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Life for survivors

THE SURVIVORS

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View of the Zeilsheim displaced persons camp. Zeilsheim, Germany, 1945.

— National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

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For the survivors, returning to life as it had been before the Holocaust was impossible. Jewish communities no longer existed in much of Europe. When people tried to return to their homes from camps or hiding places, they found that, in many cases, their homes had been looted or taken over by others.

Returning home was also dangerous. After the war, anti-Jewish riots broke out in several Polish cities. The largest anti-Jewish pogrom took place in July 1946 in Kielce, a city in southeastern Poland. When 150 Jews returned to the city, people living there feared that hundreds more would come back to reclaim their houses and belongings. Age-old antisemitic myths, such as Jews' ritual murders of Christians, arose once again. After a rumor spread that Jews had killed a Polish boy to use his blood in religious rituals, a mob attacked the group of survivors. The rioters killed 41 people and wounded 50 more. News of the Kielce pogrom spread rapidly, and Jews realized that there was no future for them in Poland. 

Many survivors ended up in displaced persons' (DP) camps set up in western Europe under Allied military occupation at the sites of former concentration camps . There they waited to be admitted to places like the United States, South Africa, or Palestine. At first, many countries continued their old immigration policies, which greatly limited the number of refugees they would accept. The British government, which controlled Palestine, refused to let large numbers of Jews in. Many Jews tried to enter Palestine without legal papers, and when caught some were held in camps on the island of Cyprus, while others were deported back to Germany. Great Britain's scandalous treatment of Jewish refugees added to international pressures for a homeland for the Jewish people. Finally, the United Nations voted to divide Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. Early in 1948, the British began withdrawing from Palestine. On May 14, 1948, one of the leading voices for a Jewish homeland, David Ben-Gurion, announced the formation of the State of Israel. After this, Jewish refugee ships freely landed in the seaports of the new nation. The United States also changed its immigration policy to allow more Jewish refugees to enter. 

Although many Jewish survivors were able to build new lives in their adopted countries, many non-Jewish victims of Nazi policies continued to be persecuted in Germany. Laws which discriminated against Roma (Gypsies) continued to be in effect until 1970 in some parts of the country. The law used in Nazi Germany to imprison homosexuals remained in effect until 1969.

Source-http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007736

Impact of the Holocaust on Survivors

Introduction

For the 12 years that Germany was ruled by the Nazi Party, a central belief was that there existed in society, certain people who were dangerous and needed to be eliminated for German society to flourish and survive. Over time and locale, these people varied. They included Gypsies, Poles, and Russians, but always and most centrally, the Jews. The Nazis condemned the Jews to death and there was no escape. No action they might take, no change in their behavior or their beliefs, made the slightest difference regarding their death warrant. At every stage of the war, the Germans used their military superiority to crush and terrorize the Jews. Above all was the threat of massive reprisals. Hundreds were shot for the resistance of a single person. Thousands of Nazis and their accomplices combed the cities and countryside of Europe to sniff out Jews, trapping every Jewish person who tried to slip through their fingers. This was a goal to which the Nazis devoted themselves with the greatest efficiency. The Jews were generally abandoned by their neighbors and by the free world. They had no country of their own to which they could turn; and they had no means of self defense. The majority of the populations in which they lived remained indifferent to their fate. Many even helped the Nazis to imprison and deport Jews to the death camps.

Frequently, the question has been asked: Was the Holocaust a unique event, unprecedented in human and in Jewish history? The historian, Jacob Talman, has pointed out the major difference between the Holocaust and all other massacres in human history.

"Never since the dawn of history had the world witnessed such a campaign of extermination. This was not an explosion of Religious fanaticism; not a wave of pogroms, the work of incited mobs running amok or led by a ring leader; not the riots of a soldiery gone wild or drunk with victory and wine; not the fear-wrought psychosis of revolution or civil war that rises and subsides like a whirlwind. It was none of these. An entire nation was handed over by a 'legitimate' government to murderers organized by the authorities and trained to hunt and kill, with one single provision, that everyone, the entire nation be murdered - men and women, old and young, healthy and sick and paralyzed, everyone, without any chance of even one of those condemned to extermination escaping his fate.

