EPILOGUE

With Berlin isolated, the command and control structures of the Third Reich finally disintegrated. No longer able to deny that his situation was beyond military salvation, that it was a matter of hours before Red Army soldiers swarmed over the Reich Chancellery, on 30 April Hitler committed suicide. Before then, however, he dictated his will and his ‘political testament’ to his secretary Traudl Junge. In it he blamed the Jews for the outbreak of war in 1939 and predicted that in centuries to come mankind would turn against ‘international Jewry and its henchmen’. If in the meantime the inhabitants of Europe suffered massacre and slavery, the responsibility ‘must be borne by the true culprits: the Jews’. Having called on his people and the armed services to opt for death rather than servitude, he nominated his successors – Admiral Dönitz as president and Goebbels as chancellor. He also settled some last scores by denouncing Göring and Himmler as traitors. Hitler’s final words proved beyond doubt the centrality of the Jews in his world view and, hence, the singularity of the anti-Jewish policies that he propelled throughout his political career: ‘Above all, I charge the leadership of the nation and their subjects with meticulous observance of the race-laws and merciless resistance to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.’¹

The Third Reich outlasted Hitler by a week. Military resistance in the west crumbled, but desperate fighting continued between German forces and the Red Army as long as Dönitz tried to obtain separate peace terms from the British and Americans. They refused to yield one iota on unconditional surrender across all fronts, so on 7 May the German high command signed the formal act of capitulation at the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Reims, France. A separate signing ceremony was held under Soviet auspices in Berlin, where fighting had actually terminated five days previously. The war was over. But the end of hostilities did not mark the end of Jewish suffering and for thousands of Jews the transition to peacetime marked little more than an abstract concept.²

Whatever situation they were in when the Allies reached them, the Jewish survivors were in dire need. Yet military personnel were hardly prepared or equipped for relief or rehabilitation work. This is not to say that the Allies failed to anticipate the problem of refugees: military units included civilian affairs officers and the military governments had branches for Displaced Persons (DPs). The main agency tasked with handling DPs in conjunction with the military was the United Nations Relief and Reconstruction Administration (UNRRA). But its first priority was to get people that had been uprooted by the war back home as fast as possible, and the magnitude of this mission was daunting. UNRRA was confronted with 20 million destitute people, including non-Jewish survivors of concentration camps, forced and slave labourers, prisoners of war, volunteer workers in Germany, and masses of refugees, amongst whom were people who had collaborated with the Germans plus millions of Volksdeutsche who had fled or were expelled from their homes. Sorting out who was who, and who deserved UNRRA assistance (which excluded anyone who had left home voluntarily or served the Germans), was itself a massive undertaking.³

There were also several Jewish relief organizations, chiefly the teams of social workers sent to Europe by the AJJDC and the Jewish Relief Unit (JRU), set up and sponsored by British Jews. However, the British and American military governments were initially wary of allowing them access to the survivors. Consequently, Jewish chaplains in the British and American forces were the first point of contact between those rescued from the Germans and Jews in the free world. Weeks passed before an organized Jewish relief effort touched those who needed it, and then it was often inadequate to the challenge.⁴

Allied policy towards the DPs, the Jewish DPs in particular, was deeply conflicted. At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had concurred in principle that citizens uprooted by the Germans or displaced by the war should be repatriated to their countries of origin. The military governments of the British, US and French zones of occupation in western Germany working with UNRRA succeeded in repatriating no less than 6 million with impressive speed. But they declined to forcibly return those who hailed from (or claimed to come from) territories annexed by the USSR, specifically the Baltic states and eastern Poland. As a result, by the end of 1945, UNRRA was supporting three-quarters of a million ‘non-repatriables’ in DP camps. The Jews were initially a tiny sliver of this problem, but they were particularly troublesome. Few wanted to return to countries where their neighbours had turned on them and where they no longer had homes or means of living. Yet the Americans were not prepared to relax their immigration controls to enable them to leave Europe. The British government was equally determined to exclude Jewish refugees and until July 1947 actually considered repatriating German Jews who had arrived in the UK before the war. Nor were the British willing to expand Jewish immigration to Palestine. Rather, the Labour government that came to power in August 1945 committed itself to enforcing the restrictions on the Jewish population enshrined in the 1939 White Paper. Consequently, the Jewish survivors were condemned to a life in limbo.⁵

To their despair, 45,000 Jews found themselves confined to barbed-wire enclosures by order of the Allied military authorities in the British, American and French zones of occupation. Frequently these were the same concentration or labour camps where they had previously been held or not far away. The barracks were overcrowded and the amenities were basic. Moreover, the military administration and UNRRA refused to recognize Jews as a separate group with particular, urgent requirements. The Americans rejected criteria that had served as the basis of discrimination under Nazism, while the British feared that treating Jews like a national group would play into the hands of the Zionist movement, which was demanding the right for survivors to enter Palestine. As a result, Jews were corralled with Russians, Poles and Balts released from forced labour and were sometimes obliged to share quarters with evicted ethnic Germans who had been willing tools of the Nazis. This was a recipe for tension and there were frequent disturbances between Jews and non-Jews in the DP assembly centres. When information about the treatment of Jewish survivors was transmitted home by American Jewish army chaplains, it stirred indignation in the Jewish leadership. Responding to the numerous protests and the adverse publicity they generated, on 22 June 1945, President Truman asked Earl G. Harrison, the US representative on the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees, to investigate and report back to him.⁶

Harrison duly travelled to Europe, accompanied by Joseph Schwartz of the AJJDC, and toured the DP camps accumulating impressions and evidence. The report he submitted to Truman ten weeks later transformed US policy and undermined Britain’s stance towards the Jewish survivors. Harrison opened by stating that ‘Up to this point they have been “liberated” more in a military sense than actually.’ Three months after VE-Day, the estimated 100,000 Jewish DPs were still living behind barbed wire in crowded, insanitary quarters. In spite of pervasive physical and psychological afflictions, they were not getting any special medical supplies or treatment. Many still wore the clothes in which they had been released. They were offered little in the way of rehabilitation and were not even being helped to trace relatives. Although their plight could be alleviated by forcing the Germans to make amends, little was being done in that direction either. Indeed, Harrison argued, ‘As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.’ As a prerequisite for any improvement he deemed it essential to acknowledge that the Jews had suffered more severely than any other group persecuted by the Germans and that, willy-nilly, they now identified themselves as a collective. He recommended that ‘the Jews in Germany and Austria should have the first claim upon the conscience of the people in the United States and Great Britain’. In practice, following immediate aid, this entailed facilitating their emigration to Palestine. The vast majority no longer wished to stay in Europe and, knowing they could not enter the US under the current immigration controls, desired to start new lives in the only place likely to welcome them and provide the support they needed.⁷

