THE CONGRESS STEMMED THE FLOW OF EASTERN EUROPEAN immigrants in 1924. As a result, about 1.5 million Jews who would have come to the United States perished in the Holocaust. After World War II, approximately 330,000 Jews who survived forced marches and death camps were put in displaced persons camps in Germany to await relocation. Their families had been annihilated, their property confiscated, their communities destroyed. Having survived the war, Polish Jews still faced physical violence from their neighbors. They had no home to go home to. The Soviet Union had demanded that all displaced persons be returned to their country of origin, but those Jews who came from Russia faced imprisonment, torture, and even death, and, so, many of them had no intention of going back.
Unfortunately for the displaced Jews, even after the Holocaust there was no cry from any of the allied nations to help them. Britain didn’t want them; neither did France or the United States, where few members of Congress felt a responsibility to allow the survivors into America. One of the fears expressed was that the Jewish refugees would be receptive to Communism. The Jews, it became obvious, needed a homeland. But because of British policy, they weren’t allowed to emigrate to Palestine.
The Zionists among the DPs wanted to go to Palestine. The anti-Zionists and those who were neutral on the subject wanted to come to the United States. President Truman, a haberdasher from Missouri, a former bag man for the Kansas City mob, was an unlikely proponent for Jewish emigration to both Israel and the United States. The strong anti-immigration sentiment in Congress in the country tied his hands.
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after liberation. Zionist organizers tried to get survivors to emigrate to what was then called Palestine. Courtesy of Harry Schweitzer
DESPITE THE PRESSURES, ON DECEMBER 22, 1945, Truman issued a presidential order that DPs, especially orphans, receive preference within existing U.S. immigration quotas. Since the quota was still thirteen thousand Eastern Europeans a year, it didn’t amount to much. But what the order did was make it possible for Jews who didn’t have relatives to sponsor them to enter the United States on group affidavits. Groups like the United Jewish Charities could be the sponsor. All they had to do was pay the $60 fee for their passage.
There was pressure to allow many more Eastern Europeans to come to America. The American Jewish Committee and the American Council for Judaism argued that since America had failed to fill its quotas for Jews during the 1930s and 1940s, a large number of refugees could come in without threatening the economy. Congressman William Stratton, an Illinois Republican, proposed a bill to bring 400,000 refugees—300,000 Christians and 100,000 Jews—to America using that same argument. Considering that the United States had housed 400,000 German prisoners of war, it was hard to argue against it. But these arguments could not compel Truman to act. A Gallup poll taken in the spring of 1947 showed that 60 percent of Americans were opposed to bringing the displaced persons to America.
The refusal to allow the displaced persons to come to America was one of the key factors in the creation of the state of Israel.
After the end of the war, Joseph Schweitzer and Mania Snopkowska were freed by the British from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was said that he was “the last man standing.” She had typhus and was at death’s door. They were moved to a camp for displaced persons in Zeilsheim, Germany. Enclosed with barbed wire, it was overcrowded and dirty, and yet, after they were given medical treatment, somehow they survived. All the while, they waited for word that they would be allowed to come to America. It didn’t come for four interminable years. During their long sojourn in the camp they met, courted, married, and had a son, Harry. In 1951 the Schweitzer family flew to America. After a short stay in Manhattan, they moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to begin their lives in their new home.
Harry Schweitzer’s parents, Joseph Schweitzer and Mania Snopkowska, on the day they got their marriage license. Courtesy of Harry Schweitzer
HARRY SCHWEITZER “My dad was born in Chorzow, Poland. He was sixteen when the war broke out. In those days being Jewish in Poland was no cakewalk. He went to a gymnasium that was segregated for Jewish kids. There were constant fights with the Polish kids. One of the slurs often thrown at him, my father told me, was ‘Jew, go back to Palestine.’
