With help from a resistance group, a Greek Jew named Frederic Kakis was able to go underground in early 1943, and after German troops withdrew, he returned by boat to Salonika in the late autumn of 1944. Hardly had he arrived than he ran into thousands of pro-Communist demonstrators who were waving red flags and singing hymns to the legendary leader of the Bulgarian Communist movement, Georgi Dimitrov. An old man reassured the former exile: “You see these people? In a little while, when the British troops will come and start distributing food, these same people will shout ‘Long live the King!’” And that’s exactly what happened.
Together with his mother, who had also been rescued from the Nazis, Kakis sought out the houses his grandparents had owned. “What we found was shocking and devastating,” Kakis recalled. The buildings were missing shutters and roofing shingles, yet families were living in the buildings nonetheless. “The Germans encouraged the local residents to take over any home belonging to Jews,” he continued. “When we identified ourselves as the owners, we were greeted with hostility, and we were told that this was now their home and they were going to stay there. ‘We were here first. You go away and find another place to stay.’”1
When the British historian Cecil Roth visited Salonika in 1946, he reported dejectedly: “Everywhere one could see traces of loot. I found a child in the street sitting on a synagogue chair carved with a Hebrew inscription; I was given a fragment of a Sefer Torah which had been cut up as soles for a pair of shoes; I saw carts in the cemetery removing Hebrew tombstones, on the instructions of the Director of Antiquities for the province, for the repair of one of the local ancient churches.”2
The memories of the Jewish victims who survived the Holocaust show how brusquely gentiles showed them the door, not only in Salonika, but in Vienna; Vilnius; Oderberg, Czechoslovakia; and Eger, Hungary. Millions of Europeans had hoped that Jews would simply disappear, said nothing as people were deported, and profited from the things the deportees were forced to leave behind. As we have seen, the gentile populations in the countries occupied by Germany had also been harmed and traumatized and may have often not been fully in control of their actions. Nonetheless, everywhere Jews returned, they were rebuffed. The similarity of their stories illustrates a general truth: people were shocked when unexpected and unwanted Jews suddenly appeared on their doorsteps. Those who had taken possession of Jewish property believed that the former owners were dead. Indeed, they almost counted on it.
The Germans had laid the groundwork for such thinking in the period when they dominated the European continent. By distributing the belongings and property of Jewish deportees among local gentiles, the German masters made the latter complicit in their crimes, ensuring their silence and turning them into thieves and fencers of stolen goods. Hungarian archives still contain countless printed lists of articles of clothing, right on down to children’s socks, transferred from Jewish to non-Jewish families in 1944, a year of extreme privation. Even the names of the individual families, both Jewish and gentile, are recorded. Only very few people were able to extricate themselves from material complicity in the genocide of Jews or to admit that they had treated the survivors unfairly.
In the days of liberation in 1944 and 1945, most surviving Jews didn’t know that they were usually the only members of their families to have avoided the worst. They traveled under trying circumstances to the places they considered home, knocking on the doors of houses where they used to live and expecting a warm, perhaps even tearful welcome from their former neighbors and friends. They assumed they would find shelter, clothing, memories, human warmth, and, above all, information about what had happened to their parents, siblings, and children.
But what they encountered were desperate, war-battered people trying to make their way in the ruins of a devastated Europe—among them many small-time profiteers who had managed to secure a small advantage amid general chaos and death. They had moved into the homes of those deported, taken over their businesses, and divided up all their belongings, from the linen cupboards to the kitchen spoons. Those who returned, whose psyches were damaged in the worst possible ways, were greeted with obduracy, transparent excuses, greed, and, not infrequently, hatred. When they returned to their former homes, displaced Jews often quickly found out that they were, in fact, homeless.
When German soldiers entered the Austrian capital on March 12, 1938, 190,000 Jews lived there. Only around 2,000 of them survived in Vienna until April 30, 1945, most thanks to the loyalty and courage of what Hitler called their “Aryan” wives. In the remaining months of 1945, some 3,000 survivors returned from the concentration camps. Exhausted and incapable of working, they “first needed to undergo a process of healing before they were strong enough to be employed again.” That was how the leaders of the Israelite Cultural Community of Vienna described the situation in their “Activity Report for the Years 1945 to 1948.”3
The difficulties were many. Aerial bombardments that March and artillery fire in April had badly damaged many buildings belonging to the Jewish community, including its archive and registrar’s office. In the Jewish cemetery, 2,250 gravestones and 53 mausoleums had been destroyed. No sooner had the guns fallen silent than gentile Austrians began to style themselves as the first victims of the Nazi dictatorship, tacitly agreeing to keep mum about the past. In May 1947, the president of the Jewish cultural community, David Brill, wrote that “our homes and all that belongs to us are still in the possession of the thieves.” Community leaders also failed to get the Austrian government “to take an interest in the return of our brothers from the countries where they found asylum,” that is, the Viennese Jews wanted to come back, despite everything, to their former home city. Nevertheless, in April 1946 the elected leadership to the first provisional community tried to initiate a new beginning. As the report told, they “simply went about” rebuilding a new Israelite Cultural Community on the ruins of the old.