Truman endorsed Harrison’s report within days and instructed General Eisenhower, the supreme commander in Europe, to act on it at once. Jewish advisers were appointed to the US military government and survivors were relocated to Jewish-only sites. Relief began to pour in. During 1945, the AJJDC expended $317,000 on its European operation. Over the following year that sum increased more than tenfold and by 1947 the agency was spending $9 million on relief and rehabilitation – although by that time the numbers in need of aid had greatly increased.⁸

The DP camps in the US zones of occupation in Germany and Austria as well as those sprinkled the length of Italy became the arena for a wholly unexpected efflorescence of Jewish life. Within weeks of being freed, Jews started taking control of their fate and asserting their interests. Representative committees sprang up in each camp and, in July 1945, a gathering of delegates met at St Ottilien DP Camp to establish a unified voice for Jewish DPs in the US zone. These local representatives began to coordinate relief and rehabilitation activity with agents of the AJJDC and ORT, which provided education and vocational training. The camps became the arena for rituals through which Jews recovered a sense of agency. Where possible they engaged in the reburial of those who had been pitched into mass graves at the camps, at massacre sites, or dumped along the roads taken by forced marches. Internment according to Jewish rites not only gave some dignity back to the dead, it showed that, in the words of historian Margarete Myers Feinstein, the living had ‘reclaimed control of their lives’. The performance of marriages was a more obviously positive gesture. Around 80 per cent of the survivors were aged 18–44 and most were either single or had lost a spouse. In normal conditions, Jewish law required that the surviving partner had to obtain proof of the other’s death in order to remarry, but the religious authorities, only too aware of the likely circumstances, relaxed the standard of evidence in order to enable couples to start new married lives. The inevitable result was a baby boom, accompanied by rituals of circumcision and naming. This too was seen as ‘a form of retaliation’ against those who had sought to deny any future to the Jewish people.⁹

In a curious echo of the ghettos, the Americans permitted the Jewish DPs to establish a camp police. This was partly to maintain order without embroiling US military personnel (or, more pertinently, the German police) and to keep a lid on the burgeoning black market. It was also intended to contain vigilantism when survivors identified men or women who had served as kapos or abused positions of power in ghettos. Improvised honour courts presided over by survivors with legal backgrounds sought to adjudicate cases that came to light in this way. While they may have been ad hoc, the courts were able to draw upon shared experience to reach a balanced judgment about those accused of abuses and frequently expressed understanding for the behaviour of the arraigned. Only in the most egregious cases were the guilty excluded from the DP community and barred from access to welfare. Honour courts were also established by the renascent Jewish communities in Poland, France and Austria. They channelled anger and helped to prevent lynchings, but they were just as important as a symbolic exercise of autonomy, a demonstration that law once again ruled Jewish lives, and the reassertion of cherished values.¹⁰

The wider pursuit of justice inspired Jews in the camps and beyond to collect documents and testimony pertaining to the years of persecution. The work of documentation had begun as soon as Jews in eastern Poland were released from German rule. Survivors started chronicling the fate of Lublin Jews in July 1944 shortly after the city was liberated and soon came under the guidance of the professional historian Philip Friedman, who had survived the catastrophe in Lwow. By the following March a central historical commission based in Lodz was coordinating five branches. Their members contributed extensively to the official investigation and prosecution of war crimes in Poland. Friedman and Rachel Auerbach, a survivor of the Oneg Shabbat group, were members of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes that was constituted by the Polish provisional government in March 1945. He accompanied the investigation of Chelmno and she travelled to the site of Treblinka. Together they contributed to the reports on the death camps that the commission submitted to the Polish delegation to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that commenced the trial of captured Nazi leaders in September 1945. Friedman also authored a forty-five-page overview of the destruction of Polish Jewry. Artur Eisenbach testified in the trial of Hans Biebow in Lodz and Nachman Blumenthal provided expert evidence against Rudolf Höss in Cracow. Blumenthal and Josef Kermisz also helped to document German crimes at Chelmno. In October 1947 these men and women established the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The central part of its already extensive collection comprised ten metal canisters containing part of the archive of Oneg Shabbat, recovered from the ruins of the ghetto.¹¹

Historical commissions sprouted in almost every major DP camp in Germany too. Eventually their activity was coordinated by a central Jewish historical commission based in Munich. It amassed 5,000 statistical surveys and 1,000 eye-witness accounts. Dozens were published in its journal, Fun Letsten Hurban – contributing to an understanding of the catastrophe and inspiring further contributions. In France, Isaac Schneersohn resurrected the centre to chronicle German and French crimes that he had initiated in Grenoble under Vichy. Schneersohn was a Russian-born businessman and communal worker from a famous rabbinical family who had survived the occupation. He was a man of energy and vision, and his Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) attracted the talents of Léon Poliakov and Joseph Billig. They started to churn out collections of German documents evidencing the fate of the Jews in France while treading a delicate path between indicting Vichy and alienating French opinion. Schneersohn had wider ambitions and in 1947 convened a conference of Jewish historical commissions from across Europe, including representatives of the nascent Wiener Library in London (officially still called the Jewish Central Information Office), with the aim of coordinating the global research effort from Paris. The Yad Vashem Foundation in Palestine was unable to send anyone due to the crisis there, but made clear its belief that Jerusalem not Paris should become the main repository of documents and the base for studying the catastrophe.¹²

Many Jews felt the pull of Jerusalem. Thanks to their common fate and shared interests, notably the struggle to emigrate, the survivors in the camps in Germany and Austria developed a collective identity. They were dubbed ‘She’erith Hapleitah’ – the surviving remnant – by activists oriented towards Palestine and that is how they referred to themselves when interacting with the outside world. However, the seeming uniformity of life in the DP camps concealed internal divisions and conflicts.

