A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [57]
Immediately after the war Aaron Waks left Lodz for an American-run camp in central Germany near Kassel, to get his connection to Palestine. Soon after, the Lesser family—Lea, her parents, three sisters, and a brother—left for the same camp. They arrived to find Aaron Waks in charge of relations with the Americans. Aaron and Lea had known each other since their childhood in the little town of Nowy Miasto, “New Town,” which had its shtetl—a little Jewish village—on the far side of the hill. They had grown up together in the Jewish part of Lodz. The few Jews who remained in their Lodz neighborhood were mostly preparing to leave, and nobody lived on the far side of the hill in Nowy Miasto anymore. But when Aaron went to Germany, he reasoned that there was more to all of this than just getting himself out. He thought there should be no Jews at all in Europe. After two thousand years of abuse, this was the end of it. When the next pogrom was launched, there should be no Jews to be found.
The DP camps were established in Allied-occupied Germany for the 45,000 Jews who had been liberated from concentration camps in Germany and were awaiting passage out of the country. That population increased by hundreds of thousands as people like Aaron and Lea came in from the east. After the pogrom in Kielce, Polish Jews packed into the DP camps in Germany.
In 1946, Aaron and Lea were married, and one year later their first son, Ruwen, was born in the DP camp. The following year, after the State of Israel was established, Leas entire family emigrated. The DPs who had been kept out of Palestine when it was British-controlled could now enter Israel and become citizens. This should have meant the end of the DP camps, with people like Aaron Waks getting everyone out in an orderly fashion and then closing up the camps and leaving. But not everyone went and so the camps did not close down, and Aaron Waks did not see his job as finished. There were still thousands of DPs. First run by the Allied military, the camps were then turned over to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, then to the International Refugee Organization. As they were passed from one organization to the next, each expected it to be a short-term project.
Many of these camps had originally been German prisoner-of-war camps. Future French President Frangois Mitterrand had been among the French prisoners held in the camp where Ruwen Waks was born. But as the camps became increasingly settled by DPs, they were turned into very livable villages. Ruwen remembers his childhood there fondly. “It wasn't like being in a camp,” he recalled. Families lived in houses, sometimes two-family houses, and conditions were pleasant, even privileged. The Allies saw to it that the DPs lived considerably better than most of the Germans who were suffering from shortages in their bombed-out cities.
The camps became Jewish villages, with their own autonomous governments. DPs wanted no relations with Germany, recognized no German authority over their territory, and they dealt only with the occupying powers and their own Jewish police and courts within the camps. They became in effect an Israel in Europe. Simply wanting to be in a place for Jews that was run by Jews, many of the camp inhabitants had no real desire to leave in order to live in the underdeveloped, politically destabilized Middle East. Aaron Waks, perhaps without ever thinking about it in this way, became a municipal official in a European Jewish village. His was a life of responsibilities, with the