The Zionists sought to prolong the suffering of Jewish Holocaust survivors

A group of survivors in Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons’ Camp, Germany, December 1945 source

After World War II, 250,000 liberated Jews found themselves in Displaced Person (DP) camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. They were refugees who survived the war in the Soviet Union and former inmates of the Nazi concentration camps, also known as holocaust survivors. The Zionist leadership in Palestine prevented their rescue to destinations other than Palestine, despite their abysmal living conditions, despite offers of resettlement and despite the desire of many to go. To Zionists, it was Palestine, or nothing. This is a brief history of how Zionists prolonged the suffering of Jewish Holocaust survivors.

After the war’s end, hundreds of thousands of Jews were living in the DP camps. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration administered camp affairs alongside the camp’s committee leaders, the United States army provided basic necessities, while the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) offered additional support and funding. In parallel to these humanitarian efforts, the Zionist community in Palestine sent politicians, educators and militiamen to ensure the Jewish refugees and the committees that directed policy in camps embraced the Zionist movement, namely, to ensure rescue attempts to destinations other than Palestine were rejected.

In one case, when the New York Rabbinical association sought to retrieve children hidden away in monasteries and settle them in rabbinical schools and seminaries in the US, France and England, camp leaders decided to stop counting children as a special category, nipping the effort in the bud. “The children should not be made into a special problem,” as Eliyahu Dobkin, Zionist immigration official put it. 

In another case, the British Jewish Committee convinced the British government to accept 1,000 Jewish children survivors, but only about 300 of them made it. The British army flew the children to England and “did everything they could to ease up matters," as one historian put it. “It is possible that no other group of immigrants ever entered this country with a more favorable welcome.” They settled into dormitories in Windermere with beds of  “crisp white sheets” and “little bowls of sweets … placed on the nightstands.”

The remaining 700 children were blocked by David Ben-Gurion, the political leader of the Zionist movement, who exerted significant influence over the camp leadership, compelling them to refuse to allow the children to leave. 

Some time later, Ben-Gurion remarked, “it is the job of Zionism not to save the remnant of Israel in Europe but rather to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people and the Yishuv.” Of course, “save” the land of Israel meant emptying it of its native inhabitants.

One of the teenagers who was brought to England described the conditions of those left behind. “People were dying like so many flies,” he recalled. “A lot of people had dysentery and were too weak to use the toilets. We could barely distinguish the living from the dead.” They were suffering from food shortages, overcrowding and an almost complete lack of heating. One Zionist observer described the camps as cemeteries. “I have never seen a picture as horrifying as this one,” reported Eliahu Dobkin of the Jewish Agency executive. “These are torn and broken shadows of men, plagued by lice and boils and eye diseases.”

But, their suffering was to no avail. The Zionist movement even used the “walking skeleton” photos of the survivors in their fundraising campaign materials all the while they denied those very same walking skeletons a path to a better life.

For the Zionists, Jewish bodies were needed in the demographic war against the native population of Palestine, no matter how emaciated those Jewish bodies would become.

For the Zionists, there was a second problem, not a manpower shortage problem but a narrative problem. If Jews were finding refuge outside of Palestine, that would undercut the whole argument for the Zionist idea in the first place. Why should there be a state for the Jews if Jews were welcome in other countries, including countries Jews preferred to go to anyways?

A British Jewish Committee representative, Shalom Adler-Rudel, even traveled to Germany to try to convince the DP leaders to change their minds. He spoke with many of the children themselves, reporting “they do not hesitate to say how much they would like to leave and how much they hated living there,” but had been psychologically pressured by the Zionist camp leaders. Gershon Pasanowsky, 14, and Bronia Katz, 15, wrote that they looked forward to going to England at the earliest possible moment. But camp leaders heeded the Zionists rather than the holocaust surviving children.

Then, in the summer of 1945, Jewish philanthropists convinced the French government to grant 500 Jewish children refugees with 50 accompanying adults entry permits to France. But, again, the camp leaders forbade the transfer of children to France.

Ben-Gurion was involved in this decision as well. “I object to the removal of Jewish children to England, even to Sweden,” he said. “It is necessary that they be there [the DP camps]--it’s good for them…it’s good for the Jews … it is a Jewish interest.” Apparently, for the leader of the Zionist movement, Jewish suffering was a Jewish interest.

One of the Jewish philanthropists behind the evacuation plan divulged that “we canceled an additional plan to evacuate three thousand refugees and 500 children to Italy, a plan that had already been negotiated with the authorities in Rome.”

In 1946, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, attacked the Zionists for abandoning the holocaust survivors. “Why in God’s name should the fate of all these unhappy people be subordinated to the single cry of Statehood? I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the unfortunate Jews of Europe’s D.P. camps are helpless hostages for whom statehood has been made the only ransom.”

For the Zionists, the aim was not just to guide camp leadership but to compel the camp residents to support Zionist policy objectives. As one scholar put it, the Zionist movement created “an atmosphere of terror” against those who wished to settle anywhere but Palestine. JDC social workers complained about Zionist passions, verging on the “totalitarian” imposition of “disciplined unity,” disrupting family reunification attempts and harshly penalizing children who wanted to leave the Zionist youth groups in the camps or join relatives abroad.

In July 1947, after the infamous Exodus ship was sent back to Europe after a Zionist attempt to transfer 4,500 Jewish refugees to Palestine, Chaim Weizmann urged the passengers to disembark in France to spare them the suffering that awaited them in Germany. But Ben-Gurion neutralized Weizmann’s efforts, preferring a spectacle of Jewish refugees forced back to Germany, which is exactly what he got.

Ultimately, Ben-Gurion’s efforts were successful and the rescue efforts failed. Liberated Jews had the liberty to choose but one immigration option: Palestine, an option that was mostly not an option at the time given strict British quotas on Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The Zionist leadership opted not for Jewish prosperity but for Jewish suffering in which child holocaust survivors served as sacrificial lambs on the altar of Zionism. The Jewish refugees may have just survived a holocaust, and they may have been living in squalid conditions, and they may have had hopes and dreams to start a new life or reunite with family or resettle in their countries of origin. But none of that was relevant. Their bodies were needed to wage a demographic war in Palestine, and that is how the Zionists transformed thousands of Jewish holocaust survivors into demographic hostages.

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