Displaced Persons Camps: Life After Liberation

The liberation of the Nazi camps in the spring of 1945 is often remembered as an ending — the gates opened, the war won, the nightmare over. For the survivors, it was nothing of the kind. The soldiers who freed them found people at the edge of death, in a continent in ruins, and the question that followed liberation was as vast as it was unanswered: where were these people supposed to go?

For most survivors there was no home to return to. Families had been murdered, houses expropriated or occupied by strangers, entire communities erased. Those who did go back — particularly to Poland — often met open hostility, and sometimes violence. The Allied armies classified the survivors, along with millions of other uprooted people, as "displaced persons," and housed them in hastily improvised camps: former army barracks, requisitioned hotels and villas, and in the most bitter of ironies, the grounds of former concentration camps themselves. Between 1945 and 1952, more than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons lived in DP camps and centers in Germany, Austria, and Italy.

Liberated but Not Free

The first months were grim. In many camps, Jewish survivors lived behind barbed wire and under armed guard, on rations barely above subsistence, sometimes alongside non-Jewish DPs who had collaborated in their persecution. In the summer of 1945, President Truman dispatched Earl G. Harrison, former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, to inspect the camps. His report shocked Washington.

As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.

— Earl G. Harrison, report to President Truman, August 1945

The Harrison Report brought immediate change. General Eisenhower ordered improved conditions and toured the camps personally, including the all-Jewish camp at Feldafing in Bavaria. Separate camps for Jewish survivors were established, rations were increased, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration took over civilian administration. The survivors began to call themselves the She'erit Hapletah — the "surviving remnant," a phrase drawn from the books of Ezra and Chronicles.

The Surviving Remnant Rebuilds

What happened next remains one of the most remarkable and least told chapters of the entire Holocaust story. In the camps at Feldafing, Landsberg, Föhrenwald, Zeilsheim, and Bergen-Belsen — the DP camp built beside the site of the concentration camp — people who had lost everything began, almost immediately, to build. Schools opened within weeks of liberation. Yeshivas and seminaries were founded. Yiddish newspapers appeared, among them the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung, printing survivor lists, camp politics, and poetry. Theater troupes performed, orchestras played, and vocational schools run by the ORT organization taught tailoring, mechanics, and nursing to people preparing for lives in countries that had not yet agreed to take them.

Above all, the survivors married and had children. The DP camps recorded among the highest birthrates in the world in the late 1940s; in Bergen-Belsen alone, hundreds of babies were born within a single year. Each birth was an intensely personal act of continuity — a declaration, made in a barracks in occupied Germany, that the story had not ended where the Nazis intended.

The camps also became intensely political. Survivors elected their own committees, ran their own courts, and organized congresses that spoke with growing confidence to Allied authorities and to the world. Zionist youth movements flourished, and kibbutz groups formed inside the camps to prepare for agricultural life in Eretz Israel. When David Ben-Gurion visited the camps in the autumn of 1945, he was greeted by crowds who saw in him not a foreign dignitary but the promise of a destination.

Nowhere to Go

Yet for years, almost every door remained closed. The United States kept its restrictive prewar quotas in place. Britain, holding the Mandate over Palestine, strictly limited Jewish immigration there. And in Europe itself, the danger had not passed: in July 1946, a pogrom in the Polish city of Kielce killed more than forty Jewish survivors who had returned home. The massacre triggered a mass flight of Polish Jews westward — the Brichah, or "escape" — that swelled the DP camps in the American zone with tens of thousands of new refugees who had survived the Holocaust only to flee for their lives a second time.

Many refused to wait. Between 1945 and 1948, the clandestine immigration movement known as Aliyah Bet carried tens of thousands of survivors on overcrowded ships toward Palestine, in defiance of the British blockade. Most ships were intercepted. Their passengers were interned — first at the Atlit detention camp south of Haifa, later in camps on Cyprus. The most famous of these ships, the Exodus 1947, was boarded by the Royal Navy within sight of the coast; its 4,500 passengers were sent back to DP camps in Germany, a decision whose impact on world opinion proved far greater than any successful landing could have been.

Doors Open at Last

The deadlock broke in 1948. In May, the State of Israel was established and opened its doors without restriction; roughly two-thirds of the Jewish DPs — well over 100,000 people — eventually made their lives there. A month later, the United States Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, the first refugee legislation in American history. Truman signed it while condemning its discriminatory provisions, which were partially corrected in 1950. In the years that followed, more than 80,000 Jewish DPs immigrated to the United States, with others settling in Canada, Australia, South America, and elsewhere.

By 1952, nearly all the DP camps had closed. One remained. Föhrenwald, in Bavaria — by then home to the hardest cases: the ill, the elderly, those whose emigration had fallen through — stayed open until February 1957, twelve years after liberation. When its last residents departed, the era of the Jewish DP camps ended, quietly and without ceremony, having outlasted the war that created it by more than a decade.

What the DP Years Mean

The displaced persons camps occupy an uneasy place in Holocaust memory — they complicate the comforting narrative in which liberation equals rescue. The survivors' ordeal did not end in 1945; for years, the remnant of European Jewry lived in camps, in the country of their persecutors, waiting for the world to decide their fate. But the DP years are also a story of astonishing vitality: of schools and newspapers and weddings and children, of a community that organized, argued, and insisted on its own future at the very bottom of history. The She'erit Hapletah did not merely survive the aftermath. They turned it into a beginning.