What was life like for those freed from Nazi concentration camps in the weeks and months following their liberation?

by stankbreff

cecikierk

In Livia Bitton-Jackson's memoir My Bridge of Hope, she described after she, her mother, and her brother (her father did not survive) were liberated by American soldiers from Dachau, they stayed in a displaced person's camp for a bit to nurse her brother back to health, they then returned to her hometown (her hometown had belonged to Hungary before the war, after the war it became Czechoslovakian territory). Their house was in completely ramshackle but their neighbors, astonished that they returned, helped them made their house habitable again. Others with nowhere to go camped out in abandoned buildings the government officially granted to the repatriates as shelter. There were worries about Russian soldiers roaming the countryside and there were rumors about them committing rape and theft. She returned to her former school but found her old Hungarian schoolmates expelled to the other side of the Danube, while Czech and Slovaks moved in and all classes were instructed in Slovak.

The survivors of her city organized a communal home with shelter, kitchen, and community activities with governmental funding.

One chapter described how she found her old furniture scattered in her neighbors' houses and after assuring them that she will not report them to the Russians, she got her stuff back.

There was an anecdote about a group of drunken people celebrating Partisan Day threatened to kill all the remaining Jews.

Then Czechoslovakia officially became communist, so the "communal home" described earlier worked secretly to transport everyone either to Palestine or the US.

estherke

It varied wildly.

First of all, tens of thousands of inmates continued dying because of the truly appalling state they had been in at liberation, due to the fact that the Germans had assembled prisoners from all over into a few large camps in central Germany as the allies advanced from both the east and the west. The horrific overcrowding led to severe food shortages and disease, and most of the inmates had been in a bad state of health even before they arrived in the collection camps.

Then there was the difference between British and American administered camps and the ones liberated by the Soviets. The Soviet approach was a little more haphazard, let's put it that way. An excellent primary resource on what happened to Auschwitz inmates after liberation is Primo Levi's The Truce. He ended up being shuttled over half of Russia before finally being sent back to Italy. He writes about the Russian way of doing things as rather chaotic and unorganised. On the other hand, this provided greater opportunities for people to just strike out on their own and make their private arrangements.

The camps taken over by the western allies were better organised but this also meant that the inmates were more restricted in their movements, especially in the early days when they were not allowed to leave the camps because of the risk of diseases spreading.

After the initial quarantine was over, everything depended on whether you had a home to go back to or not. Many Eastern European Jews were reluctant to return home because of a) antisemitism (see the Kielce pogrom in Poland in 1946) and b) there was nothing to go back to as their whole community had been killed. These people could spend several years in Displaced Persons Camps in Germany waiting for visas to Western countries, mainly North America, Palestine (later Israel) and Australia. The last DP camp was closed in 1959.

Western European Jews generally returned to their home countries with little problem. However, most of them then faced the enormous task of rebuilding their lives basically from scratch, as they had generally lost many family members and friends, as well as their jobs, their homes and their possessions. It often was quite a bureaucratic struggle to regain possession.

Non-Jewish inmates generally had an easier time as the situation back home had not changed fundamentally and they could ease back into their former lives.

An important exception should be mentioned: Soviet POWs and civilian prisoners were subjected to a severe screening on their return and many were imprisoned, sent to Siberia or even executed on suspicion of "treason" and "collaboration". It is estimated that only one fifth of returning Soviet inmates were allowed to return to their homes immediately after the initial screening.