The first step was for the new board of directors to remove those functionaries who as members of the Eichmann-ordered Council of Elders of the Jewish Population had cooperated “all too willingly” with the Gestapo and the SS. The heads of the new community desperately looked for replacements, but “the reservoir from which one could draw was very small.” Until 1938, Vienna’s Jewish community had possessed and maintained dozens of schools, hospitals, old people’s homes, libraries, orphanages, and food banks. Poor Jews had been given shelter, Jewish culture and rites had been preserved, and the community had a “well-trained and experienced apparatus” of six hundred officials and employees at its disposal. On March 12, 1938, all these things were shattered.
On that day, the overwhelming majority of Christian Austrians had voted to be annexed by the Third Reich, and many of them had celebrated the occasion with anti-Semitic acts of torment such as making Jews scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes and then dumping the dirty water over their heads afterward. “Rubbing parties” were what the Viennese called their civic-minded miniature pogroms.
After the social groundwork had been laid, Adolf Eichmann and his minions began their own systematic anti-Semitic work. Piece by piece, they chipped away at the corpus of the Jewish community until nothing was left but a shell emptied of both people and property. In support of its formal dissolution in 1942, those in power cited a 1890 decree by Emperor Franz Joseph setting out the legal requirements of the Israelite religious community.4 In 1948, the reconstituted community’s presidium accurately described this legal act as follows: “The law stipulated that a religious community could be dissolved if it is, for material reasons, unable to fulfill its duties. That was the case with the Israelite Cultural Community.”
During the Night of Broken Glass pogroms of November 1938, the vanguard of rioters claiming to represent popular rage demolished ninety-four Viennese synagogues and places of worship. A mere accident spared the central community temple on Seitenstettengasse from complete destruction. The outside walls remained intact while the interior was “the very image of a heap of rubble.” Amid the devastation and general need, Holocaust survivors succeeded in carrying out their first act of liberation. On April 2, 1946, the one hundredth anniversary of its establishment, they reconsecrated their temple. They inscribed in Hebrew the fourth verse of the one hundredth Psalm above its door: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.”
The city had no rabbi. A community supervisor named Isidor Öhler stepped in to conduct services. Vienna Mayor Theodor Körner attended the ceremony, which was broadcast by Austrian radio throughout Europe and the rest of the world. In the subsequent memorial ceremony for the founders of the synagogue, the participants unveiled a marble tablet also containing a Hebrew inscription: “In memory of the men, women and children who lost their lives in the fateful years 1938–1945.” On the first day of Passover, the community opened a kosher kitchen. A mikveh followed in 1946.
At the end of the first postwar year, 802 Viennese Jews who had emigrated to Shanghai in 1938 and 1939 were scheduled to return. The migration department of the cultural community was responsible for the extensive preparations. It worked together with a committee consisting of family members and friends of the Shanghai refugees. Together they had to overcome the bureaucratic concerns of the Austrian Interior Ministry and the “anti-Semitic-inflected resistance” of the Foreign Ministry. In the end, the director of the migration department, Michael Kohn, summarized the results of the campaign with low-key sarcasm: “We were able to get the Austrian government to declare its willingness to allow Austrian citizens to enter the country.”
For its part, the Austrian government demanded subservience. Before they left China, the would-be returnees received a special form they had to sign in which they declared their loyalty to Austria. Only then did a member of the consulate from Vienna issue them travel visas. A mere eighteen months after the demise of the Third Reich, Austrians, the majority of whom had welcomed Hitler’s Germany and driven out and helped murder Austrian Jews, now demanded written declarations of loyalty from the very people they had humiliated, robbed, and ostracized.
After those who remained determined to return to Austria had provided their signatures, they were put onboard two American troop transport ships, and several weeks later they set foot on European soil in Marseilles and Naples. From there, in the middle of winter, the repatriated Jews traveled in unheated cattle cars, with minimal provisions, to the border crossing at Tarvis, Austria. The trip took a week.
Friends and relatives of the returnees anxiously awaited their arrival, “heading to the border or spending days and nights in a state of constant readiness.” By mid-February 1947, the wait was over. Mayor Körner went from cattle car to cattle car, greeting the returnees individually and telling them that “every single person was needed to rebuild the terribly devastated city.”5 The city housing authority, however, refused to provide these Austrians returning from Chinese exile with apartments and told community representatives that the returnees “could easily be accommodated in mass quarters.”
