³¹ Emphasizing the impact of humiliation, Boris Cyrulnik contends that social success is the mask of shame.³² However, happiness shares a common denominator with success. This approach adds to our understanding of values such as the pursuit of happiness, one of the inalienable rights in the United States Declaration of Independence. Perhaps the most significant line of the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah (Hope), reads Lihyot am hofshi be-artzenu (to be a free people in our land), a sentence that plays a similar role in the minds of French people whose revolutionary stance lies in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity." These are the main tenets of the collective ethos or philosophy of these three nations. While the notion of freedom is shared by the three cultures, the Israeli ethos emphasizes the link to the physical element of the ancestral homeland, the French ethos stresses the importance of social justice and togetherness, and the American ethos epitomizes individual aspirations and satisfaction.³³ In the three countries that contain the largest Jewish populations today, I explore how these cultural parameters impact the survivors’ new lives.

A Note on Method and Organization

My methodology includes several complementary disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, literature, and psychology. In the eyes of Marc Bloch, the historian’s art lies in revealing the complexity of the individual human experience. On the one hand, the pathbreaking French historian (tortured and murdered by the Gestapo in 1944) claimed that for a testimony to be considered authentic it has to offer some form of similarity with other testimonies of the same type. On the other hand, such a statement would deny the concept of uniqueness or individual identity. As a consequence, beyond the diverging testimonies, the historian may be led to find the necessary points of resemblance.³⁴ While most of the case studies present the course followed by young Holocaust survivors who reconstructed their lives following the war, a few narratives of former refugee children have been included to emphasize the multifaceted role of the OSE.

To what extent did these forced migrants redress their loss of social or personal identity? In the early 1990s, Wolfgang Jacobmeyer deplored the fact that most studies conducted by international refugee organizations gave too little attention to the fact that refugees are not ‘legal cases’ or ‘groups’ but individuals, and that ‘history’ is made of human lives.³⁵

From that perspective, this book offers qualitative research by focusing on some forty in-depth narratives of former child-survivors who took root in three different countries, while more than 250 testimonies have been closely examined and serve as references. Focusing on the survivors’ return to everyday life and on their new-found identities, this study is an inquiry into the adaptive nature of any migrant and, more generally, any human being.

I conducted the personal interviews in three languages: French, English, and Hebrew. All the translations are mine unless otherwise noted. In a number of cases, the interviews add information to an autobiographical essay by the interviewee, while archival and historical material challenge these linear narratives. For broader perspective and comparison, I made abundant use of several archives: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yad Vashem Oral Archives; the Visual Shoah Foundation Archives; the Spielberg Film Archives of the Hebrew University; the Oral History Archive at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University; archives of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine and the OSE (both in Paris); archives of the Oral History Division of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University; the Central Zionist Archives; those of the Ghetto Fighters House; the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv; the Mehlmann Library at Tel Aviv University; as well as those of the Center for Jewish History in New York, especially the files of the NCJW, among others. More often than not, the remarkable stories of rehabilitation they contain reveal a dynamic parallel to that of the emergence of the Jewish state, especially—but not exclusively—for those who have resettled in Israel.

In a number of interviews, the questions focus on the reaction of the interviewees to constitutive events: the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the German reparations in the 1950s,³⁶ the Eichmann Trial in 1961, the Six-Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The participation of survivors in Israel’s wars is analyzed to gauge the role of the army as a factor of integration. In relation to those living outside of Israel, I ask to what extent Israel’s wars have been part of the Jewish identities of my respondents. These are only guidelines as I encourage my interviewees to tell their stories, before using my set of core questions.

In the countries in which they have resettled, these survivors have at least three elements in common: they were children or young adults when the war broke out; in its aftermath they achieved some form of professional and social success; and more often than not, they became vocal in the transmission of the memory of the Holocaust.³⁷

Through the wealth of life stories offered in this volume there emerges the complexity of postwar life trajectories involving multiple new beginnings that defy categorization and simplification. This approach reveals three types of redemptive narratives that help survivors cope with trauma and existential anxieties: the social narrative that highlights the occupational and social achievements of survivors, the ideological narrative representing the Land of Israel as a vital refuge for Jews faced with antisemitism, and the religious narrative expressing the debates between the defenders of faith and nonbelievers. Although the narratives of the survivors’ social, ideological, or religious achievements share common patterns with the life stories of other successful Jewish migrants, I argue throughout the book that the difference lies mainly in redemptive aspects, which make their experiences meaningful in their own eyes and in those of others.