“Before the Nazis took over Poland, my grandfather took my father and his brother to Lodz, where he and his sons worked for the Russians. They all were fluent in Polish and German, and they actually went to school to learn Russian. When the Nazis took over, they went to work for the Wehrmacht. My father and his brother were in provisioning, getting bedding. The commandant took a shine to my father because of his fluency in German, and so he and my uncle were able to maintain themselves for a while.
“The three of them managed to stay in Lodz for three years of the war until 1942, when my grandfather went to the Russian front, and my father and uncle went back to Chorzow.
“They went by train, and they were rounded up by the Nazis and sent off to work camps. They were in a number of different camps: Dora, which was not far from Peenemunde, where they made rockets. They were in Nordhausen, and they went to smaller camps. When they were at a work camp called Bunzlau, the commandant took a liking to my uncle. He was his boot black, his shoe shine boy, and although he was Wehrmacht, he was never Gestapo, and he attempted to keep his people in his camp together, and he did it for several years, until he was relieved of his command, which coincided with the end of the war for the Nazis. So the end result was when the Nazis started losing the war, they started retrenching back to Germany, and they moved the surviving Jews back into camps in Germany, and my father and my uncle wound up in Bergen-Belsen for six months, where they were liberated, and the story from my uncle and people who knew my father was he was the last man standing.
“It was luck, he said, because when my father and uncle were in Lodz working for the Russians, they had been inoculated for typhus, which wiped out much of the population of the camps before the liberation. The inoculations saved them.
“My father’s father actually survived the war under the Russians and was repatriated. My father had posted a notice that he was looking for his father, ‘Looking for such and such person…,’ and they were going to meet, and my grandfather died on the train on the way. Can you imagine? They were never able to determine his cause of death. He was on the way to the reunion.
“My mother’s story is more tragic. She came from a large city—by Polish standards—by the name of Zawiercie. My mother was the oldest of three. She had two siblings, a younger brother and sister. Zawiercie, being a relatively large city, was ghettoized, and they had a yid-marat who managed the affairs of the Jewish quarter.
“My mother told me this story. She wasn’t able to tell me until 1985. It was very difficult for my mother to tell it. One morning the Nazis came. They had all the fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds assemble in the square. They were rounding them up, and my mother went. Her father took her there, and from what I gather her father was trying to keep them from taking her, and my mother told me he was surrounded and beaten around the head by the Nazis. And he wound up going on the transport. The rest of the family was left behind.
“She was the only survivor. The rest perished at Auschwitz. My brothers are named after her siblings.
“My mother went to a work camp called Neusalz. She worked at slave labor, making something for the German war effort. She was young enough, able to sustain herself. At the end of the war there was a forced march back to Germany. They had called a halt, and my mother and her friend Leah slept in a barn. When they awoke, they found that the column had left.
“Instead of fleeing, they chased after them and rejoined the column, because they were so inured to the fear. They had two enemies, the Nazis and the Poles, and they were afraid if they escaped and were discovered by the Poles, they would be killed. My mother said they actually felt safer within the transport. So my mother wound up at Bergen-Belsen for three or four months, where many died, and she was on her deathbed with typhus when in April of 1945 the British tanks came through the trees, and they knew they would be saved.
“A lot of people died that day because their saviors didn’t know how to treat them. You’ve seen pictures of what they looked like. Skeletons. They fed them, and many died. My mother managed to survive. My father managed to survive. And, independently, they both wound up in the same DP camp in Zeilsheim. Somehow they managed to get together through friends.
“Zeilsheim was a suburb of Frankfurt. They got married in 1946. Though my mother had difficulty giving birth, as was to be expected, I was born in Frankfurt in 1950, and then, in 1951, through the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, we came to this country.
“When we arrived, we were given shelter on Irving Place in Manhattan. My father was a smoker at the time—I think everybody was. I remember he left my mother and me in the house for ten or twenty minutes, went out for a smoke, walked the street, and he couldn’t believe how free he felt.