After they had suffered torture, degradation, and humiliation inflicted on them by their tormentors to break them down, to rob them of the last shred of human dignity, and to deprive them of any strength to resist and perhaps of any desire to live, the victims were seized by the agencies of the state and brought from the four corners of Hitlerite Europe to the death camps to be killed, individually or in groups, by the murderers bullets over graves dug by the victims themselves, or in slaughterhouses constructed especially for human beings. For the condemned, there was no judge to whom to appeal for a redress of injustice; no government from which to ask protection and punishment for the murderers; no neighbor on whose gate to knock and ask for shelter; no God to whom to pray for mercy. It is in all this that this last campaign of extermination differs from all the other massacres, mass killings, and bloodshed perpetrated throughout history.

The Holocaust visited on the Jews is different from all other earlier massacres in its conscious and explicit planning, in its systematic execution, in the absence of any emotional element in the remorselessly applied decision to exterminate everyone, but everyone; in the exclusion of any possibility that someone, when his turn came to be liquidated, might escape his fate by surrendering, by joining the victors and collaborating with them, by converting to the victors faith, or by selling himself into slavery in order to save his life."¹

One important element of the Holocaust was that the Nazi genocidal machine was aimed not only at the destruction of the European Jewish Community, but also at the Jewish seed itself. It was a war not only against the Jews racial existence, but also against the Jewish procreative potential. The very number of individuals imprisoned and murdered in the concentration camp network challenges one's ability to comprehend the enormity of the suffering. The repeated exterminations that had already begun in the ghettos, continued on arrival at the camps and were repeated again and again at every medical inspection. Anyone with any sign of physical disease was eliminated. The suffering and deprivation were enormous. Mortality after liberation from Bergen-Belsen was so great that many of the physically weak died almost immediately after the liberation they had longed for.

On May 8, 1945 World War II ended in Europe. At war's end there were about 10 million people in the Nazi labor and concentration camps, forced labor units, and prisoner of war camps. Among the huge number of newly liberated people who sought to return to their homes, there were only about 200,000 surviving Jews (from a population of about 6 1/2 million), who had neither homes nor countries to return to. The Jews from the western countries of France, Holland, and Belgium – as well as many Hungarian Jews did indeed return to their countries of origin. But the majority of the surviving Jews of Poland and Lithuania refused to return to those lands despite the attempts made by the United States and other countries to persuade them to do so. These Jews had neither family nor friends waiting for them in their original homelands and communities, only unfriendly neighbors who feared that the Jews would ask to have their property returned to them.

At war's end, tens of thousands of survivors found themselves in Displaced Persons (DP) Camps, waiting to immigrate to Israel (then called Palestine). These survivors included Jews from Germany, Austria, Italy, and in particular, Poland, where they no longer found a viable Jewish community, and moreover, the Jews who had survived were still the objects of hate and murder by Polish nationalists. The survivors of the Holocaust were condemned to wait many times for long months and sometimes even years until they were able to immigrate to Israel. Their determination to reach that land and rebuild a homeland was a major contribution of the survivors to the eventual independence of Israel and to the renewal of Jewish life in the Jewish State.

In assessing the impact of the Holocaust on survivors, it needs to be said that no person could have survived Hitler's concentration camps and emerged totally unchanged. The implications to world Jewry and succeeding generations are indeed vast and complex. It is the intent of this paper to focus on these implications in three important areas. First, a brief comparison will be made between the Jews of eastern and western Europe, followed by a more in depth discussion of the situation in Poland, comparing life as it was pre-holocaust with life as it is today. Next, this paper will look at the impact on survivors - both adult and child: the psychological, the physical, and spiritual implications. Lastly, the effects on the second generation of the survivors will be discussed along with the implications to family life.

Source-http://www.sandrawilliams.org/HOLOCAUST/holocaust.html

Elie's Journey

Elie Wiesel is a Nobel-Prize winning writer, teacher and activist known for the memoir Night, in which he recounts his experiences surviving the Holocaust.

IN THESE GROUPS

• FAMOUS PEOPLE IN WRITING & PUBLISHING
• NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNERS
• FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO BECAME U.S. EXPATRIATES
• HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

QUOTES

“Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.”

—Elie Wiesel

Synopsis

Born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania (then and now part of Romania), Elie Wiesel pursued Jewish religious studies before his family was forced to relocate to Nazi death camps during WWII. Wiesel survived, and later wrote the internationally acclaimed memoir Night. He has also penned many books and become an activist, orator and teacher, speaking out against persecution and injustice across the globe.