In June 1947, a further 208 Viennese Jews arrived, unannounced. They, too, had left Vienna in 1938 and 1939, heading for the Baltic territories or the Soviet Union. No sooner had the Third Reich, Romania, and Hungary launched their summer 1941 offensive against Russia than Soviet security forces arrested them as hostile aliens and transported them to the interior of the country, where they built a camp in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. There they dug coal and suffered through piercing cold in winter and pitiless heat in summer. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of people would disappear in Karaganda: Soviet criminals, alleged enemies of the state, Communist functionaries, deported Poles, Sinti, and Roma, Romanians, dissidents, those suspected of all manner of transgressions, German POWs, and German, Polish, Baltic, Russian, and Austrian Jews.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn described Karaganda as the biggest provincial capital in the “gulag archipelago.” The Jewish prisoner Joseph Kuszelewicz from Belarus, who had fled the Holocaust and joined the Red Army, was suddenly arrested one day in 1946 and sent to Karaganda. At first he ended up in the camp train station. There, as he would later write, the deportees were divided up into various groups and sent on their way through seemingly endless corridors of barbed wire into the dismal, impenetrably laid out world of the camp proper, which stretched on for dozens of kilometers.6
Viennese Jews were among the relatively privileged prisoners. They weren’t systematically murdered. Many of them died of malnutrition, frostbite, typhoid fever, dysentery, malaria, and tuberculosis, but their chances of survival were far higher than if they had fallen into German hands. In 1940, Menachem Begin, later Israeli prime minister, was taken from Soviet-annexed Lithuania to Siberia because the Soviet secret police considered him an “agent of British imperialism.” Looking back many years later, Begin wrote: “Compared with the general, colossal catastrophe, my unhappy fate was insignificant. During this catastrophe, the Soviet Union unexpectedly provided Jews with inestimable help. I will always remember that, and no Jew has the right to ever forget it.”7
On May 9, 1945, when the Jews in Karaganda learned of Germany’s capitulation, they fell into one another’s arms, weeping with happiness in the belief they were now free. They were wrong. The Soviet political commissions tersely informed them that their forced labor as vanquished German citizens had only just begun: “This is no day of joy for you. You will have to make up with your labor for what your people have done to the Russians.”8 The prisoners’ torment would go on for almost two years.
In Vienna, the Karaganda Jews were sent to “several very poor-quality homeless shelters” with forty beds to a room. The housing authority was responsible for this. By the end of February 1948, it had only managed to find apartments for 17 percent of the 1,393 Jews who returned to the Austrian capital. Those figures testify to the disregard in which the Jews were held. We need to recall that under Nazi leadership, the city administration had given 50,000 apartments owned or rented by Jews to gentile Viennese from 1938 to 1942, thereby, as Hitler noted with satisfaction “solving the shortage of living space” in the Austrian capital. After the war the authority, which was headed by Social Democrats, didn’t see anything wrong with allowing these people to continue living in the apartments. To its chagrin, the Jewish community was forced to acknowledge that the democratic political parties had refused to pass laws reversing “the National Socialist act of larceny.”
Historian Walter Grab first returned to his native city in 1956, eighteen years after he was forced to flee Vienna as a nineteen-year-old. While there he visited the building he grew up in. Out of what used to be six renters, only the Czech former superintendent was still living in the building, albeit on the fourth rather than the ground floor. Grab rang the bell, and the former superintendent’s wife opened the door. “Jesus, Mr. Grab has returned,” she exclaimed. After a few seconds she invited him to come in, whereupon he took a seat in the living room and asked who used to live in the apartment. It was an architect named Theodor Giesskann. When he heard the name, Grab understood that all the furniture was the Giesskanns’. The wife explained that the Giesskann family had “disappeared somehow” and that “the Nazis had given them this lovely apartment and the furniture in it.” Grab added: “At that point, a key turned in the door, and her husband, the former superintendent, stepped in.” He immediately recognized the visitor and hissed to his wife: “Don’t say a word!”9
In 1947 and 1948, at the start of the Cold War, the Soviets released most of their Austrian prisoners of war. The few Jews who had survived in the Austrian capital or had returned there now got to see how the Viennese government office treated former Wehrmacht soldiers. “Government officials began to adopt the strange position that the POWs were the returnees for whom everything had to be done and who could claim every sort of privilege, while our people were merely returning emigrants who had come back voluntarily, who shouldn’t have done so, and who in any case had no claim to any special treatment,” wrote Jewish community representatives. “They were helping Nazis or their enablers while our people were victims of Nazism—that’s something they chose to forget.”
By December 1947, the Israelite Cultural Community had twice as many members as it had eighteen months previously, just over 9,000 Jewish men, women, and children. Jewish religious life began to reawaken. In late April 1947, a requiem was held in the synagogue for Denmark’s deceased King Christian X, who had helped save the lives of 5,000 Jews in his country in 1943. “If you introduce the yellow Star of David in Denmark,” King Christian alone among the European heads of state said to his country’s German occupiers, “I and the entire royal family will wear it, too, with pride and dignity.” On June 8, the Vienna Synagogue held a memorial on the forty-third anniversary of the death of the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. On November 10, survivors came together to mourn the victims of the Night of Broken Glass and collected money for the “planting of an Austrian-style forest in Palestine.” On December 6, the “large and enthusiastic congregation” turned out in droves for a service expressing gratitude that the United Nations had agreed to the founding of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
Since the partition of Poland in 1795, Vilnius had been part of the Russian Empire. Between 1914 and 1921, everyday life there was characterized by war, revolution, and battles between nationalities and pogroms. These were followed by economic crises and quarrels about minorities. In Vilnius, as in many other places, social upheaval destroyed the traditional coexistence and rivalries of city inhabitants of various nationalities: Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews. In the First World War, German troops had occupied the city; when they withdrew, it was briefly controlled by the Poles and then the Soviets. In the war that commenced immediately afterward, the Poles emerged with the upper hand. In 1939, as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Vilnius again fell to the Soviet Union, and in the summer of 1940 it became part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1941 it was conquered by the Wehrmacht. In the summer of 1941, some 8,000 of Vilnius’s 220,000 Lithuanian Jews were able to flee to the center of the Soviet Union. Of those unable to run away, more than 200,000 were murdered. One hundred to 2,000 were able to go underground or survive as partisans in Lithuania.