Of the 20,000 Jewish survivors in the British zone about 12,000 were concentrated in the Hohne DP camp. It was located in a former army base, about two miles away from Bergen-Belsen, to which the living had been evacuated in May 1945. However, for the following year it was also used to accommodate DPs of various nationalities, a cause of much antagonism. The Jews were represented by a committee – grandly entitled the Central Committee of Liberated Jews – energetically chaired by Joseph Rosensaft, a survivor from Bedzin. Rosensaft’s committee irritated the British authorities by campaigning noisily for the recognition of the Jews as a separate group and the right to emigrate to Palestine. There was unrest between different Jewish factions too. The survivors resented the late arrival of the Jewish Relief Unit and derided the help it brought. The JRU, in turn, brushed up against the better-resourced team from the AJJDC. Non-Zionist and Orthodox Jews felt marginalized by the predominantly secular, political leadership. Notwithstanding these internal divisions, the Belsen-Hohne DPs eventually supported a rich variety of initiatives. The camp boasted a kindergarten, a school and an ORT establishment for vocational training. There was a theatre, called ‘Kazet’, which presented dramatic reconstructions of life in the ghettos and camps as well as lighter entertainment. The residents had access to two Yiddish-language newspapers and there was even a publishing house. An honour court emerged, but its jurisdiction was contested by the internal police and it fell apart amidst acrimony.¹³

There was little cooperation between the DP camp Jews and the rump of German Jews living in the cities. Initially it was difficult for Jewish Germans to establish their credentials and avoid being treated as members of the vanquished nation, but they got scant sympathy from Jewish relief workers who could not understand why on earth they wanted to rebuild lives in Germany. About 90 per cent of the Jewish DPs were Polish and they felt little warmth for the German Jews who had survived in mixed marriages or as converts. Discord between the communities was aggravated by the fact that most of the relief was channelled into the Jewish DP camps. In reply, the German Jews left it to UNRRA to care for their east European brethren. The two groups had divergent practical concerns, too. Whereas German Jews were preoccupied with the restitution of property, creating the basis for a renewed communal life, most east European Jews were focused on getting out. Even Polish Jews who went to live in urban areas kept to themselves: they were younger than the German Jewish survivors and had different priorities, such as starting families, looking for homes, and making a living (not always by legal means). In Frankfurt they established their own community and synagogue. In other centres German Jews tried to exclude them. The old antipathy between German Jews and Ostjuden was sharpened when the camp Jews were accused of black market activities and attracted anti-Semitic comments, even police raids.¹⁴

Efforts to create a unified representation of all the Jews in both zones foundered on the egos and ambitions of the men who dominated the representative committees in their respective domains. Since neither was prepared to accept subordinate status Rosensaft reigned supreme in Belsen-Hohne and the British zone while the Jews in the Bavarian camps formed their own central committee, led by Samuel Gringauz. Orthodox Jews felt better served by the Vaad Hatzalah, the council for rescue, supported by Orthodox Jews in the USA, which supplied their religious needs. Yet all had to contend with the persistence of anti-Semitic thinking among the German population.¹⁵

The state of affairs in the western zones of Germany was transformed by upheavals in Poland during 1946. Approximately 30,000–60,000 Jews emerged into freedom from hiding in the cities or the forests on Polish territory. About 20,000 were released from ghettos and camps, mainly in Czestochowa and East Upper Silesia. A few thousand more made their way back from camps in Germany and between 13,000 and 20,000 were demobilized from Russian or Polish military formations under Red Army command. However, the resurgence of the Jewish population was mainly due to the return of those deported to central Asia from Soviet-occupied Poland in 1939–41, including Jews who originally lived there and refugees from the German sector. Around 30,000 reached Poland in 1945 and a further 136,000 during 1946–7. The new Polish authorities directed the bulk of them to the areas annexed to Poland from western Germany – Lower and Upper Silesia and Szczecin (formerly Stettin). They poured into a country occupied by the Red Army and racked with civil strife. Polish nationalists and elements of the Home Army that had gone underground when the Red Army arrived routinely accused the Jews of collaboration with the Soviets. One underground leaflet in June 1945 stated, ‘Power has been usurped by a gang of corrupt Jewish Communists who do the bidding of the Red Tsar Stalin …’ Violence against the Jews was endemic, although only a proportion was politically motivated. It is estimated that about 200 Jews were killed on trains carrying them through Poland or ejected and shot by nationalist extremists. Hundreds more were murdered when they returned to their homes, victims of Poles who feared that they would otherwise have to give up property or wealth obtained from Jews while the Germans reigned. The danger was so great that Polish Jews often moved around in disguise or abandoned homes in remote areas for the relative safety of the cities. According to the best calculations a total of 600–750 Jews were done to death after the war, by Poles.¹⁶

For a brief, euphoric period the Central Committee of Polish Jews believed that notwithstanding the disorder there was a chance of reconstructing Jewish life in a new Poland under a progressive regime. Efforts and resources, mainly from the AJJDC, were devoted to schooling, health and welfare services, as well as cultural activities. But it was always an uphill struggle. The challenge was exemplified by the battle to retrieve Jewish children who had been placed with Christian families or in convents during the period of deportations. After the war the central committee set about recovering those whose identity and location were known, roughly 2,500. Where a parent or close relative was involved (about 10 per cent of cases) it was relatively easy to succeed, although ‘financial compensation’ was almost always demanded. When Jewish agencies made the approach it was often necessary to go to litigation. In either case, the cost of recovering children spiralled from 15,000 zlotys per child in 1945 to 50,000 zlotys a year later. By 1946, 239 orphans had been reclaimed for the Jewish community at a cost of 4.5 million zlotys. Rabbi Kahane, who had survived in Lwow, and the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, who visited Poland, pleaded with Catholic Church leaders to instruct their flock to hand back Jewish children – but their appeals were ignored. The effort was further hindered by competition between secular Zionist organizations and religious rescuers, such as the British-based Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld. In any case, the arduous work of rebuilding Jewish life was suddenly rendered futile by the recurrence of pogroms on Polish soil.¹⁷

There had been an outbreak of collective anti-Jewish violence in Rzeszow in June 1945, after which 200 Jews abandoned the town. That attack had been triggered by an accusation of ritual murder. Two months later a mob in Cracow, inflamed by rumours that Jews had killed a Christian child, attacked the Kupa Synagogue. The attackers included Polish militiamen. One woman died in this incident and five other people were wounded. Nevertheless, these assaults lacked the resonance of the violence that claimed forty-two Jewish lives in Kielce on 4 July 1947. The target was a Jewish communal building where Jews were accused of concealing and slaughtering a Christian youth. In fact it housed over a hundred Jewish refugees, but despite the absurdity of the charge the local law officers did nothing to prevent repeated assaults, murder and looting. The assailants included police officials as well as armed workers. Conversely, the militia confiscated weapons from Jews in the hostel even though they had permits to carry them. When Yitzhak Zuckerman in Warsaw got news of the pogrom he armed himself and went to investigate. As he arrived ‘bodies of Jews killed on the roads were brought in. I saw pregnant women whose stomachs were ripped open.’ For him as for many other Jews who had vacillated in answer to the question whether to stay or to go, this was the answer. The phrase on everyone’s lips was ‘men geyt’, meaning ‘we’re off’. Zuckerman focused on evacuating the survivors of the atrocity and then dedicated himself to organizing emigration from Poland. The lacklustre response of the authorities and the attitude of the Church, which blamed Jewish communists, the so-called Zydo-Kommuna, for the tragedy, were as much an incentive to go as the horror itself. Over the next four months 100,000 Polish Jews streamed across the borders into Hungary and Czechoslovakia, making their way to Jewish DP camps in the American zone of Germany. Another 60,000 followed over the following three years. This exodus effectively extinguished the Jewish revival in Poland even before the Communist Party decided to clamp down on autonomous Jewish activity. Conversely, the influx into Germany transformed the camps and gave added salience to the plight of the Jewish DPs.¹⁸