Early Life

Elie Wiesel was born Eliezer Wiesel on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania, which would later become Romania. Wiesel, who grew up with three sisters and pursued religious studies at a nearby yeshiva, was influenced by the traditional spiritual beliefs of his grandfather and mother, as well as his father's liberal expressions of Judaism.

Surviving the Holocaust

In 1944, Nazi Germany forced Jews who resided in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to relocate to labor and death camps in Poland. At the age of 15, Wiesel and his entire family were sent to Auschwitz as part of the Holocaust, which took the lives of more than 6 million Jews. Wiesel lived in the camps under deplorable, inhumane conditions, gradually starving, and was ultimately freed from Buchenwald in 1945. Of his relatives, only he and two of his sisters survived.

Wiesel went on to study at the Sorbonne in France from 1948-51 and took up journalism, writing for French and Israeli publications. His friend and colleague François Mauriac encouraged him to write about his experiences in the camps; Wiesel would publish in Yiddish the memoir And the World Would Remain Silent in 1956. The book was shortened and published in France as La Nuit, and as Night for English readers in 1960. The memoir became an acclaimed bestseller, translated into many languages, and is considered a seminal work on the terrors of the Holocaust. Night was followed by two novels, Dawn (1961) and Day (1962), to form a trilogy that looked closely at humankind’s destructive treatment of one another.

Writer and World Activist

Wiesel went on to write dozens of books, including the novels Town of Luck (1962), The Gates of the Forest (1966) and The Oath (1973), and such nonfiction works as Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters(1982) and the memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995). Wiesel has also become a revered international activist, orator and figure of peace over the years, speaking out against injustices perpetrated in an array of countries, including South Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda. In 1978, Wiesel was appointed chair of the President's Commission on the Holocaust by President Jimmy Carter. Additionally, he has been honored across the world with a number of awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor's Grand Croix.

Teaching is another passion of Wiesel's, having been appointed in the mid-1970s as Boston University's Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. He has also taught Judaic studies at the City University of New York, and served as a visiting scholar at Yale.

Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and later founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with his wife Marion (Erster Rose) Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel- Healing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgWJrLn2SGk

Elie Wiesel

Born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania (then and now part of Romania), Elie Wiesel pursued Jewish religious studies before his family was forced to relocate to Nazi death camps during WWII. Wiesel survived, and later wrote the internationally acclaimed memoir Night. He has also penned many books and become an activist, orator and teacher, speaking out against persecution and injustice across the globe.

Early Life

Elie Wiesel was born Eliezer Wiesel on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania, which would later become Romania. Wiesel, who grew up with three sisters and pursued religious studies at a nearby yeshiva, was influenced by the traditional spiritual beliefs of his grandfather and mother, as well as his father's liberal expressions of Judaism.

Surviving the Holocaust

In 1944, Nazi Germany forced Jews who resided in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to relocate to labor and death camps in Poland. At the age of 15, Wiesel and his entire family were sent to Auschwitz as part of the Holocaust, which took the lives of more than 6 million Jews. Wiesel lived in the camps under deplorable, inhumane conditions, gradually starving, and was ultimately freed from Buchenwald in 1945. Of his relatives, only he and two of his sisters survived.

Wiesel went on to study at the Sorbonne in France from 1948-51 and took up journalism, writing for French and Israeli publications. His friend and colleague François Mauriac encouraged him to write about his experiences in the camps; Wiesel would publish in Yiddish the memoir And the World Would Remain Silent in 1956. The book was shortened and published in France as La Nuit, and as Night for English readers in 1960. The memoir became an acclaimed bestseller, translated into many languages, and is considered a seminal work on the terrors of the Holocaust. Night was followed by two novels, Dawn (1961) and Day (1962), to form a trilogy that looked closely at humankind’s destructive treatment of one another.

Writer and World Activist

Wiesel went on to write dozens of books, including the novels Town of Luck (1962), The Gates of the Forest (1966) and The Oath (1973), and such nonfiction works as Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (1982) and the memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995). Wiesel has also become a revered international activist, orator and figure of peace over the years, speaking out against injustices perpetrated in an array of countries, including South Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda. In 1978, Wiesel was appointed chair of the President's Commission on the Holocaust by President Jimmy Carter. Additionally, he has been honored across the world with a number of awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor's Grand Croix.