One of them was Zahana Zuckermann-Stromsoe. In the fall of 2009, Israeli journalist Koby Ben-Simhon asked her for her opinion on the Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds, in which, in an inversion of history, Jews torture, beat to death, burn alive, and scalp Nazis. Zuckermann-Stromsoe found the film graphically violent and “really well done,” adding, “It cheered me to watch Nazis begging for their lives and getting a bit of a taste of their own cruelty.” Her own life had taken a very different course.
As a teenager she had survived the terror of the Vilnius ghetto and various camps. When Jews were forced on a death march, she begged in vain for her father’s life, hid in a sewer canal, and was forced to listen to the tread of Nazi boots above her head—much as a Jewish family at the start of Tarantino’s film does. “We were like rats,” she recalled. “No one who hasn’t been through the Holocaust can understand that, but that’s the way it was.” No sooner had she been liberated than she fled Europe as fast as she could. In Tel Aviv she started a new life and raised two children. In 2009, Zuckermann-Stromsoe took delight in her four grandchildren. “They are my true revenge,” she said.10
Of the 60,000 Jews who had lived in Vilnius in 1939 and had been part of the city’s character, several hundred reappeared in the summer of 1944. The returnees celebrated religious services in the badly damaged but still functional main synagogue. In accordance with the rules of their faith, they buried their desecrated and torn Torah scrolls. That fall, they opened a school and then a museum to exhibit the writings, pictures, and sculptures that the Jews of Vilnius, facing certain death, had buried or hidden behind walls so they would be preserved for posterity.
Other initiatives were blocked by the local populace. The Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) was prevented from being reestablished, Yiddish newspapers and radio programs were banned, and the Jewish choir prohibited from singing in public. By the summer of 1945, 4,000 Jews were once again living in the city. A short time later the Soviet-Lithuanian city council ordered the provisionally restored synagogue torn down. The site was used as a parking lot until a kindergarten was built there in 1964. The Jewish school had to shut down in 1948. Historian Solomon Atamuk writes: “On June 10, 1949, the Ministerial Council of the Lithuanian Socialist Soviet Republic ordered the Jewish museum in Vilnius closed. Many of the objects exhibited were transferred to other Lithuanian institutions, but most Jewish books were taken to paper factories to be recycled. In 1950, Jewish institutions for children were shut.”11 Local functionaries argued that no one needed anything Jewish, including Jewish culture, because Jewish was not a nationality. Jewishness, they said, was “nothing.”
At the same time, they changed the name of all streets recalling Vilnius’s Jewish past. Gone from the map were Gaon Street, named after the greatest Jewish intellectual in the region, and Straszuna Street, one of the city’s main commercial arteries, which commemorated Talmud scholar, cosmopolitan, and philanthropist Mathias Straszun. In 1952, city leaders in nearby Paneriai removed a memorial with a Yiddish inscription that remembered the 44,000 Jews who had been shot to death there.12 Whereas over the years Lithuania suppressed all evidence of murdered Jews, in 1960 a huge memorial was built in the city of Pirčiupiai for 119 Christian Lithuanians killed in a German revenge massacre in June 1944.
In the late Stalin era, Jews were systematically defamed as treacherous cosmopolitans. In a show trial of Jewish doctors in Moscow in 1952, two prominent Lithuanian physicians were summoned before the court. Stalin’s death in March 1953 brought a swift end to the proceedings and spared the alleged “murderers in white lab coats” any further consequences. To get a better handle on the public mood concerning Jews, agents of the Lithuanian secret service evaluated private letters gentile inhabitants of Vilnius sent abroad in this period. They recorded statements like these:
“Jewish barbers don’t shave non-Jews as closely and try to poison them with cream.”
“These Israelites want to strangle us. They have killed a number of excellent people. They’re ripe for the gallows at the very least.”
“Nothing good is to be expected from the Jews! The Germans didn’t annihilate them for no reason. In this area, that was rational.”
A Jewish citizen of Vilnius named E. M. Preissatshenko wrote: “I have no desire to go out into the streets. I imagine I will hear things like ‘They killed too few of them!’ Where will this end? It is a bitter blow for us Soviet Jews, responsible and loyal citizens of the Soviet Union, that we have to endure hostile looks just because we’re Jews.”
In the final twenty years of Soviet rule, more and more Lithuanian Jews emigrated to Israel and other countries in the West. A considerable number of state functionaries and gentile Lithuanians approved of this exodus. “Jews are leaving their apartments—now Lithuanians can move into them,” one person was quoted as saying. “Jews are giving up their jobs—that creates new opportunities for Lithuanians!” Others were openly or secretly “simply satisfied that Lithuania is becoming ‘Jew-free.’”13
RACHELA MARGOLIS, WHO was born in 1920, came from an affluent doctor’s family in Vilnius. In 1943 she fled the city ghetto and joined up with partisans. After the German occupiers were defeated, a Polish neighbor returned to Margolis some documents that her father, since murdered, had buried in his garden. Margolis found her student ID card and the addresses of people to whom her father had entrusted family possessions before the Vilnius ghetto was established in 1941.