In December 1945 there were only about 1,800 children in the Jewish DP camps of Germany and Austria. One month after the Kielce pogrom the number reached 16,000 and by the end of the year there were 26,500 Jewish children in the US zone alone. The Polish Jews who had been exiled to the USSR had departed and come back as family units. Although conditions in places such as Kazakhstan were harsh it was possible to preserve family life, marry, and have children. Now these Polish Jews brought their families to Germany, creating new demands on the relief agencies and also generating new possibilities. The overall Jewish population rose to 141,000 in the American zone and 50,000 in the British zone during 1946, peaking at about 190,000 in Germany plus some 60,000 in other refugee centres. Although the vast majority of the Jewish DPs were now Polish, only a small proportion had actually endured German camps and ghettos. All the same, they wanted to leave Europe and fixated on reaching either Palestine or America. Unable to work and unwilling to integrate into German society – even if they had been welcome, which they were not – they frittered away time in the camps, raising the spectre of ‘demoralization’. Zuckerman observed caustically that ‘Life in the camps was degenerate, a life of idleness supported by charity.’ At the end of the year the lawyer and Zionist politician Zorach Warhaftig wrote that ‘It can frankly be stated that eighteen months after the liberation the war is not yet over for European Jewry.’¹⁹

The dramatic expansion of the Jewish DP population fortified demands for the British to allow the refugees to settle in Palestine. After the Harrison report, the British government had approached the Americans to set up a joint committee to look into the Jewish DP problem and suggest solutions. They hoped that it would draw the Americans into the Palestine imbroglio and help relieve the pressure on them to solve it on their own accord. Between November 1945 and May 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry visited DP camps and Jewish communities across Europe taking evidence, but the outcome was a bitter disappointment to Whitehall. A majority of members endorsed Harrison’s findings and recommended the emigration of 100,000 Jews to Palestine. As more and more Polish Jews arrived in western Germany the pressure built up. Palestinian emissaries of Hamossad Le’aliyah Bet, the branch of the Haganah responsible for covert immigration, along with members of the Jewish Brigade, became increasingly active, channelling the new arrivals to ports in Italy and southern France where they embarked on rickety ships bound for the Jewish national home. In response, the Royal Navy strengthened its blockade of Palestine and the British government announced that illegal immigrants would be deported to camps on Cyprus. The tough new policy was a public relations disaster. World opinion was revolted by the fate of over 4,000 Jews on the ship Exodus, which had been purchased by the Haganah. It was intercepted by the navy on 18 July 1947. Newsreels showed Jews, only recently freed from Hitler’s grip, being manhandled off Exodus and onto another vessel that took them back to Europe, eventually disembarking them in Hamburg – of all places.²⁰

The camps on Cyprus presented a no less distressing image to the world. Nearly forty shiploads (carrying a total of 50,000 migrants) were consigned to two massive camps, one at Caraolos, close to Famagusta, and the other at Dekhelia, near Larnaca. At their peak capacity, 32,000 Jews were interned there. They lived in Nissan huts or in tents, baking during the summer and shivering in the winter. In an effort to alleviate conditions the AJJDC expended $30,000 per month on aid workers, food and supplies. In April 1947 some 10,000 internees took part in an open-air celebration of Passover. The British officers and guards were sympathetic on the whole, but they tried to prevent escapes and insisted on using armoured cars to escort groups of children going to nearby beaches for a swim. Despite the benign regimen 400 Jews were buried on the island, just 165 miles from ‘the promised land’. Although 750 each month were permitted to make the short, final hop to Palestine, there was no disguising the fact that the British now held more Jews behind barbed wire than the Germans had done ten years previously.²¹

British endeavours to bar the Jews from Palestine not only backfired in the short term, they were futile. The Jewish inhabitants of the Yishuv were now in a state of open revolt and the security forces were unable to maintain order. After a last attempt to crush resistance using military force in early 1947, the British renounced the mandate and prepared to hand Palestine over to the United Nations. A special commission of the UN set up to determine the future of Palestine recommended partition, a solution that won majority support at the UN general assembly the following November. British troops pulled out in May 1948 and the Jewish leadership under David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel. With the way now open to unrestricted immigration the DP camps decanted their populations into the new state. Around 100,000 Jews arrived from Europe between June and December 1948. A quarter of a million immigrated the following year, including tens of thousands from Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. Although some 30,000 Jews remained in DP centres in West Germany, too old or sick to move again or unwilling to start a new life in the Jewish state, the liminal world of the camps ended.²²

Meanwhile, American opinion on immigration shifted fundamentally – although not out of sympathy for Europe’s stranded Jews. Rather, change was driven by anti-communism and sympathy for DPs who claimed they could not return home for fear of persecution by the Soviets. In June 1948, Congress passed the first Displaced Persons Act, opening the way for 200,000 homeless Europeans to settle in the United States over two years. However, the Act stipulated that one third should be farmers and that nearly half had to originate from the Baltic states. Despite this blatant discrimination the Act marked a fundamental break with previous immigration policy. On 23 October 1948, the passenger ship SS General Black carried 813 Jews into New York, the first to arrive under the new dispensation. Eventually, nearly 140,000 would make their way to America.²³

For the Jews who chose to remain in Europe, the post-war years were almost as beset and disillusioning as they were for those who fought to emigrate. They just had different battles to fight. Although their fate was no longer shaped by German militarism and interstate warfare, it was buffeted by civil strife and the fast-developing ‘cold war’ between the western allies and the USSR.