Chapter 1, which addresses conceptual and methodological concerns, contends that survivors have been perceived less as social actors than as victims of the Third Reich or as pawns in the Cold War. The life stories in chapters 2 and 3, which focus on rehabilitation and successful integration in France, are part of a social narrative valuing the occupational and social achievements of survivors in an environment requiring assimilation. In chapters 4 and 5, dealing with coping strategies and achievements in the American environment, such a redemptive narrative appears alongside a religious one, when survivors have kept their faith. This is the case because America is a country in which the expression of religiosity in the public sphere is not repressed. In chapters 6 and 7, focusing on resettlement in Israel, the ideological narrative often prevails over the social one, sometimes overshadowing a major social impact of the survivors. In that context, the religious narrative conveys debates about faith after 1945, while the dialectics between the Diaspora and Israel emerge from the survivors’ choices. Chapter 8 bridges the three types of narratives, paying particular attention to the transnational social or cultural impact of survivors., The concepts of Diaspora and transnationalism appear as key concepts for understanding the postwar plight of survivors—and beyond their experience—and the Jewish condition which remains under existential threat today in some parts of the world. The final chapter offers the main conclusions of this comparative approach.

Collectively, the narratives presented in this book reflect Jewish efforts to respond to utter destruction. They reveal the voices of the unwanted and their determination to cling to humanity and rebuild the destroyed pillars of culture. This study therefore provides new insights that modify the perception of the Jewish survivor as an eternal victim, and emphasizes the various facets of someone who can defeat suffering—his own and others, as Elie Wiesel put it.³⁸ It consequently challenges our understanding of trauma and rehabilitation and highlights the underestimated social impact of survivors. Last but not least, this volume spurs hope in human abilities while encouraging a return to the past to find answers to some of the most universal and crucial human questions. Hopefully, it could, for instance, give birth to the adoption of measures in the domain of education, a crucial key to rehabilitation of traumatized groups, while emphasizing the need for supportive communities to provide a sense of belonging to migrants. Such an approach is all the more needed as the twenty-first century continues to be one of mass displacement, political upheavals, and uprooted populations in search of proper guidance.

Note: (Note all translations into English are from the author unless otherwise mentioned.)

Notes

1. For the practical purposes of this study, the term Holocaust is considered equivalent to the Hebrew term Shoah (destruction, devastation, extinction).

2. DellaPergola, Jewish Shoah Survivors. To the best of my knowledge, to this day there has been no comparative or comprehensive study that encompasses the experiences of young Holocaust survivors in three countries while attempting to focus on their motivations for emigration.

3. In administrative memorandum No 39 of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of Allied Expeditionary Forces), April 16, 1945, displaced persons are defined as civilians who are, by reasons of the war, outside the national boundaries of their countries, wishing to return home or find homes, but being unable to do so without assistance. Displaced Persons Operations, G5, box 5, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS.

4. Conversation with Yehuda Bauer, April 7, 2015, Yad Vashem Research Institute, Jerusalem.

5. Bauer, Jewish Survivors in DP Camps, 491. For a breakdown and a view on the complexity of the problem, see also idem, The DP Legacy.

6. On the Kielce pogrom and anti-Jewish violence in Poland, see Engel, Anti-Jewish Violence. See also Gross, Fear.

7. Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors, 111–12.

8. Keramida, Way to the Homeland, 75.

9. Zahra, Lost Children, 98–99. On the OSE, see Zeitoun, L’Oeuvre de secours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990); Samuel, Sauver les enfants; Hazan, Les Orphelins de la Shoah. On debates about collective versus familial solutions for Jewish youth, see Doron, Jewish Youth.

10. Mankowitz, Life, 131–60.

11. Lewyn and Lewyn, On the Run, 321.

12. Grossmann, Jews, Germans and Allies.

13. Lewyn and Lewyn, On the Run, 320.

14. In terms of the history of the Holocaust, testimonies and oral history significantly complement the historical narrative. Yet some scholars are reluctant to use oral history on the grounds that memory is often unreliable and that testimonies may be reconstructed. However, it is a matter of fact that past memories linked to trauma are often accurately remembered, even in old age.

15. This is a point of view shared by historian Atina Grossmann iterated in her lecture Gender as a Historical Category: New Research, Recovered Stories, and Shifting Questions about War and Holocaust, delivered at the annual Marianne and Ernst Pieper Symposium on Gender, War and Antisemitism conducted at Tel Aviv University on January 14, 2015.

16. Quoted by Rosenfeld, End of the Holocaust, 192.

17. Shmotkin, Blumstein, and Modan, Long-Term Effects.

18. Sicron, Immigration to Israel.

19. How were the survivors chosen for this research? Over the years, I interviewed some survivors I had met when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation on the immigration of Jewish DPs to America under the Truman Administration. (See Ouzan, Ces Juifs.) Personal acquaintances and colleagues helped me locate those who set out on their postwar lives in France and Israel. Often, the survivors who had written memoirs were interviewed more in depth on account of their writings; most of the interviews have been recorded. All in all, more than two hundred in-depth testimonies have been examined in various oral documentation archives.