Although she expected the worst, the young woman contacted the putative caretakers of her family property. “People had gotten used to regarding Jewish property as their own and often didn’t want to give it back,” she recalled. “The Jew, hungry and homeless, was left standing there empty-handed. After all, he had no witnesses.” One of the people Margolis went to see was an elderly woman who had been her father’s nanny. Rachela immediately recognized some of her wealthy family’s household effects but was given the brush-off: “I don’t know you. No doctor ever left anything with me for safekeeping. Off with you!” As a former partisan, Margolis was able to get help from the police, whereupon the old woman blamed her failing memory. Margolis took a few things—to remember her murdered family by.14
After the end of German occupation, a Christian woman named Ona Šimaitrė tried to help Jews recover their lost property but met with little success in Vilnius. “The people I asked were from various social classes, some were educated and some not, some were Lithuanians and some Poles, but they were all the same in one respect,” she remembered. “They would only surrender belongings taken from Jews under great pressure or would categorically refuse my requests. I had to put up with a lot of abuse.”15
The disregard of society at large was matched by that of the state. In October 1947, the World Jewish Congress in New York tried to prevent the destruction of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Vilnius, which dated back to the fifteenth century. Jewish representatives requested that the burial place be respected as a religious and historical site—as a bet olam, or “house of eternity.”16 Their entreaties moved no one. Between 1948 and 1950 the city administration had the cemetery plowed over and used the gravestones as construction materials. The now empty site was used for a monument to socialist progress in the form of a sports arena with an indoor swimming pool and a broad thoroughfare called Olympic Street. Synagogues still in existence were categorically denied the status of listed buildings, whereas a large number of Catholic churches enjoyed such protection.
The destruction of the Old Jewish Cemetery was welcomed by many of the city’s Lithuanians and Poles. In 1924, while on a journey through what was then Poland, the German novelist Alfred Döblin had described the cemetery’s “terrible dereliction.” Pieces of brick were scattered around, and Polish soldiers rode and marched through the hallowed ground, using it as a shortcut between barracks. Now and then they would demolish a grave or chop down a religiously significant tree. “Soldiers were singing and suddenly there was a bleating,” Döblin wrote. Curious, he walked over a hump topped with broken headstones. “From up there I could see a cow grazing below on the graves. Its dung was everywhere.”17 The cemetery had been disused since 1830, but it had almost certainly not been deconsecrated in accordance with Jewish law.
The New Jewish Cemetery, designed in the modern style, occupied a large stretch of land on the Neris River. Seventy thousand people were buried in it by 1960. At that point the city fathers—“acting in tacit concert with higher authorities”—also destroyed this final reminder of the Jewish past. They had the inscriptions sanded off the better quality headstones and used them in various construction projects. They also combined the deconsecrated grounds with a neighboring park and allowed an open-air stage to be built there. Vingis Park opened in 1965 and remains a popular venue to this day, hosting events such as traditional Lithuanian folk-song festivals. The people of the city eradicated almost all traces of Jewish life that had survived the war. In 2014, Lithuania officially blamed the former Soviet authorities and began offering “professional guided tours of Jewish Vilnius.”
Of the 440,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, approximately 340,000 were murdered in the gas chambers in early summer 1944 and around 100,000 were forced into slave labor. In the final months of the Third Reich, more than 40,000 of the latter group were worked to death. In the fall and winter of 1944 and 1945, some 80,000 Hungarian Jews were made to go, mostly on foot, to Austria, where 20,000 of them died. After the end of the Second World War, 120,000 Hungarian Jews returned home—a large number compared to other countries.18
One of those who returned home was twenty-two-year-old Lilly Weisz, who later married and took her husband’s name, Kertész. Like her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, she grew up in the northern Hungarian city of Eger. She considered herself Hungarian until June 1944, when she and 1,620 other Jews were herded into a factory courtyard. That afternoon, Hungarian civil servants accompanied by Hungarian police appeared and “demanded that we hand over any money, jewelry and other valuables, although our baggage was searched anyway.” The officials even confiscated people’s wedding rings. The Jews were then physically searched and herded down the city’s main road to the train station in the middle of the night. “There were lights on in the houses,” Lilly remembered. “Dance music was playing in people’s apartments. From their windows, the people of Eger watched the big event: the Jews were being taken away! A window was opened on the left, and a male, then a female voice bellowed out into the dark, stormy night: ‘You won’t be coming back!’ I knew the people who lived in that apartment. I had visited them frequently, and they had always received me cordially. We didn’t expect any apologies. But the fact that they treated us like this was deeply wounding.”
Once they arrived at Auschwitz, Weisz was separated from her father, mother, and sister. She was sent on to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany itself, ending up in Bremen. There she was forced to clear rubble left behind by air raids. Shortly before the end of the war she was marched to Bergen-Belsen, where on April 15, 1945, a truck carrying loudspeakers broadcast the news of her salvation: “Here are soldiers of the British Army. You are now free. Tomorrow there will be food. The sick will be tended to. The healthy will be put in quarantine. You are free to go home. There’s no need for panic. Everyone should stay in his place. Here are soldiers from the British army. Bergen-Belsen is liberated.”
