A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [58]
But something was beginning to trouble Aaron and other camp leaders: Many of the DPs were slowly settling into Germany. Germany was out there, not in their village. Living in Germany was exactly what Aaron did not want Jews to do.
Because the camps were supplied with many goods that were not available in the Germany outside the camps, black marketeering was an easy temptation for DPs. Near each DP camp, a German community sprang up from its economic activity. Some DPs were making substantial profits in the German economy. DP Jewish communities started to appear outside of the camps. In Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and Hesse, Jewish communities were founded in places that had had no Jews before the war. Among the DPs who settled in Germany, there was a strong tendency toward disreputable or even criminal activity. They hated Germany and the Germans, and anything was fair. What didn't the Germans deserve?
By 1949, excluding the Soviet sector, which had no DPs, more than half the Jews in Germany outside the DP camps were former DPs. Only about fifteen thousand German Jews had survived in Germany, most because of mixed marriages. Few among the German survivors had a strong Jewish identity. Of the 4,378 married Jews remaining in Berlin after May 1945, 94 percent were married to non-Jews. For these few survivors, most of whom had lost all property and livelihood, there was no help. A generation later, Germans would express their guilt in an eagerness to be seen helping and working with Jews. But directly after the war, German guilt worked very differently. Germans were reluctant to hire Jews because Jews made them feel bad. The survivors went hungry until foreign Jewish agencies provided them with assistance.
Slowly, in urban centers around occupied Germany, minuscule Jewish communities began to reappear. DPs were not always seen as an opportunity to enlarge these communities. Some communities put out flyers warning their members against “DP panhandlers” who might be working the area. The unscrupulous and lawless attitude of these new arrivals aggravated the old German Jewish prejudices against Eastern Jews, Ostjuden. In a harsh echo of traditional German citizenship law, some communities passed laws stating that only a German-born Jew could become Community president. In spite of everything, German Jews were Germans.
DPs settled in the larger cities like Frankfurt, where sleazy bars and beer halls that catered to soldiers and prostitutes became stereotypical DP businesses. They drifted aimlessly from one city to another. Their only moral principle was that doing anything to help Germany rebuild was wrong.
When Aaron Wakss camp was closed in 1949, it was at last time for him, Lea, and their baby to make aliyah to Israel. They had learned from Lea's family and others that it was difficult to get consumer goods in Israel. Everything that would be needed in their new home, even furniture, was bought in Germany and shipped. But the Israeli port authorities, for incomprehensible bureaucratic reasons, would not let Lea's parents pick up their goods, and the crates remained on the Israeli dock until everything in them was ruined. This became part of the Waks family mythology. Decades later, the family still insisted that Aaron and Lea did not go to Israel because the Israelis let all their goods rot on a dock. “A country that would do that? They must be criminals,” Lea said in Yiddish.
Moishe Waks, who was not born until three years later, grew up firmly believing that his family did not move to Israel because the British blockade had captured the ship with their goods and his parents had lost everything. “The ship was taken by the British, and therefore my parents stayed still in Germany,” he explained erroneously, more than forty years later in Berlin. Asked why they had not tried again, he speculated that “all their money must have been gone.”
The more complicated truth was that Aaron and Lea had become involved in a different kind of life in Germany. They had become German Zionists—Jews who lived