20. Cohen, Case Closed.

21. Waxman, Holocaust.

22. For social worker Judith Hemmendinger (who took care of Elie Wiesel in the OSE homes), the lost identities of children was an acute problem in the aftermath of the Holocaust; See Hemmendiger and Krell, Children of Buchenwald.

23. For a synthetic view of the historiography on the subject, see Gemie and Humbert, Writing History.

24. See also Friedländer, When Memory Comes.

25. Régine, Appelle-moi.

26. Akerman-Tieder, Tell Your Children, 177.

27. Earl Harrison to President Harry S. Truman, August 1945, in David Niles Papers, Box 29, HSTL; Lewyn and Lewyn, On the Run.

28. Bauer, Flight and Rescue, 321.

29. DP Act, Public Laws, Chapter 647, June 25, 1948, OF 127, HSTL.

30. Mankowitz, Life, 72.

31. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, xiv–xv, preface to the 1992 edition, included in the 2006 edition; interview with Samuel Pisar, Paris, December 22, 2010. The following quote is significant: I needed success as if my life depended upon it.

32. Cyrulnik, Mourir, 37.

33. Demographer Sergio DellaPergola made that remark in his foreword to my book, Ouzan, Américains juifs, 7.

34. Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 101–02. Bloch explains the reasons why there is no reliable witness in the absolute sense. (p. 101). For Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, survivors’ testimonies become extremely useful and reliable when cross-checked and borne out by many other testimonies. They are, I would argue, at least as reliable as a document of the time. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 24.

35. Jacobmeyer, Displaced Persons, 286. From this perspective, I have made use of some of the 236 oral histories on deposit at the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem. They have been taped by survivors who attended the 1981 World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors held in Jerusalem.

36. This subject is not broached in each case study, since a number of survivors refused such financial compensation on the grounds that no money could ever atone for their suffering and the cruel deaths of entire families.

37. Survivors are sensitive to distortions of the memory of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. For provocative insights on the evolving representations of what is termed The Holocaust and the examination of the sources and cultural elements that influence our sense of the past, see Rosenfeld, End of the Holocaust.

38. Jewish Values, 291; quoted in Wieviorka, Era of the Witness, 103. On the complex experience of liberation, its challenges and its sorrows, see Stone, The Liberation, 216–19.

1

FROM VICTIMS TO SOCIAL ACTORS

THE ENORMITY OF the Nazi genocide of the Jews cannot be grasped without listening to the voices of the former young victims who suffered a series of psychological blows and faced constant fear during the war years. This study attempts to understand how a number of those who survived triumphed over adversity even though their families, culture, and religion were all annihilated. The individual stories I have chosen provide a wealth of information on the survivors’ rehabilitation and involvement in social, economic, and cultural activities. These narratives are classified by country of return (in the case of France) or of resettlement (the United States and Israel), and also, as much as possible, by the method of survival during the war. The main distinction lies in the fact that concentration camp survivors underwent a radical dehumanization, which other categories of survivors in hiding did not. However, they all faced various forms of harmful humiliation, which is enough to destroy self-confidence. As a consequence, the two main categories I examine in this volume may be distinguished in the following way: those who experienced proximity to death, and those who fled or were hidden without experiencing direct contact with death. Indeed, the genocidal process was not limited to deportation and internment in extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, and to concentration and labor camps. It also involved mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) operating in German-occupied territories in eastern Europe during World War II.¹

While the dates of birth of those who survived constitute an important element since reactions to trauma often vary according to age, classification according to age seemed less appropriate for this project. All in all, the postwar life stories demonstrate the extent to which young Holocaust survivors, as migrants, adopted some of the social, behavioral patterns of the Jews after their emancipation. This is strikingly clear in their need to excel to gain social acceptance and recognition. In Israel, they made a point of serving as soldiers in several wars, even if they were the last remnants of their decimated families. More than a thousand lost their lives in the 1948 War of Independence. In America, many volunteered to enlist in the Korean War, thus running counter to the negative stereotype of the Jew as one who evades military service.² The life story of Tibor Rubin showed that strategies of survival learned in the concentration camps saved the lives of American soldiers in Korea. It also enabled the exploration of the American army as a field of belonging and identification. Yet, the numerous hurdles Rubin encountered until he was socially recognized as a war hero testified not only to the long persistence of anti-Jewish feelings in the American military but also to his resilience in that