Lilly survived a serious typhoid infection, but thousands of others in Bergen-Belsen died of the disease. In late September she returned to her home country. In the courtyard of the Great Synagogue in Budapest, she learned that there had been no word from any of her family members. She then traveled to Eger, where she was given shelter by the Jewish relief organization Joint. The group had commandeered a stately villa, a former private sanatorium for sick women that had been run by Dr. Bela Kun. He and his entire family had been sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
In the days that followed, Weisz had a look around her native city. Her family home, located directly next to a bridge, had been destroyed by Soviet troops. In the ruins she found some photographs. Joint didn’t have sufficient funds to keep the twelve Jewish returnees sufficiently fed. “Day in, day out, there were either beans or potatoes, but it was never enough. There was never any meat, eggs or yoghurt.” Lilly and the woman with whom she shared a room had no choice but to go to the vineyards and steal grapes. A watchman caught them, showering the two women with threats and abuse. They tried to explain their situation, telling him who they were. Without a word, the watchman dumped the grapes in Lilly’s basket on the ground and covered them with soil. Then he pointed to the other side of the vineyard: “The sweet grapes are over there.” He left, but not before turning around and adding: “In the morning, I’m the only watchman on duty.”
Before they were deported, the Weisz family had entrusted two trunks full of their better clothing for safekeeping to two of their Christian neighbors. Lilly urgently needed shoes and things to wear, so she knocked on one of the neighbors’ door. “Standing in the doorway, the woman said that she had nothing she could give me because the Russians had stolen everything,” Lilly recalled. “She gave me a hostile look and shut the door in my face.” Lilly repressed a sob, gathered herself, and went to the other neighbor. “Thank God, you’ve returned,” said this woman. Turning to her husband, she added: “Look at this, Joska, the older Weisz girl is back! Come on in!” The neighbor put out sponge cake and coffee and showed Lilly a photo album of pictures of her daughter, who had gotten married and now lived in Budapest. Finally, Lilly asked about her family’s things. “It’s hard for me to talk about this,” the neighbor said. “You don’t know what we’ve been through. First we were plundered by the Germans, then by the Russians. It broke my heart when they took away your things, too. I always liked your mother.”
Lilly thanked the neighbor and left. Another woman had observed her coming and going and asked: “Did they say the Russians took everything away?” The Weiszes weren’t the only family to give their belongings to the neighbor for safekeeping. “She boasted [about her good fortune] and how the Jews were never coming back,” the other woman told Lilly, advising her to return to the neighbor’s house. “Go back. Confront this thief!” the woman exhorted. “I swear her daughter still wears Mrs. Weisz’s fur coat. If she doesn’t hand over the coat voluntarily, report her to the police.”
Disgusted by such coldheartedness and hypocrisy, Lilly set off back to her quarters. Along the way, she saw a movie poster. An elegantly dressed couple also stopped and stood behind her, examining it.
He: “Do you want to go to the cinema tonight?”
She: “No, I’d rather stay home.”
He: “Fine.”
She: “Besides the cinema is already full of Jews again. I just saw one at the bakery too. They’re everywhere. There are more of them than we got rid of.”
Back at the Joint shelter, Lilly was told that someone urgently wanted to speak with her. She didn’t recognize the person’s name, but she went to the address that had been left for her, where she found an older couple. They asked her to come into their apartment, even inviting her into the bedroom. There, she saw wardrobes, a dressing table, beds, night tables, lamps, rugs, and a sofa, all of which had come from the Weiszes’ home. “The only things missing were the family photos on the wall,” Lilly remembered. She burst into tears and fled to the kitchen. After sharing dinner, the couple traded embarrassed glances. Finally, the man began to speak: “The neighbors came and said that the Jews’ furniture was being handed out.”
The couple had seized the opportunity and gone to the Weiszes’ home, where a government finance official had told them they could take whatever they wanted. “We walked through the rooms with a guilty conscience and asked what would happen, if the people who lived here returned,” the man said. But the official told them: “No people lived here, just Jews. They won’t be coming back.” The couple acquired the complete furnishings of the bedroom at a discount price to be paid to the government. Lilly Weisz took a decorative pillow her mother had cherished and was happy. She later said that she was cheered when she met people like the watchman and the couple, who were open about the mistakes they had made. “It was the first night in Eger that I got a good night’s sleep,” she recalled about encountering the older couple.
A short time later, she learned that her entire family was dead. Her father, who was lame, had immediately been separated off to the left at Auschwitz, which meant the gas chambers. Her grandmother and aunts suffered the same fate. Lilly’s brother, Gyula, had been in Budapest and thus not deported with the rest of the family. There, in October 1944, he had been executed by Hungarian fascists. Lilly’s mother, Margret, and her younger sister, Judith, had been transferred from Auschwitz to an explosives factory in Lichtenau in western Germany. But they fell ill due to the inhuman working conditions there and were sent back to Auschwitz the same month Gyula was killed, where they too were gassed. Lilly’s fiancé Gyuri Minkusz starved to death while being forced to labor for the Hungarian army sometime in the winter of 1944 and 1945.19
Because the Hungarian regime stopped assisting in the deportation of Jews in the summer of 1944, some 150,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly from Budapest, survived the war. A further 60,000 returned from German labor camps, and the same number came back from Austrian camps where they had been taken in the final months of the conflict. But an entire generation had been obliterated. Sixty thousand Jewish children had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered. In 1947, only 15,000 Jewish children lived in Hungary, the majority of them born after the war.
