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When Jews Sought Refuge after World War II

(New Yorker) Amy Davidson Sorkin - As David Nasaw recounts in The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, after World War II the Allied authorities initially maintained that it was wrong to differentiate Jews from other displaced people. Instead, displaced persons were to be sorted out on a "nationality basis," which meant that a Polish Jew who had survived the death camps might share quarters with someone who had guarded a camp in Poland. Many Polish Jews did try to return home, only to be greeted with violence from neighbors who, in some cases, had taken possession of their houses. On July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, some 40 Jewish survivors were killed in a pogrom: "stoned to death, beaten to death, thrown from windows, shot, bayoneted," Nasaw reports. When it came to resettling the refugees, the prospect of increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, which President Truman endorsed, exasperated the British who still controlled the region. Yet there was no mobilization to bring Jewish refugees into the UK. In the U.S., too, the number of Jews admitted during the first years after the war was achingly small. At the same time, the British gave sanctuary to thousands from the Baltic states to address labor shortages in agriculture and industry. This hit a snag when a doctor in London noticed that many of the Latvian men had their blood types tattooed under their left arms, revealing them to have been members of the S.S. When British miners refused to work with the Baltic men whose S.S. tattoos they had spotted, the National Coal Board recommended that they not be given jobs "where they might have to remove their shirts." In late 1946, Jewish groups in the U.S. pushed Congress to pass legislation to accept 400,000 D.P.s, estimating that based on the proportion of Jews in the D.P. camps, a good 100,000 would be Jews. But senators who didn't want to let Jews in added language excluding the Jews who had fled the Polish pogroms. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Eastern Europeans arrived in the U.S. with little real examination of their wartime records.
2020-11-05 00:00:00
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