Years of persecution and official Jew-hatred had not softened attitudes towards the Jews in the victorious and liberated countries. On the contrary, the racist and anti-Semitic outlook fostered by Nazi propaganda persisted, while national feeling scaled new heights. The victors and the peoples of liberated Europe constructed mythic versions of the war that were a necessary foundation for peacetime reconstruction. In these accounts the victors had fought a ‘good war’: they had saved the Jews and therefore owed them nothing. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands the post-war governments cultivated the impression that everything bad that had occurred between 1940 and 1945 had been caused by the Germans. With the exception of a few collaborators the people had been united in resisting the occupiers and had suffered terribly for this defiance: thousands had been executed, imprisoned and deported. In Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam the return of forced labourers sent to the Reich, POWs, and resistance fighters consigned to the concentration camps was stage-managed as a celebration of collective endurance and heroism. According to the historian Pieter Lagrou, the concentration camps became the ‘cultural symbol of this narrative of national martyrdom’. The fate of the Jews did not fit well into this story; in fact, it was a dissonant element that raised awkward questions about how people had actually behaved under the occupation. Furthermore, in mid-1945 relatively little was known about the extermination centres in comparison to knowledge of the concentration camps to which dissident west Europeans had been sentenced. The Jewish survivors who trickled back to France, Belgium and the Netherlands could speak eloquently of the difference, but their number was minuscule set against the flood of POWs, conscripted workers and ‘political deportees’. In any case, since Jews had been deported just for being Jewish and not because they had resisted the occupier their plight did not contribute to the myth of resistance and national suffering. Sensing this, many Jews chose to depict themselves as victims of fascism and to frame their post-war testimony or memoirs in such a way as to play down their Jewishness and the specific reasons for their persecution. As Lagrou writes, ‘victims of racial persecution often preferred to see themselves as being victimised for their opinions rather than for what the persecutor had defined as their race … persecution seemed more acceptable if it was somehow occasioned by a choice or an action or an opinion made by the victim’. Consequently, in the crucial months during which each nation’s war story was crystallizing, the particular fate of its Jews was blurred, occluded or entirely suppressed. This distortion would seriously hamper contemporaneous efforts to obtain justice and redress for the Jewish victims of persecution and genocide.²⁴

In France, the Jewish community re-emerged in the summer of 1944 following the liberation, but it immediately faced obstacles to reintegration and restitution. The provisional government abolished all the edicts passed by the Germans and the Vichy regime, but foreign and stateless Jews still laboured under discrimination. French men and women who had purchased property expropriated from the Jews rallied to defend what they considered had been obtained in good faith. The Association of Owners of Aryanized Property lobbied the authorities and organized demonstrations punctuated by anti-Semitic slogans. Jews attempting to recover businesses and homes were met with violence. In one incident in Paris in April 1945, six Jews were wounded and several arrested by police who took the side of the mob. Yet the Free French leadership, and later the provisional government under Charles de Gaulle, was reluctant to uphold the claims of dispossessed Jews for fear of alienating support at a febrile political moment. Instead they counselled the Jews to be patient and discreet.²⁵

The victims did not entirely heed this admonition. In order to strengthen their voice, the Jews in France finally overcame their historic differences and formed a unified representative body, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF). The new body campaigned for compensation for those who had lost property and livelihoods, and demanded citizenship for foreign Jews as well as those who had fought for France. CRIF also took on the task of recovering Jewish children from convents and the homes of Christians. As in Poland this often necessitated legal action. None of this activity would have been possible without aid from the AJJDC: the Jewish population was largely impoverished and its institutions were in ruins, so AJJDC agents played a major role in the rebuilding.²⁶

Notwithstanding the straitened circumstances, the CDJC continued to collect material pertaining to the Vichy regime and the occupation. As in Poland, the work of documentation was keyed into the search for justice. Billig and Poliakov moved temporarily to Nuremberg to assist the French delegation at the International Military Tribunal in the prosecution of Nazi crimes against humanity. In the process they accumulated a mass of records that provided the basis for a stream of publications from 1946 to 1949. The CDJC also published a monthly journal, Le Monde Juif, which carried the first fruits of historical research as well as reports by survivors. But only 2,500 out of the 76,000 Jews deported from France came home and their story was marginalized by the officially propagated myth of resistance. While militants sent to the camps received immediate financial compensation, Jews had to wait years for any assistance from the state.²⁷

The first post-liberation government in Belgium seemed oblivious to what had befallen the Jews under German occupation and refused to treat Jews differently from other citizens. Foreign-born Jews who surfaced from hiding, especially Germans, were subjected to internment as enemy aliens. Illegal Jewish immigrants were actually expelled. Stateless Jews as well as foreigners, who still comprised the majority of the Jewish inhabitants, found themselves excluded from compensation for war damage. However, all of the 5,900 Jewish deportees who returned did initially receive state support thanks to the sympathetic outlook of the communist minister of the interior. Grants were also extended to 2,791 orphaned Jewish children. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church and many foster parents contested efforts by the Jewish community to retrieve them. Belgian Jews resorted to the legal system to rectify this grievance, only to find that the courts usually rejected claims based on racial or religious grounds. Orthodox Jews showed less patience for legal means; the Vaad Hatzalah used bribery and even abductions to get orphans back. The report of the official Commission on War Crimes, published in 1948, gave an accurate account of what had happened to the Jews in Belgium, but it came too late to have much practical effect. By spring 1946 anti-communism and the Cold War had produced a rightward tilt in politics. Xenophobic and right-wing Catholic politicians accused the Jews of ‘impertinence’. Sections of the press depicted foreign Jews as an alien presence and blamed them for the black market. The benefits that had been extended to foreign-born deportees and orphans were rescinded. Jewish victims only gained recognition from the state if they had engaged in resistance activity. The historian Frank Caestecker concludes that ‘The heritage of genocide was hardly felt in public policy.’²⁸

Just over 16,000 Jews survived the occupation in hiding in the Netherlands. They were joined by 5,450 deportees – including nearly 1,000 who never went further than Westerbork. The Jewish population had sustained catastrophic losses and the basis for communal existence was virtually erased. Yet the government-in-exile saw no need to make special provision for the Dutch Jews. Ironically, those who had risked their lives to protect their Jewish neighbours were most insistent that religious and racial categories should be banished from policy-making in the post-war world. This reluctance had other, less elevated motives. Many Dutch suspected that the ones who avoided deportation and death had purchased their good fortune and possessed hidden riches. Those who trickled back from eastern Europe were treated with disdain due to their poor physical and mental condition. There was scant understanding of what they had been through and little sympathy from Dutch people in the north of the country who had themselves endured a final winter of extreme privation. Camp survivors who reached the border were routinely detained along with Dutchmen who had gone to Germany voluntarily to work and sometimes found themselves being screened alongside members of the Dutch Nazi movement, the NSB. When the government set in train measures to compensate victims of German persecution, articles appeared in the press warning Jews not to strain the patience of those to whom they ought to feel gratitude. Anti-Jewish feeling in the immediate post-war period reached such a pitch that citizens who had hidden Jews preferred not to advertise their bravery.²⁹

