Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America

[Mosby]

Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America

WORLD leaders gathered at Auschwitz last month to mark the liberation 70 years earlier of the Nazis’ most infamous concentration camp. More ceremonies will follow in coming months to remember the Allied forces’ discovery, in rapid succession, of other Nazi concentration camps at places like Bergen-Belsen that winter and spring of 1945.

Largely lost to history, however, is the cruel reality of what “liberation” actually meant for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors discovered barely alive in the Nazi camps.

Even after the victorious American and Allied forces took control of the camps, the survivors — mainly Jews, but also small numbers of gays, Roma, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others — remained for months behind barbed wire and under armed guard in what became known euphemistically as displaced persons, or D.P., camps. Many Jews were left wearing the same notorious striped pajamas that the Nazis first gave them.

-Snip-

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/sunday-review/surviving-the-nazis-only-to-be-jailed-by-america.html

[Mosby]

1. the harrison report

http://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/displaced-persons/resourc1.htm

1) Generally speaking, three months after V-E Day and even longer after the liberation of individual groups, many Jewish displaced persons and other possibly non-repatriables are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences, in camps of several descriptions (built by the Germans for slave-laborers and Jews), including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions, in complete idleness, with no opportunity, except surreptitiously, to communicate with the outside world, waiting, hoping for some word of encouragement and action in their behalf.

(2) While there has been marked improvement in the health of survivors of the Nazi starvation and persecution program, there are many pathetic malnutrition cases both among the hospitalized and in the general population of the camps. The death rate has been high since liberation, as was to be expected. One Army Chaplain, a Rabbi, personally attended, since liberation 23,000 burials (90 per cent Jews) at Bergen Belsen alone, one of the largest and most vicious of the concentration camps, where, incidentally, despite persistent reports to the contrary, fourteen thousand displaced persons are still living, including over seven thousand Jews. At many of the camps and centers including those where serious starvation cases are, there is a marked and serious lack of needed medical supplies.

(3) Although some Camp Commandants have managed, in spite of the many obvious difficulties, to find clothing of one kind or another for their charges, many of the Jewish displaced persons, late in July, had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb-a rather hideous striped pajama effect-while others, to their chagrin, were obliged to wear German S.S. uniforms. It is questionable which clothing they hate the more.

Snip

For reasons that are obvious and need not be labored, most Jews want to leave Germany and Austria as soon as possible. That is their first and great expressed wish and while this report necessarily deals with other needs present in the situation, many of the people themselves fear other suggestions or plans for their benefit because of the possibility that attention might thereby be diverted from the all-important matter of evacuation from Germany. Their desire to leave Germany is an urgent one. The life which they have led for the past ten years, a life of fear and wandering and physical torture, has made them impatient of delay. They want to be evacuated to Palestine now, just as other national groups are being repatriated to their homes. They do not look kindly on the idea of waiting around in idleness and in discomfort in a German camp for many months until a leisurely solution is found for them.

With respect to possible places of resettlement for those who may be stateless or who do not wish to return to their homes, Palestine is definitely and pre-eminently the first choice. Many now have relatives there, while others, having experienced intolerance and persecution in their homelands for years, feel that only in Palestine will they be welcomed and find peace and quiet and be given an opportunity to live and work. In the case of the Polish and the Baltic Jews, the desire to go to Palestine is based in a great majority of the cases on a love for the country and devotion to the Zionist ideal. It is also true however, that there are many who wish to go to Palestine because they realize that their opportunity to be admitted into the United States or into other countries in the Western hemisphere is limited, if not impossible. Whatever the motive which causes them to turn to Palestine, it is undoubtedly true that the great majority of the Jews now in Germany do not wish to return to those countries from which they came.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. If you've never seen the '97 documentary "the long way home", it's worth viewing.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Way_Home_(1997_film)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119561/

Focuses quite a bit on this period, the DP camps, etc.

Eisenhower comes off like a fairly decent chap- Patton, errrrrr, not so much.

[MessengerFromIsrael]

3. Anti-Semitism UPROOTED

How the Jewish People and the World Can Win (or Lose) Together

Pariahs
A few days ago, two Jewish boys were beaten up in Queens, New York, and the word Hamas was written all over them. The media took no notice. But if Jews were to do the same to Arab boys, would the media treat it likewise?

It is not a hypothesis that the world is against us, nor is it a residue of past fears that should have been long gone by now. Anti-Semitism is as vibrant and as vile as ever not only in our neighborhoods, in some of our neighbors’ eyes, or on graffiti next to the shul. It is everywhere: on the bus, at school, at college, at work (albeit in a more implied manner), and, of course, in the media.
The social media is inundated with unreserved anti-Semitism. In France, names, residential addresses, and pictures of Jews were posted on a Facebook wall with an invitation to hurt them. To date, some have already been attacked. The rest are hiding. In Belgium, an elderly Jewish lady was refused medical care and was advised to go to Gaza for treatment.

Anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic demonstrations are held in dozens of cities throughout the world each day since the beginning of July. According to the Anti Defamation League (ADL), in just three weeks between July 8 and July 29, “there have been more than 135 anti-Israel protests held in cities throughout the U.S., many of which featuring anti-Semitic slogans and statements.”

http://www.bundleofreeds.com/anti-semitism-uprooted/

[ismnotwasm]

4. Is this your blog?

I've noticed your posts are from the same blog-- a friendly reminder that blog promoting is against our TOS.