A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [59]
Instead of going to Israel, the Wakses moved to another DP camp, Forenwald, near Munich, where Lea's parents joined them. It was the only camp that hadn't yet been closed down. All the remaining refugees from around Germany were sent to Forenwald. Moishe was born there in 1952. That year, with twelve thousand DPs still in Germany, the International Refugee Organization announced that its DP activities had come to an end. Lea's parents went back to Israel to give it another try. But two thousand Jews refused to leave Forenwald, and Aaron Waks decided to stay with them.
Finally in 1955, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the Joint—agreed to support the remaining one thousand camp DPs. At this point Aaron had finished his Zionist camp work, even though many of the DPs were still in Germany, and he was free to make aliyah. But instead, he decided to move to Dusseldorf. The Jewish Community leader from Dusseldorf had visited him at Forenwald and urged him to come there. In Dusseldorf Waks came across a German-language Jewish newsletter that told its readers in boldface type, “Learn Hebrew!” Their community meetings, like those in many other German cities at the time, were under the influence of the Eastern European Zionists who had settled there and therefore always ended with singing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli anthem.
It was a small community, and Aaron Waks thought he could work with Zionist organizations and help Jews leave. This had become his way of working for Israel, and Germany was where he did it. It offered familiar comforts and certainties after twenty years of upheavals. Israel, the war-torn impoverished dream, would remain a goal for some time in the future.
9
From
the Lowlands
to Palestine
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE WAR, RELATIONS AMONG THE various Jewish groups in Antwerp were so harmonious that it almost seemed un-Jewish. Working with international Jewish organizations, they quickly established a system of kosher food, two Jewish schools, an orphanage, and a working synagogue. Jewish leaders began to hope they could stay united in a single organization. But as Sam Perl said, “When things got better, everybody started acting like Jews again.”
One of the most divisive issues was the movement to establish an Israeli state. The British, who still controlled Palestine, had promised to reverse their 1939 policy of tightly restricting Jewish immigration. The policy reversal had been a campaign promise of the Labour party. But once in power, Labour enforced the old policy with even harsher measures against illegal immigrants. The British hold on its Middle Eastern oil fields concerned the Labour government far more than the party's historical commitment to Zionism.
After the Kielce pogrom, when the population of the DP camps surged into the hundreds of thousands, pressure on the British to let Jews into Palestine increased. The British and American governments formed the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which recommended that a hundred thousand refugees from DP camps be quickly let in. But again, even in the face of recommendations from its own committee, the British Labour government refused.
In Palestine the Haganah decided that it would undertake a massive smuggling of Jewish refugees. The Haganah, whose name means “defense,” had been founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Jew from Odessa who had organized a Jewish Legion in the Middle East to fight with the British in World War I. When the British attempted to disband it after the war, Jabotinsky held it together as a clandestine Jewish defense militia. Now the Haganah set up a network of agents throughout Europe