Not only did Jews have no interest in remaining in (not returning to- most Holocaust survivors had of course spent the war in Europe and afterward, as we'll discuss, remained for as long as several years before leaving) Europe after the war, even during the war their brethren outside Europe had essentially been planning for a world in which Europe was no longer a home for the Jews.

Even before WWII, Nazi Germany and Austria were places of terrible persecution of their Jews, and once the war started the ghettoization and murder of Jews in Poland and other areas of Central and Eastern Europe began as well. While the Final Solution wasn't enacted until 1942, enough horror was occurring that Jews outside of Europe began to see Europe as a place where the blood of the Jews had soaked the earth, so to speak- a place where they could never again live freely and comfortably, considering what was able to happen to them there. This is one of the main reasons why, prewar, so many were clamoring for more Jews to be admitted to various countries around the world, fighting against the immigration quotas in vogue at the time with little to no success; for example, the Evian Conference was a conference in 1938 in which 32 countries, including the US and Britain, gathered together to discuss the need of Jews to escape Germany and Austria yet, with the exception of the Dominican Republic, refusing to do anything about it. These efforts were generally occurring at the same time as efforts to obtain Jewish right of emigration to British Palestine, and with the advent of the war this became an important focus. Later, efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine were greatly influenced by the recent Jewish experience with the idea that they had no place where they belonged and nowhere to turn; a Jewish state would be that place in the future.

So while that was the attitude before and during the war, what about after, when Europe was under the control of the Allies, the Nazis were defeated, and things seemed to be looking up for the Jewish survivors?

One thing that's often little discussed when people talk about the liberation of the camps is the fact that even those Jews who were freed from concentration and death camps were often destined to live in camps for several years afterward- displaced persons (DP) camps. While Jews were far from the only ones in these camps, they were in a somewhat unique position. Many of them tried to return to their homes only to find themselves with no property or money, as it had been taken from them by the Nazis or by their former neighbors in their hometowns. Some faced far worse; in some places, most famously Kielce in Poland, Jews who had survived the camps were attacked or even murdered by mobs of their former neighbors upon their attempted return to their homes. There were therefore hundreds of thousands of effectively stateless Jews in Europe, with nowhere to go and no options besides displaced persons camps run by the US and British militaries.

In these camps, they often lived side by side with their former oppressors and their collaborators, as initially the Allied officials refused to separate the Jews in order to address their specific circumstances and instead organized the camps by nation of origin. The camps, which were in some cases Nazi concentration camps that were repurposed, were squalid and disease-ridden. The people in the camps could not work, were restricted in their movement, had little to no contact with the outside world, had nobody to advocate for them, and were overcrowded. It got to the point that when Earl Harrison, the US representative on the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees, inspected 30 DP camps in 1945, he was so horrified by them that he summed the situation up by saying that “. . . we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”

After a tremendous amount of work by Jewish chaplains who were ministering to the survivors, as well as by Jewish charities and officials under orders from General Eisenhower and President Truman, conditions greatly improved; Jews began to be housed in separate camps, recommendations were made by chaplains and fulfilled by Allied military personnel that all DP camp officials be screened for antisemitism, food and sanitation were improved, Jews were given the opportunity to get in touch with relatives and get jobs, and the barbed wire and military guards were removed. The camps were taken over by officials of the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency). While conditions absolutely improved, with Jewish life and community blossoming, conditions in the camps were still suboptimal and crowded, and the Jews there wanted little more than to leave Europe, where they were not wanted, and go someplace new where they could rebuild their lives. However, many of them were stuck in these camps for several years as they searched for places to go.

The two main desired destinations were Palestine and the US. Both of these places were nearly impossible to gain entry to; they had extremely restrictive immigration quotas. In Palestine, some got around them by organizing illegal aliyot, groups of people who were smuggled into Palestine through networks of Jewish organizations. Famously, some of these attempts were by ship, such as on the Exodus (the basis for the popular novel and film of that name); my own grandfather was part of an illegal aliyah in which children were smuggled in under other people's Palestine passports. In the US, American Jews lobbied for increased immigration for survivors, a move that was very unpopular among the American public; when Truman announced a proposal to admit Jewish refugees outside the quota system, 72% of Americans were against the move. In 1948 and 1950, various iterations of bills were passed which allowed certain numbers (first 202,000 then 415,000) of displaced persons with nowhere to go into the US, but while they allowed some Jews into the country, due to technicalities they allowed far more non-Jewish displaced persons. Many of these were actually Germans, including former concentration camp guards and Nazi collaborators, whose former homes had fallen under Soviet rule, leading officials of the American Jewish Community to complain that these bills "might be entitled [bills] to exclude DPs, particularly Jews, and to admit Hitler's collaborators." In 1948, with the establishment of the State of Israel and its open-door policy to Jewish survivors, much of the pressure on the US to admit Jewish refugees was slackened as even those who would have preferred to go to the US went to Israel, and at the end of the day, less than a quarter of the 400,000-plus displaced persons let into the United States by the early 1950s were Jewish.