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When the Jews Fled to Germany. a Forgotten Chapter of Postwar History by Hans‐Peter Föhrding and Heinz Verfürth

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When the Jews Fled to Germany. a Forgotten Chapter of Postwar History by Hans‐Peter Föhrding and Heinz Verfürth Sample Translation (Chapter 1 and 2) When the Jews Fled to Germany. A forgotten chapter of postwar history by Hans‐Peter Föhrding and Heinz Verfürth Translated by Jefferson Chase © 2017, Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG Publication: March 2017 (Hardcover) 352 pages ISBN: 978‐3‐462‐04866‐7 Foreign rights with: Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG Iris Brandt ibrandt@kiwi‐verlag.de Aleksandra Erakovic aerakovic@kiwi‐verlag.de Chapter 1 The Safety of the New Ghetto in the Middle of Germany: Jewish Refugees after 1945 Aron Waks is nervous. The young man is waiting impatiently for an American jeep, which left the camp in the western German camp of Ziegenhain that morning, to finally return. It was sent out to pick up a family, a couple and their five children, from another camp in the neighboring town of Schwarzenborn. Around noon, the turnpike barrier at the wide front camp gate is raised, and the open jeep slowly rolls down the dusty street. The Lessers have arrived in Ziegenhain, their final destination after weeks of dangerous traveling. Aron greets everyone heartily. But only after he’s given the Lessers’ eldest daughter Lea a prolonged embrace. The young man in his mid‐twenties has been in love with her for a few weeks. Lea, too, has feverishly awaited their reunion. That morning she was suddenly called to appear before the camp administration. Some wanted to talk to her urgently on the telephone, she was told. Who would be trying to reach her here, in an isolated provincial German village, she asks herself? Most probably, she decides, it’s just one of those enquiries that her family has had to endure in various places since they left Poland. The questions are always the same: where do you come from, where are you headed and why? But after taking the telephone receiver she cries out in joy. It’s Aron. He’s quite nearby, in Ziegenhain. Aron’s and Lea’s embrace completes a story that began four months ago in Poland. They didn’t know one another back then, but both had survived the terrors of the Lodz ghetto and then, thanks to a last‐minute stroke of luck, miraculously escaped being murdered. The rest of the Lesser family was able to flee to the Soviet‐occupied eastern Poland after Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched into the west. They were later taken to Siberia – a harsh turn of fate that ironically saved their lives. After the end of the Second World War in 1945, all of these people were shocked to discover that they were greeted as Jews in their home city of Lodz with hatred and threats of violence from their former neighbors. Increasingly they came to fear a new wave of anti‐Semitism and felt threatened by the murderous excesses of pogroms. So Aron Waks and the Lesser family, who had gotten to know one another in the small Jewish community remaining in Lodz, devised a bold plan. In early 1946, they prepared to flee once more – this time to Germany and the protection of the American occupying powers. Their ultimate aim is to get to Palestine as soon as they can. They depart from Lodz at different times. In summer 1946, Aron becomes the first to leave, taking his things and heading off with a group of young Zionists. A few 2 weeks later the Lessers followed. Because they took separate paths they lost contact with one another. It’s a near wonder after the confusion and uncertainty of their respective journeys that they have been reunited so quickly in post‐War Germany. In Ziegenhain, they can once again breathe easily. A photo from those days documents their relief. Lea is sitting with Aron on a bench in front of one of the camp barracks. She’s wearing an elegant dress, he, a proper jacket, shirt and tie. To either side of them are Lea’s sisters Salle and Manja, also looking well turned‐out. In the background, her brother Schaje and father Leib Lesser look out from one of the building’s dark windows. Of course, this arranged scene is one of those typical keepsakes, photo‐album pictures. “That’s how it was,” people say when they flip through such albums many years later. “That’s what we looked like.” Yet this photo expresses something more. It says: “Yes, we’re all together. We’ve survived terrors and flight and can once again look ahead to the future.” It’s an almost defiant demonstration of familial happiness amidst the sadness of camp life. This little group of people can, no doubt, use a bit of optimism. In the late summer of 1946, Ziegenhain is a relatively large camp with over 2000 refugees, most of them from Poland. Aron Waks has a special position within