KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
Legal Papers for Palestine At the end of World War II, the Allied powers found that millions of people had been left homeless; more than six million were quickly repatriated, but one million Jews who had survived were homeless. Few of them were willing to return to the places of their betrayal and the murders of their families. “Having been subjected to wide - spread anti-Semitism on the part of their Christian neighbors both before and during the Holocaust, [they] wanted only to begin new lives in countries that were not haunted by bitter memories.” 1 About three hundred thousand Jews filtered into Displaced Persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Earl G. Harrison, sent by U.S. Pres- ident Harry S Truman to investigate the American-zone camps in Germany in the summer of 1945, found that conditions, especially for Jews, were shockingly bad and blamed the United States mil- itary. (Conditions in the camps run by England and France were no better, however.) Clothed in the same disease-laden rags they had arrived in, sometimes even the striped “pajamas” of the death camps, Jews were behind barbed wire and under armed guard in former concentration camps, and were forced to share tight quar- ters with Nazi perpetrators. They slept on tiny wooden shelves and were denied adequate food and medical treatment. The DPs had no homes, no communities to return to, no means to feed and clothe themselves, and many spirits were broken beyond repair. 2 Harri- son strongly recommended that the only solution to the problem of Holocaust survivors’ homelessness was relocation to the British mandate of Palestine, and he urged the United States to pressure Britain to issue 100,000 entry permits immediately. Zionist and non-Zionist groups, including Agudah Israel, Po- alei Agudah Israel, Jewish Brigade soldiers, the Jewish Agency, and the Palestine Jewish community were active in the DP camps, and a handful of Jewish organizations, principally the Joint Dis- tribution Committee GDC) and the World Jewish Congress, took up the cause of the DPs. The JDC alone helped one out of every two Jewish survivors in Europe, and in 1946, the American Jewish JDC)
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