Mania Schweitzer gave birth to Harry in a German hospital. Courtesy of Harry Schweitzer
“My father had been involved in the black market in Germany, which was common, dealing in coffee and cigarettes. Some people came here with a lot of money. My father’s means were much more modest. My father was a plumber by trade. He had done a little bit of plumbing before the war, when he was fifteen, and he learned the rest here. He became a union member, and he was a union plumber for his life. My mother was a housewife.
“A lot of the DPs were relocated based on their connections with people they knew who were already here. People who came with a lot of money went to Forest Hills in Queens. Rego Park had a fair amount of DPs. And Brownsville, Brooklyn, had a very large DP population.
“My father went to Brownsville because he didn’t have a lot of money. He was offered the job of superintendent of an apartment house. It was a two-bedroom apartment, rent-free. My mother also helped him out, which she hated. Eventually the building hired another super, and my father joined the union, got himself started, and made money, $65, $70 a week, which was fine for those days.
“We lived at 26 Bay 25th Street right by the el. It was called the West End line. We had the first floor of the apartment house. The neighborhood was Jewish and Italian. On the side of the block where we lived there were two apartments that had many, many Jewish people in them, and the rest were big one-family homes—not much land, but a lot of room, and they were owned by Italians. The Jews and Italians got along. Half my friends were Italian, and half were Jewish. There was one block of black families on Eighteenth Avenue and Bath Avenue that had been there since the Revolutionary War. And that was it.
“The streets were our kingdom. Everything revolved around the streets. There were no play dates.
“I don’t know if it was born out of the concentration camp experience, but my parents were very protective with their kids. I have two younger brothers. We’re still close. It was brought to me very early that the oldest brother had a responsibility to set an example for the others.
“The notion of extended family was not part of my upbringing. We had no relatives. Our extended family was all the fellow survivors my parents knew. But there was an arrogance built into that, and this was privately expressed: We survived. And in the early days there was also a malevolence attached to surviving, because within the Jewish community the survivors were quite suspect. What did you do to survive? My father would say, ‘The best of us went up in smoke.’ He had major guilt. He would reminisce about this kid who he knew, or that one, and a pathos would come over him. He would say, ‘This one died…’ And it was very difficult for him to talk about his parents or other relatives. But they did manage to become Americanshe: American-born Jewish people. They had a lot of friends. My mother was very popular. When I was a kid, my mother would be on the phone for hours. Friends would be calling her. She would field phone calls every ten or fifteen minutes. Her card game was the big thing. My parents loved to play pinochle, and my father loved to play poker. Typically on Friday nights my parents went to card games.
Harry Schweitzer’s fifth birthday party, in Bensonhurst. Courtesy of Harry Schweitzer
“We didn’t have much money. We never traveled a lot. We didn’t have a lot of family. There was the five of us. And that brought home to me clearly that we depended on each other.
“To tell you the truth it was a very nice existence in Bensonhurst. The candy store where my father got his cigarettes, Benson & Hedges, was on the corner of Twentieth Avenue and 85th Street. It was called either Moe’s or Irving’s. When I got old enough he would give me money. ‘Go get me a pack of cigarettes.’ We got our candy there. Candy was cheap. We got bubble gum two for a penny. I was an incessant nosher. We had a deli two stores down, the Hy Tulip deli on 86th Street by the Twentieth Avenue stop by the el. We would get two franks with mustard and sauerkraut and a knish, my favorite thing.
“We would go there after we played ball in Cropsey Park, a big park with ball-fields and grassy areas and playgrounds. We played softball and baseball. And we would go all the time to Lenny’s Pizza, which, if you recall the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever, the soundtrack starts up and you see John Tavolta’s feet going right into Lenny’s Pizza. It was the most delicious pizza. It was two blocks from our apartment. We were there all the time.