In 1946, several pogroms took place in Hungary. In the eastern Hungarian community of Kenmadaras, a mob attacked the secretary of the local Communist party because he was Jewish. He survived the attack, but two other Jews were murdered in the incident. Similar scenes played out in the northeastern Hungarian city of Miskolc. Here, too, people died. Leftist circles and others had called for an attack on robber capitalists and black-market and wartime profiteers, all of whom shared one characteristic—they were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Like other political parties, the Hungarian Communist Party encouraged such views: “In the past we were under the yoke of Jewish capital. In the present, nothing has changed. This must not be!” While the forms of propaganda and the strategies for justifying injustice may have varied, the ultimate aim was always to retain possession of stolen Jewish property. A popular joke at the time is all too telling. A Jew encounters a Christian, who asks him how he’s doing. “That’s a stupid question,” the Jew responds. “I was in a concentration camp. Now I have nothing but the clothes on your back.”20
In the immediate postwar period, an estimated 600 to 3,000 of the Jews who returned to Poland or emerged from hiding were murdered. The following is a typically tragic story. Hania Piller was imprisoned at Auschwitz and liberated in Lower Silesia in February 1945. After walking home on foot, she ran into a former fellow inmate named Mrs. Berger. She had survived Auschwitz together with her son and was also headed home to the community of Brzeszcze, which was located only nine kilometers southwest of Auschwitz-Oświecim. Piller described what happened next: “It was a happy reunion. But some time later I heard something terrible. Mrs. Berger was killed in her own home by her Polish neighbors. I’ve never gotten over this tragedy. In the end, after everything she suffered during the war, after losing her entire family except for that one son, she was murdered by Poles.”
What had happened? Brzeszcze, an industrial settlement with 3,500 inhabitants established around a coal mine, contained two flour mills, several farms, a distillery, and a small factory that manufactured medical supplies. Before 1939, a number of poor Jewish families lived there. Two stood out: the Finders owned the distillery, and the Bergers engaged in wholesale and retail trade. Most of the farmers and miners were in debt to the Bergers, who had given them credit for purchases. When the Germans rolled through town in September 1939, they deported all the 138 Jews there and confiscated their property. Only Mrs. Berger and her son Moishe-Munik survived. After they returned, the debtors feared they would be made to pay what they owed and that they would have to return everything they had stolen from the deportees. They murdered Mrs. Berger and her son out of greed.21
German soldiers and occupiers devastated Poland and parts of the Soviet Union in every conceivable way. The extent of the damage is documented in a report by an Anglo-American governmental commission in early 1946. It investigated the question of how many surviving European Jews could and wished to emigrate to Palestine. Commission members traveled to displaced persons’ camps, Palestine itself, and all countries affected by German-led mass murder that lay outside the Soviet Union. The report’s authors were shaken by the survivors’ “indescribable suffering,” adding, “It must also be understood that this happened in what were regarded as civilized communities.”
Words, the commission found, could hardly do reality justice: “In the cold print of a report it is not possible accurately to portray our feelings with regard to the suffering deliberately inflicted by the Germans on those Jews who fell into their hands. The visit of our Sub-Committee to the Ghetto in Warsaw has left on their minds an impression which will forever remain. Areas of that city on which formerly stood large buildings are now a mass of brick rubble, covering the bodies of numberless unknown Jews. Adjoining the Ghetto there still stands an old barracks used as a place for killing Jews. Viewing this in the cold gray light of a February day one could imagine the depths of human suffering there endured. In the courtyards of the barracks were pits containing human ash and human bones. The effect of that place on Jews who came searching, so often in vain, for any trace of their dear ones can be left to the imagination.”
The report also acknowledged the terrible psychological toll the Holocaust had taken upon those who lived through it:
These Jewish survivors have not emerged from their ordeals unscathed either physically or mentally. It is rare indeed to find a complete Jewish family. Those who return to their old homes find them destroyed or occupied by others, their businesses gone or else in other hands. They search for relatives, frequently undertaking long journeys on hearing a rumor that one has been seen in another part of the country or in another center. Such was the system of the Germans that it is difficult for them ever to establish the death of their dear ones. They are faced also with very great difficulties in seeking the restitution of their property.… In Germany and in Poland, which was often described to us as ‘the cemetery of European Jewry,’ a Jew may see in the face of any man he looks upon the murderer of his family. It is understandable that few find themselves able to face such conditions.22
Within three and a half years, Germans murdered 72 percent of the Jewish population in the places they ruled, almost always with the passive or active support of local administrations, police, political parties, and ordinary anti-Semitic citizens.23 Of the 352,559 Jews in Warsaw, only 6,000 survived; of the 17,840 Jews in Kielce, a mere 243. After the end of the Nazi horror, 80,000 of the 3 million persecuted Jews in Poland reappeared. Only 5,000 of them (a little less than 8 percent) were children under the age of fourteen. By comparison, in 1939, 30 percent of the Jewish population was under that age.24 Moreover, nearly all the children of those who did survive grew up without grandparents. It is small wonder that in March 1947, the World Jewish Congress came to the conclusion that very large numbers of Jews had no desire to remain in Poland.25
Ruth Huppert was born in 1922 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, the capital of the region of Moravia. Her father, Fritz, left her mother, and Ruth and her sister, Edith, grew up in part with their grandmother and their uncle Hugo’s family. Hugo and Fritz were in the meat business in the suburb of Přívoz (Oderfurt). Starting out with a butcher’s shop, they opened a buffet restaurant, a small chain of stores, and finally a meat-processing plant. Along the way, the family joined the upper-middle class with all that entailed: a nanny, piano lessons, an automobile, private schooling, and ski vacations.