this arbitrarily assembled community as the chairman of the camp refugee committee. Inside of it, he’s nicknamed “Präses,” which means something like “head honcho.” His function is to mediate between the refugees, the American camp commander and various aid organizations. As a roll‐up‐your‐sleeves sort of fellow, he and his small team are establishing set structures in the strange place they now live. The US Army pretty much lets the refugees organize everything themselves, including daily essentials like accommodation, food, clothing and hygiene. The army and various Jewish aid groups provide the refugees with enough to eat and whatever else they absolutely need. But Waks and the committee see to it that these goods are distributed in orderly fashion. It isn’t always easy, for instance, to offer the large contingency of Orthodox Jews kosher food. And the needs of this community of necessity go a lot further than that. The refugees require kindergartens, schools, vocational training and workshops so that the children and young people can be adequately prepared for the future. To ensure a stable order among people so tightly cramped together, there also has to be a camp police force constituted of refugees. Many of the camp inhabitants want to practice their religious traditions again, so synagogues and prayer rooms have to be set up. Arrangements are made with the Jewish army “field chaplains” for regular religious ceremonies. It’s also necessary to establish Talmud and Torah schools in order to remind people, especially young ones, of the importance of the written word in the Jewish faith. And 3 of course they want to preserve the venerable language of Yiddish, the camp’s most frequently spoken tongue. The directorial team thus faces enormous challenges, if it is to create for the refugees a small social and cultural unit, based on the Eastern European shtetl, in a foreign country. It must follow the rules of the camp as it attempts to resuscitate a venerable tradition which the Nazis tried systematically to eradicate. Looking back on those days, so full of improvisation and getting used to novel things, Lea will only remember the positives about this new microcosm: “What did we have to complain about? After all the terrible things we’d been through, we were so happy just to be back together again. That was all that mattered!” Yet at least from the outside, the conditions in Ziegenhain looked anything but appealing. Under the Nazis the camp was run as Stalag IX A Ziegenhain and was the largest holding facility for POWs in the western German state of Hessen. Built upon a cow pasture shortly after Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the overcrowded facility would ultimately house more than 35,000 people from Poland, Russia, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and wherever else the Wehrmacht fought and took prisoners. After the war, the American occupiers initially interned NS functionaries, members of the SS and SA, Wehrmacht soldiers and women active in the League of German Girls there. There they conducted a brief and thus unavoidably insufficient attempt at politically re‐educating Germans infected with National Socialist ideology. Before long, the US military administration had no choice but to use the facility for another group of people whose numbers had been swelling month by month since the start of 1946: Eastern European Jews. The anti‐Semitism that had broken out in their home countries, especially in Poland, but also in the Baltic nations, Czechoslovakia and Hungary led to a mass exodus. Usually illegally, large numbers of these people tried to cross the borders into the West, especially into the US‐ occupied areas of Germany and Austria, where they thought that they would be safe and protected. Historians have written of a “flight of panic.” That description is apt for a number of reasons. In Poland, for example, enmity increased to the point that the minority of surviving Jews became the targets of incendiary tirades, and isolated instances of violence developed into frenzied mobs hunting down people. In mid‐1946, 42 people were killed and 80 wounded in a pogrom in the small town of Kielce. The murderous campaign lasted for two days. After this barbaric excess, there was little to keep Jews in Poland any more. In the fall of 1946 alone, 50,000 of them left the country. A large wave of refugees headed west, and the migration continued in 1947. 4 But could Jews find refuge in the land of the perpetrators so shortly after the Shoah? Few of those who had survived the Nazi catastrophe in Eastern Europe seem to have doubted that this was possible when they left their homelands. In their eyes, they were fleeing not to Germany or the Germans, but to those who had vanquished the Hitler dictatorship, first of all the Americans, and then the British and French.
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