“We had a Chinese restaurant we liked. My mother’s English wasn’t very good. My father, being involved in the black market, learned English quickly. My mother did not. Beverly Jonas, one of our neighbors, brought home Chinese food one day. She said in Yiddish, ‘Try it.’ My mother liked it, and she asked, ‘Where did you get this?’ Beverly said, ‘You get it at the Chinks. Go across the street under the el.’
“My mother went in and asked for Chinks, and she got thrown out immediately. She couldn’t figure it out, until someone told her why, and my mother was upset, because she knew how smart she was, and she didn’t like people laughing at her. We thought it was quite funny. She found out not to ask for Chinks anymore.
“Even though I was only five or six, I was a Dodger fan. We had an appliance store, like Save Mart, on the corner of Eightieth Avenue and 85th Street, right opposite the candy store. In the window they had a big television—big was twenty-seven inches—and they were broadcasting the World Series. There were twenty gazillion people standing around watching, and my father, all five foot three inches of him, put me on his shoulders. My father wasn’t a baseball fan at all. He couldn’t understand the game.
“When the Dodgers left after the 1957 season, there was a lot of white flight, but not in Bensonhurst. Nobody I know moved away. Nobody. I’m thinking about all my friends. They didn’t move. And they may still be there.
“In 1962 my parents looked to move out of Brooklyn. My father was doing relatively well in plumbing. He made a foray into building houses. They started looking in Forest Hills, the mecca. But my father could not afford a one-family house. Even then a one-family house in Forest Hills was $30,000, and that was out of his reach. But he had friends who had survived the war who lived in Flatlands. It had been the Canarsie dumps, and it was being built up on landfill. So in 1962 we moved to Flatlands. My father bought a two-family house in a Jewish neighborhood. Meyer Levin Junior High was a bus ride away. Meyer Levin was a decorated flyer from the New York area who died in a bombing mission over Europe in World War II. It had been Junior High School 285.
The Schweitzers on the day Harry’s mother went blond.
Courtesy of Harry Schweitzer
“I went there for two years. I was in an accelerated program, did three years in two, and I applied for high school at Brooklyn Tech, a specialized high school, and got in, much to the surprise of my parents. It was all boys. It was in downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene. I graduated in 1967.
“Brooklyn Tech was the quintessential cosmopolitan school. The other specialized schools were Bronx High School of Science, the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and Stuyvesant in Manhattan.
“The neighborhood around the school was dangerous. Recently I went to a reunion with my daughter. We live in Park Slope, and we walked, and I started laughing. She asked why. I said, ‘Because I’m walking here.’ Back then you wouldn’t be caught dead in that neighborhood walking after three o’clock in the afternoon. The danger came from the underclass of white toughs hanging around the school looking for trouble, and from black kids who lived in the projects not too far away. These kids had nothing to do.
“Brooklyn Tech, unlike most high schools, only had one session. Everyone was through by one thirty, and everybody left promptly, unless you were on a team or in the band. I don’t want to overemphasize the danger. It wasn’t that terrible, but you had to be careful.
“I was always liberal. I remember watching the debates in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy and hating Nixon. I couldn’t vote until I was twenty-one, the 1972 election. I worked for George McGovern, and the Jewish people in Brooklyn didn’t like McGovern very much. Because he was not pro-Israel. Nixon had a legacy of right or wrong—and, in my mind, wrong—but he had Henry Kissinger, and the Republicans were very strong on Israel and on defense. And so at a certain point a lot of Jews became Republicans.
“I worked for McGovern during that election. They stuck me in Boro Park, an ultraconservative bastion, to campaign. The Hasidim, who are ultraconservative, lived there. I worked my butt off, but it was like trying to push against the tide. It wasn’t going to happen. They called me all sorts of funny names. Even though I was walking around with a yarmulke on, they were saying I wasn’t a Jew. I used to laugh. I said, ‘You guys will get yours at some point.’
“I was at McGovern headquarters in Brooklyn the night we lost dramatically. But I have always stayed very Democratic, very liberal. On a national basis, I have never pulled that lever for anyone but Democrats.”