All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [80]
There were no bloody reprisals, few summary executions, no public beatings. There was no collective vengeance, except for the Nuremberg trials and a few other prosecutions (of criminal doctors and the Einsatzkommandos). De-Nazification wasn’t really serious. The German judicial system was scarcely affected by it. Nazi judges sat in judgment of Nazi defendants, and no one seemed to care, not even in the international Jewish community, which seems incomprehensible. In 1492, when they were forced to leave Spain, the Jews were quick to excommunicate the country that had expelled them, a ban the entire Jewish people observed for nearly five centuries. There is one very pragmatic explanation for why we didn’t act with equal rigor against Germany, whose crimes were far more monstrous. After the exodus from Spain, the Marranos were the only “Jews” who remained, whereas tens of thousands of survivors were unable to leave Germany in 1945, for they had nowhere else to go. All doors were closed to them. Lodged in camps for refugees and displaced persons, often in the very places they had been held by the SS, they waited for travel permits to Palestine or visas to America. It was a painful ordeal that lasted for some until 1950. It was therefore impossible to impose a public ban on a land where Jews were forced to go on living, even if in a state of misery and humiliation.
Yes, the fate of the “displaced persons” was shameful indeed, as was established in an official American report ordered by Harry Truman and drafted by Earl Harrison, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and American representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. The September 30, 1945, issue of The New York Times devoted a long and devastating article to this report. Some excerpts:
President Truman has directed General Eisenhower to clean up alleged shocking conditions in the treatment of displaced Jews in Germany outside the Russian zone and in Austria.…
The report declared that displaced Jews were held behind barbed wire in camps guarded by our men, camps in which frequently conditions were unsanitary and the food poor and insufficient, with our military more concerned with other matters.
Some of the displaced Jews were sick and without adequate medicine, the report stated, and many had to wear prison garb or, to their chagrin, German SS uniforms. All were wondering, it was added, if they had been liberated after all and were despairing of help while worrying about the fate of relatives.
They were in many cases, [Mr. Harrison] said, behind barbed wire in camps formerly used by the Germans for their prisoners, including the notorious Bergen-Belsen camp. Nearly all had lost hope, he stated.…
The Germans in rural areas, whom the Jews look out upon from the camps, were better fed, better clothed and better housed than the “liberated” Jews, the report declared.
It also noted:
As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our own military guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning the Nazi policy.
As I read and reread this article, feelings of shame, frustration, and sorrow sweep over me. American Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and humanists must have read this report. They knew—they must have known—that their brothers and sisters were suffering in Germany, yet they did little to relieve their plight. I don’t like to criticize fellow Jews, but their passivity seems incomprehensible.
And what about the Allied governments? In Henri Amouroux’s book La Page n’est pas encore tournée (The Page Has Not Yet Been Turned), he recounts with indignation the outrageous conditions as French inmates left Bergen-Belsen, with the bitter memory of having been treated scarcely better by the British than by the Germans. The same for Flossenburg,