Teaching is another passion of Wiesel's, having been appointed in the mid-1970s as Boston University's Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. He has also taught Judaic studies at the City University of New York, and served as a visiting scholar at Yale.

Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and later founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with his wife Marion (Erster Rose) Wiesel.

Source-http://www.biography.com/people/elie-wiesel-9530714

The Nuremberg Trials

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Aerial view of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, where the International Military Tribunal tried 22 leading German officials for war crimes. Nuremberg, November 1945.

— National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

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After the war, some of those responsible for crimes committed during the Holocaust were brought to trial. Nuremberg, Germany, was chosen as a site for trials that took place in 1945 and 1946. Judges from the Allied powers -- Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States -- presided over the hearings of twenty-two major Nazi criminals. 

Twelve prominent Nazis were sentenced to death. Most of the defendants admitted to the crimes of which they were accused, although most claimed that they were simply following the orders of a higher authority. Those individuals directly involved in the killing received the most severe sentences. Other people who played key roles in the Holocaust, including high-level government officials, and business executives who used concentration camp inmates as forced laborers, received short prison sentences or no penalty at all. 

The Nazis' highest authority, the person most to blame for the Holocaust, was missing at the trials. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the final days of the war, as had several of his closest aides. Many more criminals were never tried. Some fled Germany to live abroad, including hundreds who came to the United States. 

Trials of Nazis continued to take place both in Germany and many other countries. Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi-hunter, located Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Eichmann, who had helped plan and carry out the deportations of millions of Jews, was brought to trial in Israel. The testimony of hundreds of witnesses, many of them survivors, was followed all over the world. Eichmann was found guilty and executed in 1962 

KEY DATES

AUGUST 8, 1945
CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL (IMT) ANNOUNCED AT LONDON CONFERENCE
The International Military Tribunal (IMT) is composed of judges from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Leading Nazi officials will be indicted and placed on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, under Article 6 of the IMT's Charter for the following crimes: (1) Conspiracy to commit charges 2, 3, and 4, which are listed here; (2) crimes against peace--defined as participation in the planning and waging of a war of aggression in violation of numerous international treaties; (3) war crimes--defined as violations of the internationally agreed upon rules for waging war; and (4) crimes against humanity--"namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated."

OCTOBER 6, 1945
LEADING NAZI OFFICIALS INDICTED FOR WAR CRIMES
The four chief prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal (IMT)--Robert H. Jackson (United States), Francois de Menthon (France), Roman A. Rudenko (Soviet Union), and Sir Hartley Shawcross (Great Britain)--hand down indictments against 24 leading Nazi officials. The indicted include Hermann Goering (Hitler's heir designate), Rudolf Hess (deputy leader of the Nazi party), Joachim von Ribbentrop (foreign minister), Wilhelm Keitel (head of the armed forces), Wilhelm Frick (minister of the interior), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (head of security forces), Hans Frank (governor-general of occupied Poland), Konstantin von Neurath (governor of Bohemia and Moravia), Erich Raeder (head of the navy), Karl Doenitz (Raeder's successor), Alfred Jodl (armed forces command), Alfred Rosenberg (minister for occupied eastern territories), Baldur von Schirach (head of the Hitler Youth), Julius Streicher (radical Nazi antisemitic publisher), Fritz Sauckel (head of forced-labor allocation), Albert Speer (armaments minister), and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (commissioner for the occupied Netherlands). Martin Bormann (Hitler's adjutant) is to be tried in absentia.

OCTOBER 1, 1946 
VERDICT AT NUREMBERG
The International Military Tribunal (IMT) announces its verdicts. It imposes the death sentence on 12 defendants (Goering, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss­Inquart, and Bormann). Three are sentenced to life imprisonment (Hess, economics minister Walther Funk, and Raeder). Four receive prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years (Doenitz, Schirach, Speer, and Neurath). The court acquits three defendants: Hjalmar Schacht (economics minister), Franz von Papen (German politician who played an important role in Hitler's appointment as chancellor), and Hans Fritzsche (head of press and radio). The death sentences are carried out on October 16, 1946, with two exceptions: Goering committed suicide shortly before his scheduled execution, and Bormann remained missing. The other 10 defendants are hanged, their bodies cremated, and the ashes deposited in the Iser River. The seven major war criminals sentenced to prison terms are remanded to the Spandau Prison in Berlin.