In 1928 Ruth entered the Jewish People’s School. There were eighteen boys and twenty-five girls in her class, which was led by a teacher named Grete Gross. The language of instruction was German—only a handful of subjects were taught in Czech. To ensure everything was done correctly, the regional school inspector I. Dworak visited the school once a year. In 1928, his report noted “everything found satisfactory.” As of the school year 1936–37, the school principal was required to write his annual chronical in Czech.
On March 14, 1939, German troops occupied Moravia and the following day Prague. That June, the chronicle of the Jewish People’s School stops abruptly. In his final entry, the principal noted: “Extraordinary circumstances have led to dramatic changes in the student body.” Official statistics shed light on what he meant. The 187 pupils who began the school year in September 1938 were joined by 55 additional children in the first four months of German occupation. Obviously they had transferred from public schools to the Jewish People’s School. In the same period, 91 of the 242 pupils left the school prematurely. This means that within this time, 38 percent of the school’s student body fled the region with their parents.26
Czechoslovakia’s new German masters wasted no time in terrorizing Jews and confiscating everything they owned. In response, Fritz Huppert entrusted his most valuable possessions, his daughter’s dowry, and other family things to his Czech apprentice Gustav, while handing over less valuable property to the Gestapo. After that, the family procured false identity papers and went underground in the village of Pozořice in southern Moravia. By October 1939, Adolf Eichmann had already deported 1,290 Jews from the Ostrava area to the Nisko region of occupied Poland. The deportations, he noted, were “primarily intended to gather experience in order to be able to evacuate larger masses.”27 In the summer of 1942, the Hupperts’ true identity was discovered, and they were arrested and deported. Ruth alone survived—despite being sent to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and being forced to undergo the death march to Taucha near the German city of Leipzig. There she hid in the forest until she was liberated by American troops on April 18, 1945.
In early 1938, the Jewish community of Ostrava had numbered 6,000 people. In the spring of 1945 there were only 2,954 Jews in the entire Moravia region. After trying to locate family members in Prague and then Pozořice, Ruth returned to Přívoz, proceeding directly to her uncle Hugo’s house. She found it “deserted and plundered,” later recalling, “The bare walls stared at me mockingly.” She then started looking around for a room in the city, which was once again under Czech control. Ostrava’s hotel owners had been good customers of her father’s business and knew the family well, but all of them turned her away. “We are truly glad that you’re back, Miss Huppert,” she was told, “but we don’t have a room for you because they’re all occupied by the Russians.”
Finally, she found shelter with the now aged midwife, a Miss Rutino, who had helped deliver her and whom she approached after chancing to meet her on the street. The next morning she went to the headquarters of the Israelite Cultural Community. “The closer I got, the more I hesitated, because I suspected what I would find,” she recalled. Ruth’s worst fears were confirmed. There were no signs of any of her extended family.
Afterward, she visited her father and uncle’s former apprentice Gustav. His family lived in a fine house, and they and the Hupperts had enjoyed good neighborly relations. “I was given a very cool reception, and I could see the disappointment in the family’s faces that I had returned,” Ruth remembered. “I was led into the living room, which contained all of our furniture. There, amidst my family’s belongings, they told me to my face that the Russians had taken everything. It was an easy excuse for all concerned.” Ruth proceeded on to her grandmother’s house. It was occupied by strangers.
Dumbfounded and desperate, she left for Prague, where she married a man named Kurt Elias and witnessed the return of Jewish refugees from Poland who had snuck across the border without identity papers. The few survivors of the German death camps and execution squads had once again become the victims of persecution, afraid for their lives, after the pogroms that had erupted in liberated Poland. On July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, forty-two Jews were murdered by local anti-Semites. But that wasn’t the only place where Jewish returnees were met with rejection and violence. As Ruth Elias later documented in her memoirs, when they inquired about their possessions, they were told, bitterly: “It’s a shame that you weren’t gassed. Why did you of all people have to return?”
Soon, Ruth recalled, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors had only one goal: Israel. They wanted “to leave Europe, which had caused us so much misery.” In Naples, Ruth and Kurt Elias, together with 2,000 other émigrés, boarded the much-too-small steamship Galilah. In April 1949 they landed in Haifa.28
In 1939, 9,855,500 Jews lived in Europe. By 1945, that number was 3,833,000.29 In the parts of Europe under German control, some 1.4 million Jews survived the Holocaust. Jews were more likely to have escaped being murdered in those places where German rule was for various reasons disrupted or constrained by governmental, social, or military forces. They included the Soviet Union, France, Hungary, Romania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Denmark, and Slovakia.
Between 1948 and 1951, 715,000 European Jews left for Israel, while 120,000 emigrated to North America. Six years after the end of the Second World War, more than half of the Jews who had escaped the German machinery of murder and lived outside the Soviet Union voluntarily left Europe.