Mendel Letters 112 — World War II Refugees
Dear Mendel,
January 27th is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Felicia and I visited an exhibit on displaced persons camps after World War II sponsored by the United Nations and the YIVO Institute. It will be in the lobby of UN Headquarters in Manhattan until February 23. It focused on the daily lives of the 250,000 Jewish refugees in the DP camps who survived the European Holocaust that took the lives of 6 million Jews. The exhibit also displayed Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel contributed a Book of Names listing 4.8 million names of Jews who were murdered by Nazi Germany. I tried to find your grandfather, aunt and cousins in the online version of the Book of names but so far no luck because I am not certain of their first names. There are thousands of Singers and Zingers from Poland.
The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was created in 1943 while the war in Europe was still waging. After the war there were hundreds of displaced persons camps in the American controlled zones of Germany and Austria. At first Jews were treated by the military as enemy citizens and kept in camps with displaced Germans and Austrians, many of whom were Nazi collaborators. This situation quickly ended and Jews were moved into their own camps where they were able to gradually acclimate to normal lives. There were soccer teams, schools, marriages, and babies being born. It is estimated that 1.5 million Jewish children were exterminated by the Nazis and fewer than 40,000 survived.
About 250,000 Jews survived the Holocaust and were assigned to the camps while the victorious allies debated their future. No one really wanted them. The United States refused to lift immigration quotas in the 1930s to allow refugees fleeing Eastern Europe to enter the country. It continued to severely restrict entry at the end of the war and it wasn’t until 1948 that Congress passed legislation to allow 50,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their children to become American.
I know on our floor at 1400 Jesup Avenue in the Bronx there was a woman with a number tattooed on her arm who had survived the camps. She rarely came out of the apartment. It was furnished all in white and she was constantly cleaning. She had a son who was the age of my younger brother who was never permitted to go outside and play with the other kids.
One of the best part of the exhibit was the comparison between the post-war refugees and refugees today. There are tens of thousands of refugees on the U.S. southern border fleeing criminal gangs, abusive militaries, and the impact of climate change and the United States agin is refusing to let desperate people enter.
The exhibit also included photographs and artifacts from the camps like children’s dolls and Shabbot candlesticks. The anti-Semitic posters were from the collection of Arthur Langerman. His parents fled from Eastern Europe to Belgium where he was born. When he was about a year-and-a-half old, the German Gestapo arrested his parents and they were sent to concentration camps. Under an agreement between Belgium and German officials, young children like him remained in Belgium in orphanages. Langerman’s father died in the camps. His mother survived Birkenau and they were later reunited in Belgium.
I thought you would like to see the images and artifacts from the refugee camps.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