Dutch Jewish survivors faced particular difficulties in two areas. The despoliation of the community was almost total. Those who remained had to recover their own property and try to redeem heirless assets for use by the community – which was utterly bereft. Yet thousands of homes, businesses and parcels of land that had been expropriated, as well as millions of securities transferred to the Lippmann–Rosenthal pseudo-bank, were sold on to buyers who could argue genuinely or tactically that they had made the purchases in good faith. It would take years for Dutch Jews, working through government restitution agencies and the courts, to recover a fraction of the wealth systematically stolen from them. An even more sensitive and emotive issue was the fate of just over 2,000 Jewish war orphans in the custody of Christian foster families or institutions. The government established a commission to rule on these cases, but the Jewish members were in a minority and found themselves helpless when the chairman, Dr Gesina H. J. van der Molens, questioned the assumption that the deceased parents, who might not have been particularly religious, would have wanted their offspring removed from a Christian environment. ‘According to some people’, she declared, ‘they must be given back to the Jewish community. In most cases the children were entrusted by their parents to resistance workers, and in other cases they, on their own, spirited them from the Germans. Does the Jewish community have the right to demand these children? Did these children really belong to the Jewish community alone?’ The Jewish participants were so frustrated by the outcome of case after case that in mid-1946 they walked out of the commission. A plea by Chief Rabbi Herzog had no more effect and in June 1949 the community was driven to stage public protests. Long after the war was over the fate of Jewish war orphans continued to fester.³⁰

Unusually for western Europe, the Jews in the Netherlands also set up an honour court to hear allegations of Jewish collaboration with the Germans. The defendants were David Cohen and Abraham Asscher, along with two dozen other members of the Jewish council. Asscher refused to recognize the proceedings, but Cohen (who was under pressure from the university where he had resumed his teaching position) fought to vindicate his conduct. In November 1947 the court ruled that the two men had behaved reprehensibly and punished them with exclusion from the community. They were then threatened with criminal charges by the body that the Dutch government had set up to deal with collaborators. The embarrassment caused by the ensuing public debate, and the relish with which some Dutch commentators appeared to offload responsibility for the destruction of the community onto the Jews themselves, inspired the honour court to revise its verdict. This was by no means the end of the controversy. The moral dilemma faced by the council would echo on in the work of survivor historians, like Jacob Presser, for years to come.³¹

A fierce desire for justice and retribution animated Jews across the shattered continent. In the chaotic interlude between liberation and the re-establishment of order some survivors wreaked their own private revenge on local Germans. Jurek Kestenberg confessed to David Boder, a researcher from the United States who interviewed survivors in the DP camps in 1946, that he hunted down SS men and abused the German population in the vicinity of Buchenwald. Another interviewee, Benjamin Piskorz, recalled that ‘I took a bit of revenge on the Germans.’ He killed men and children. ‘I also did some things with the Germans’ children as the SS men did in Majdanek with the … Jewish children.’ He explained he did it ‘because the hate within me was so great’. Many years later, in his memoir, Yitzhak Zuckerman admitted that ‘I was convinced that revenge operations should be carried out’ but he preferred to execute individual war criminals rather than take indiscriminate action against any old German. By early 1945 he relented: ‘I wouldn’t issue any more death sentences.’ Members of the Jewish Brigade in Austria and southern Germany also went after known SS personnel, although the extent of their extra-judicial activity remains vague. Aba Kovner, the leader of the Jewish partisan group that formed in Vilnius in early 1942, dedicated himself to mounting a major revenge operation. With other members of his unit he formed a group called ‘Nakam’, revenge in Hebrew, and set about obtaining enough toxin to kill thousands by contaminating the water system of a German metropolis. Their symbolic objective was Nuremberg. In the event the plan failed, although members of the groups succeeded in poisoning the bread delivered to a German POW camp, causing some fatalities. More typically, Jewish DPs treated the German population as legitimate targets for casual abuse (especially women), theft, and exploitation through the black market.³²

The thirst for retribution was barely slaked by the outcome of war crimes trials held under Allied jurisdiction. The first of these was conducted under Royal Warrant by the British. During September–November 1945 a military court tried Josef Kramer, former commandant of Auschwitz, and over forty other members of the Camp SS, plus a few kapos taken into custody at Bergen-Belsen. In many ways this trial set the pattern for the others to follow. The charges ranged widely and certainly did not focus on the persecution and mass murder of Jews: the Allied prosecutors were chiefly interested in offences against Allied military personnel and citizens of Allied countries. What the Germans did to German Jews, for example, fell outside their jurisdiction. Jewish survivors gave evidence, but they were only a fraction of those who testified and the particularities of Judenpolitik got lost amidst the welter of exploitation and abuse that the Germans heaped on occupied populations. The same dilemma was writ large when it came to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.³³

The first assembly of delegates representing Jewish DPs, which met at St Ottilien in July 1945, passed a resolution calling on the Allies to ensure that Jews were included in the process under which justice would be exacted on the Germans by the victorious Allied powers. That never happened. The Allies had sufficient difficulty resolving their different approaches to a post-hostilities reckoning without complicating matters by involving Jewish jurists. Initially the British did not want to hold any trials at all and favoured the perfunctory investigation and summary execution of senior Nazis and members of the SS who fell into their hands. The Americans showed little interest in a judicial accounting until late 1944 when they were persuaded by the Russians that exemplary justice was called for. The four great powers were also edged in the direction of trials by the governments-in-exile which, since 1943, had been cataloguing German crimes. Their persistence led to the creation of the UN War Crimes Commission that was intended to prepare cases against the perpetrators, although it was effectively sidelined by the British and the Americans. During the summer of 1945 Allied legal experts met in London to resolve these varied demands and came up with the charter for a tribunal to be presided over by American, British, Soviet and French judges, with legal teams from each country taking responsibility for a portion of the charges. They agreed on four chief counts: conspiracy against peace, the waging of aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The men to be put on trial comprised those at the apex of the civil and military echelon who had been captured and remained alive. They included Göring, Wilhelm Frick, Robert Ley, Hans Frank, Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Baldur von Schirach, Albert Speer, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Julius Streicher. Neurath, Hjalmar Schacht, and Rudolf Hess, who had been out of the picture since the late 1930s, were also selected for trial along with Keitel and Jodl of the army high command and Admiral Dönitz. These men had presided over or fed into most aspects of Judenpolitik at one time or another, and yet there was no specific charge relating to crimes against the Jews.³⁴

The World Jewish Congress tried to convince the chief American prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, who oversaw the preparation of the trial, that the annihilation of the Jewish people should be treated separately. They were assured that it would be subsumed under the newly created and already somewhat controversial count of crimes against humanity. One element of this count was genocide, newly defined by the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who had successfully lobbied the Americans to adopt his jurisprudential innovation. But Jackson refused to permit Chaim Weizmann to deliver an address to the tribunal coherently setting out the extent of German crimes against the Jews. Consequently, the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich and the implementation of genocide emerged fitfully over the duration of the proceedings between November 1945 and October 1946.³⁵

