Conclusion:
The Sorrows of Liberation

As the Nazi regime was collapsing, contemporaries began slowly to understand the extent of its crimes. ‘Is this our progress over other more barbarous ages?’ asked Judah Leib Magnes, head of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in his opening address of the academic year on 1 November 1944. ‘What carrion foulness, what a stench of burnt bodies arises from these camps and fills the void of the world – that same world wherein so much of beauty is, light, love and joy. Man created in the Image proves to be the wildest and cruelest of raging beasts – man, who is at times but little lower than the angels.’1 Only weeks before Magnes wrote these words in freedom in Jerusalem, Zalman Gradowski, one of the members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, the group of inmates forced to work in the gas chamber and crematorium complex disposing of the corpses, addressed his hoped-for reader in an extraordinary text penned in the heart of the killing machine and buried in the earth next to the gas chamber:

Tell them that even if your heart turns to stone, your brain to a cold calculator and your eyes to camera lenses, even then, you will never again return to them. They would do better to seek you in the eternal forests, for you will have fled from the world inhabited by men, to seek comfort among the cruel beasts of the field, rather than live among cultured demons. For although even animals have been restrained by civilization – their hooves have been dulled and their cruelty greatly curbed – man has not, but has become a beast. The more highly developed a culture, the more cruel its murderers, the more civilized a society, the greater its barbarians; as development increases, its deeds become more terrible.1

The extent of the Nazis’ crimes could barely be taken in. Communities across Europe were devastated and the surviving Jews of Eastern Europe were left bereft.

Liberation did not mean the end of the Holocaust. The survivors – in the camps, in hiding and in exile – faced years of further struggles to find a place to call home and to rebuild their lives, to the extent that they ever did. Those who came to the UK or the US found that their experiences were subsumed in a general narrative of war suffering and that they were rarely listened to outside of their own small circles. It would be decades before a general image of ‘the camps’, meaning a world of unspecified suffering, would slowly give way to a differentiated understanding that acknowledged the ways in which victims were targeted differently depending on which group the Nazis had assigned them to. In the years after the war, the Jews were rarely distinguished from the Nazis’ other victims. And any mention of Nazi victims was often countered with the response that during the war everyone had suffered. Broadcasts, newsreels, exhibitions and trials (such as the Belsen trial) almost always failed to mention that Jews had been the Nazis’ specific target, not just a randomly selected group among many others.¹ As the victims were beginning to gather documents, testimonies and material remains, the wider world preferred to focus on a universal message of the defeat of fascism and a future-oriented narrative centred on national rebuilding. Although the resources were at hand for a more nuanced understanding of Nazi criminality – in Knauth's and Sington's books, for example – the liberated victims of Nazism would have to wait many years before ‘the Holocaust’ began to be comprehended. The appeals of the DPs were widely regarded as noisy, unwelcome special pleading rather than the desperate cries of stricken people. Allied policy towards them only exacerbated the problem of mutual misunderstanding.

The actions of the US, Britain, the Yishuv, the Soviets and their local communist allies across Eastern Europe all combined to create a situation whereby Jews could no longer live in most of their old communities. The Western Allies paradoxically first helped the survivors – not least by liberating the camps, albeit with ‘liberations’ that were often unplanned and not prepared for – and then set about effectively re-imprisoning them. The camps in Cyprus were regarded with especial disdain as those in them were so close to reaching their goal. The Yishuv, though it did not create Zionism in the DP camps, encouraged a scenario in which the loudest voice in the camps would be demanding the one thing the survivors could not have: access to Palestine. The Soviets and their satellite governments in Poland, Romania and elsewhere behind the newly-descended ‘iron curtain’ mischievously upped the ante by encouraging Jewish emigration from their lands towards Germany, under the pseudo-humanitarian guise of acknowledging the survivors’ plight and demands. Instead of stamping out local anti-Semitism the communists used it as one of the strategies that enabled them to take power and provide their authority with solid local roots across the region. The DPs themselves thus lived increasingly frustrated lives, engaging in all sorts of ‘normal’ social, religious, cultural and political activities, but always on the basis of a shaky knowledge that they were waiting for their departure.

The sorrows of liberation therefore forced survivors into ‘illegal’ immigration, into conflict with local populations and military and civilian authorities, and into psychological turmoil. Non-Jewish DPs were rapidly repatriated or, as with ‘unwilling’ Soviet citizens (or those now suddenly finding themselves claimed as Soviet citizens after the occupations and border shifts of 1945), were generally resettled within a year or so of the war. By contrast, tens of thousands of Jewish DPs remained in camps for years after the end of hostilities. After 1950 only the ‘hard core’ cases remained, but these were not properly dealt with until the middle of that decade. By that time there had been conflict between Jewish and non-Jewish DPs, between Jewish DPs and German and Austrian civilians and authorities and, most significantly, between the Jewish survivors and their liberators. This last conflict, whereby the admiration and love between survivors and those who helped them was sullied by bitterness, ingratitude and resentment, is one of the aspects of liberation hardest to bear.

That shift in relations, however, also helps to explain the connection between the liberation of the camps and the wider geopolitics of the Cold War and British imperial decline. The Soviets backed DP Zionism not just to make local anti-Semites in the satellite states accomplices of the new regimes but also to press the British in terms of economic overstretch and moral standing. Increasing tensions in Palestine placed the British in the invidious position of trying to find a balance between maintaining cordial relations with the Arab states and responding satisfactorily to the Jews whom they had just liberated. The British response, in the face of intense pressure from the DP leadership, American recommendations over immigration to Palestine and, not least, an inability to continue funding expensive imperial missions, was to abandon the Mandate. Although people were not killed in the huge numbers seen during the partition of India, when the British rapidly left the country to its fate, the war that followed Israel's declaration of independence saw a new group of displaced persons appear: the Palestinians. The Palestine–Israel conflict is today as far from being resolved satisfactorily as it has ever been. The long-term effects of the geopolitics of liberation are still felt in the Middle East and in the politics of Holocaust memory across the globe. And the Holocaust's after-effects will be with us for some time yet. Liberation was not only not the end of the Holocaust, it was the bridge between the wartime alliance and Cold War tension.

If, as Auden wrote, ‘existence is believing / We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving’, then the Holocaust, like all genocides, shattered the grounds of existence.1 The survivors knew neither for whom they should mourn nor who was mourning, and many never found out. What they did know was that everything they had believed to be stable and dependable had been destroyed. Their survival could not alter that basic fact, as is clear in Isabella Leitner's words:

We are … we are – what? What are we? We are … we are … We are liberated!

Barefoot, wearing only a single garment each, we all surge out into the brutal January frost and snow of eastern Germany and run toward the troops. Shrieks of joy. Shrieks of pain. Shrieks of deliverance. All the pent-up hysteria accumulated over years of pain and terror suddenly released.

I have never since heard sounds like those we uttered, sounds released from the very depths of our being. The sheer force of it must have scattered the ashes of Auschwitz to every corner of the universe, for our cries of joy suddenly turned into a bitter wail: ‘We are liberated! We are liberated!’ But where are they all? They are all dead!¹