This was not for lack of awareness or information. In his opening peroration, Jackson referred to the ‘common plan to exterminate the Jews’ and asserted that it ‘was so methodically and thoroughly pursued that [it] … largely succeeded’. Otto Ohlendorf was examined about the Einsatzgruppen operations. Dieter Wisliceny disclosed information about Eichmann and the workings of office IVB4 of the Gestapo, in effect summarizing the ‘final solution’. Bach-Zelewski was quizzed on ‘anti-partisan’ operations. The prosecution read into the court record Jürgen Stroop’s report on the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, showing slides of the photographs that illustrated it. Rudolf Höss appeared as a defence witness for Kaltenbrunner, but described the mass-murder operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A French prisoner, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (who had testified at the Belsen trial), gave the inmates’ perspective on the killing centre. A German engineer, Heinrich Graebe, gave a graphic account of a mass shooting in the Ukraine, all the more powerful for coming from a non-Jewish source. A handful of Jewish witnesses described Treblinka, Majdanek, and the fate of the Vilnius ghetto. Jacob Robinson, a lawyer attached to the World Jewish Congress, attended unofficially and supplied extensive statistical data amassed by the WJCs Institute of Jewish Affairs, which had been set up for the purpose of charting the depredations against the Jews. The official delegation from Poland passed on the results of the investigations into the extermination camps and the destruction of the Polish Jews. Léon Poliakov and Joseph Billig fed in German documents that gave evidence for the deportation of Jews from France. Rudolf Kasztner submitted the report of the Budapest Jewish rescue committee (originally prepared for the World Zionist Congress), giving fine detail on Eichmann’s activity in Hungary and the disaster of the Hungarian Jews. Numerous Jewish lawyers, interrogators, psychologists, researchers, and translators laboured in support of the proceedings – including the Hollywood producer Budd Schulberg, who was in charge of preparing film evidence of Nazi crimes. And yet, the numbing detail presented day after day on a panoply of issues, and the relentless focus on the German conspiracy to wage war, obstructed a clear understanding of German policy towards the Jews and a nuanced appreciation of their fate.³⁶

The Jewish population of Europe followed the trial avidly but greeted the outcome with mixed emotion. Dos Naye Lebn, a newspaper published in Lodz, proclaimed on 4 October 1946 that ‘We have been overwhelmed with feelings of joy about the justice and joyous, holy revenge when we read about the death sentences for the twelve main murderers …’ By contrast, Le Monde Juif for November 1946 wondered at the sparing treatment accorded to the fate of the Jews in the final judgement. Moyshe Feigenbaum, a leading light of the DP historical commissions, anticipated that it would be up to the Jews to supplement the trial record with their own experiences. The Nuremberg documents ‘show only how the murderers behaved towards us, how they treated us and what they did with us. Do our lives in those nightmarish days consist only of such fragments? On what basis will the historian be able to create an image of what happened in the ghettos? … Therefore each testimony of a saved Jew, every song from the Nazi era, every proverb, every anecdote and joke, every photograph is for us of tremendous value.’³⁷

The partial comprehension of German anti-Jewish policy and its unprecedented character also account for the difficulty that Jews had in the parallel legal process of obtaining restitution and reparation. In 1945 there was simply no legal framework for dealing with state-sponsored larceny coupled with genocide on an international scale: it was necessary to invent a whole new language and to write new laws to deal with the claims of the living and the dead. Jewish organizations in the free world had begun mapping the extent of Jewish material losses during the war: the WJC established the Institute of Jewish Affairs and held a special conference in November 1944 to set out Jewish claims against the Germans and their partners in crime. A year later, Weizmann presented a memorandum to the Four-Power Conference in Paris that was considering the entire question of reparations to the countries exploited and plundered by the Germans. Nehemiah Robinson, Jacob’s brother, set up an office of the WJC in Europe to press these demands. The Paris peace conference in November–December 1945 agreed to create a fund to compensate the victims of Nazi persecution and acknowledged that Jews would merit paramount consideration. A follow-up convention on reparations in June 1946 allotted over $50 million for the resettlement of non-repatriable displaced persons, including Jews. The funds were to come from ‘non-monetary gold’ discovered by the Allies at the end of the war in underground storage depots where the Germans had stashed plunder. The term ‘non-monetary gold’ was used to distinguish it from bullion that had been held by national banks, most of which was traced and returned; it was a euphemism for the residue of objects and personal belongings, such as wedding rings, smelted by the Germans. It included dental gold. Money would also be generated by the liquidation of heirless Jewish property and the disposal of sequestered German assets in neutral countries. Although 90 per cent of this sum was directed to the AJJDC and the Jewish Agency, it covered a fraction of the sums expended on the resettlement of Jews who left the Reich before 1939 and would not go far to cover the costs of maintaining the Jews in DP camps.³⁸

The great powers refused to intervene at the level of restitution in particular countries or individual reparations. In the American and French zones the respective military governments passed laws to enable Jews to recovery property or receive compensation, leaving it to local agencies to work out, and then implement, the details. The British, afraid that the activities of the Zionist movement would benefit from recovered wealth, declined to act at all until 1949. As a result, the process was extremely uneven and riven with conflict. Survivors in West Germany submitted thousands of claims, although often the property in question had been reduced to rubble by bombing or fighting. In May 1947, Jewish organizations in the USA, Britain and France cooperated to set up the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) specifically to identify and evaluate heirless property; but the task was massive and there were huge problems of documentation. The JRSO abandoned any thought of obtaining recompense for household furnishings and personal items, lodging a universal claim based on a rough estimate of what had been plundered from the deportees from the Reich. While the Allies sent experts to recover treasures looted from national collections, it was left to an ad hoc body, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, to track down artworks, devotional objects and rare books purloined from Jewish institutions. The team included the historian Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt. It achieved a great deal, but the thousands of paintings and antiques once owned by Jewish dealers and collectors or that once decorated Jewish homes across Europe lay beyond its purview. Unless there were survivors able to begin the arduous work of restitution this loot remained in the hands of the thieves and their beneficiaries.³⁹

In Italy, which had changed sides during the war, Jewish efforts to achieve restitution were hampered by the myth that the country had never embraced the racial persecution of the Jews. Instead, every evil was blamed on the German occupation, 1943–5. No Italians faced trial for the despoliation, deportation or murder of Jews. Survivors had to go through a complicated legal process to prove that a property or business had been expropriated from them. The agency that handled such cases was the same one that had managed the dispossession of the Jews in the first place. Even if they were successful, Italian Jews had to pay back-taxes on a business or a residence and the costs of administering it while it was confiscated. When Jews who had been members of the Fascist Party appealed to get their jobs back they were told that as fascists they were disqualified from any compensation.⁴⁰

Even in the United Kingdom the war cast a perverted shadow over attempts by Jews to retrieve what was rightfully theirs. Hundreds of Jews from Axis countries found that their assets were frozen by the Custodian of Enemy Property. Afterwards those still alive usually succeeded in recovering their property; but many more who had entrusted a portion of their wealth to British financial institutions had perished. Instead of seeking heirs or handing the property to representative Jewish organizations, the British government appropriated the heirless assets and used them in a succession of bilateral compensation deals with other countries. Swiss banks would perpetrate a similar deception on a much, much larger scale.⁴¹

The lack of attention that the western allies paid to retribution, restitution and reparation was symptomatic of the swift redrawing of international relations in the post-war world. Already during the Potsdam peace conference in summer 1945 the strains were apparent between the western allies and the USSR. Anticipating the time when they would need Germany as part of the anti-Soviet alliance, by mid-1946 the British and the Americans were keener to promote reconstruction in their respective zones and to restore morale amongst the German population than to punish them and remind them of past misdeeds. For the same reasons, the Americans relented in their efforts to make neutral countries – chiefly Switzerland, Sweden and Spain – disgorge heirless Jewish assets or properties acquired at knock-down rates thanks to Aryanization. The Soviets were no less eager to win over the Germans. They knew that benign policies were more likely to legitimate and foster rule by the East German communists than continuing recrimination and ruination. The Jews were the great losers in this strategic repositioning. Even Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine was adversely affected. As the western allies mustered their resources to counter what they perceived as the threat of Soviet expansion, the British became more attached to Palestine as a strategic base in the Middle East and less willing to alienate Arab feelings by permitting mass Jewish immigration.⁴²

Jews in the fast-crystallizing Soviet bloc became increasingly isolated. In 1946 there were only about 6,000 Jews in the Soviet zone of Germany, including 2,500 of mixed parentage. They were embraced by the category of ‘victims of fascism’ but did not get any special assistance. The official association of victims of Nazism offered some help reconstituting communities and for a few years aid trickled through from the AJJDC, but they did not benefit from the restitution of private or communal property. Unusually for German Jews, the community did establish an honour court at the synagogue in Oranienburgerstrasse, which had survived partially intact. It focused on the role of Jews who bought their own lives by betraying Jews in hiding in Berlin. No fewer than sixty-five were tried, of whom half were acquitted. Those found guilty were excluded from the community and denied access to welfare.⁴³

Stalin allowed democracy to survive in Czechoslovakia for three years after the Red Army liberated Prague. During this period nearly 30,000 Jews returned to Slovakia from camps, forced labour and hiding. A smaller number came back to Bohemia and Moravia. But the status of survivors was confused. German Jews liberated in Theresienstadt were slated for expulsion as enemy aliens. The government refused to reinstate the pre-war treatment of Jews as a national minority, which meant that they had to struggle against generic legislation for war compensation that ignored the total devastation they had endured. Often the officials who handled claims were the same men who staffed expropriation agencies under the Germans or for the Slovak regime. Efforts to retrieve property frequently provoked a violent backlash. There were anti-Jewish riots in Topalcany in September 1945 and in Bratislava in August 1946 following the promulgation of a restitution law. Paradoxically though, the Prague government adopted a strongly pro-Zionist stance. This accorded with the conviction in Moscow that a Jewish state in Palestine would be dominated by socialists. Consequently, Czechoslovakia became a corridor for Jews fleeing Poland and the authorities allowed the AJJDC to provide aid en route. However, by 1948, Moscow was changing its tune and the atmosphere chilled in this respect too. Eventually over 18,000 Czech Jews joined the exodus to Israel.⁴⁴

In Hungary some 100,000 Jews survived the siege of Budapest and the ghetto. They were completely stricken, though, and depended on financial aid from the AJJDC. Eventually tens of thousands more made their way back from the camps, bringing the total registered with the community to 180,000. The World Jewish Congress led the fight to restore their rights and recover their property, but it was a fruitless endeavour. Once the communists monopolized power the work of restitution ground to a halt and the community was subject to heavy taxation. However, the left-wing government tackled the trial of collaborators with gusto. Baky, Endre and Jaross were tried and executed, while hundreds of lesser perpetrators were subjected to investigation and various degrees of punishment.⁴⁵

A significant Jewish population remained in Romania, too. Around 50,000 deportees to Transnistria were left alive plus 65,000 Jews who had been uprooted from within the country. However, the post-Antonescu regime refused to allow back into the country Jews who could not prove that they were of Romanian birth. Tens of thousands remained trapped in the strip between the River Dneister and Soviet Ukraine, clamouring to emigrate. Eventually about 30,000 were permitted to leave for Israel. The remaining Romanian Jews received no compensation for their wartime ordeal and never recovered lost property. As in Hungary it suited the communists to stage trials of leading figures in the wartime government, notably Ion Antonescu, and a host of lesser officials. Crimes against the Jews featured in the accusations, but the scope and comprehensive nature of anti-Jewish measures were never spelled out clearly. The offence of anti-Semitism played second fiddle to the crime of being a fascist.⁴⁶

The fons et origo of policy towards the Jewish remnant in countries under Soviet domination was, of course, Moscow. By 1945, Stalin had no more use for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the authorities once again refused to differentiate the fate of the Jews from the rest of the population. In reports of German atrocities and the liberation of the camps, the official media referred to fascist crimes against Soviet citizens, even if victims had been struck only because they were Jewish. Survivors in the liberated western territories of the USSR had to rebuild without any support from the state and were permitted to function collectively only as religious communities. For a period synagogues served as the address and channel for relief from the AJJDC and Jews in the west. One of the first activities by these reconstituted communities was to rebury the dead or to mark mass graves with memorials. There was no equivalent to the historical commissions in the USSR, but since 1944, Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman had been recording testimony and collecting accounts by survivors in the wake of the advancing Red Army. They intended to publish these eye-witness statements and other evidence of the catastrophe in a ‘Black Book’. However, during 1948 almost all forms of Jewish communal activity were choked off. The leading Yiddish writers associated with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were shot and the ‘Black Book’ was suppressed. It would not be until the end of the Cold War and the opening of archives in the former USSR that the full scale of Jewish suffering and loss in the USSR would be researched, transforming perspectives on the fate of the Jews across the whole of Europe during the Second World War.⁴⁷