Jewish
Frontier

The following is adapted from remarks delivered by the general manager of the Forward Association, Samuel Norich, on January 15 at the "Life Reborn" conference on displaced persons, 1945-1951, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I was born in Feldafing, Germany, in 1947. We left for the States, for New York, in 1957, and 10 years later, in the summer of 1967, I went back for a visit. I got a grant from my college to spend the summer doing research on political ideology in the Jewish D.P. camps in a number of archives in Israel, Germany and at the Wiener Library in London. At least, that was the excuse for my trip. The reason was that, even though I was already 20, this was an adolescent odyssey for me. I went to find myself.

As it turned out, I found much more of myself in Israel, where I had never been before, than in Germany, where many memories connected me—and connect me to this day—to friends I grew up with and to places I remember.

I decided I would have to go back to Israel for a longer stay, and I did, two years later, when I spent the 1969-70 academic year, my second year ofgrad school, at the Hebrew University, taking courses with several of the great teachers of that great university. One was a seminar with Yehuda Bauer on the Sherit Hapleita. That course confirmed in me what has remained a fascination with the history and culture of the place and time in which I was born. I didn't become a scholar of it, but I remain a student of it.

I must tell you that for me, the central mystery of my parents' lives was, and remains, not what happened to them in the years from 1940 to 1945, but what they managed to do in the years just after 1945. My father never spoke about the war years. My mother never ceased to speak about the war, and I think, though she gave birth to and brought up two children, and made a warm home for Anita and me and our father for another four decades, I think she never quite recovered from the anguish of losing her mother, Khane; her sister, Giti, and her sister's baby, Taybl, and my mother's little brother, Moyshe, in Auschwitz. I think I feared that if I were to approach the events of those years too closely—even if vicariously—I would be hurt, maimed.

The mystery of my parents' and other survivors' lives after liberation was, simply, where did they find the strength to choose life? What did they think they were doing? That is, how did they understand themselves at that time? What, precisely, was the psychological or the cultural well from which they drew their strength?

The fact that most of our parents, most of the time, did find the strength to choose life may blind us to the possibility that they could have chosen otherwise. I remember the impression made on me by my first reading, in the late 1960s, ofBruno Bettelheim on psychological trauma in the concentration camps, and especially his description of the extreme passivity to which some inmates succumbed. Such people were called musselmaenner, and Bettelheim describes their extreme personality change as follows:
"...they were people so deprived of affect, self-esteem, and every form of stimulation, so totally exhausted, both physically and emotionally, that they had given the environment total power over them...
"...all conscious awareness of stimuli coming from the outside was blocked out, and with it all response to anything but inner stimuli.
"...[they became] objects, but with this they gave up being persons...they behaved as if they were not thinking, not feeling, unable to act or respond, moved only by things outside themselves."

Why didn't most of our parents, most of the time, become zombies of this sort, not during the concentration camps and not after? And the fact is that they didn't. On the contrary, as you heard from Professor Bauer last night, they demonstrated a degree of initiative, inventiveness, determination—gevureh—which played the key role in lowering the curtain on the British Empire in the land of Israel. They couldn't have done what they did without the eventual help and direction of the Jewish Agency's emissaries, of the Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish chaplains of the American and British armies. But they began to organize themselves before the Jewish Brigade arrived in late June 1945, and before the Joint came on the scene in August of that year. The Bricha organization and the central and camp committees in the American and British zones remained their show. To be sure, not everyone was an Abba Kovner, a Yosele Rosensaft, a Shmuel Gringauz, a Zaimen Grinberg, a Treger, a Shalit, but there were quite a few of them, and there were so many others who put their shoulders to the wheel, who were willing, in the later idiom of my generation, to put their bodies on the line.

There must have been hundreds who worked on the D.P. newspapers, which Professor Bauer mentioned only in passing. Despite the difficulty of obtaining printing presses and Hebrew type, the first newspapers appeared in Landsberg (Di Landsberger Lagercajtung, beginning on October 8, 1945) and Munich (Unzer Weg, published weekly beginning October 22). These were joined in the winter of 1945-6 by others: A Heim in Leipheim, Auf der Frei in Stuttgart, Unzer Hoffenung in Eschwege, Unzer Wort in Bamberg, Unzer Leben in Berlin, Unzer Mut in Zeilsheim, Der Neuer Moment in Regensburg, Dos Freie Wort in Feldafing, Bamidbar in Foerenwald, D.P. Express in Munich and Der Morgn in Bad Reichenhall.

Where did the feverish social and cultural activism of our parents during those days come from?

And what explains the unmatched birth rate of the Jewish D.P. camps in late 1946 through 1948?

For me, the clue to that mystery is to be found in the name they gave themselves: sheris hapleyte. That term has a certain currency in Jewish tradition. Sheris ha'pleyte means "saving remnant." Not "saved remnant"; that would have been a redundancy. Not even "surviving remnant," as you'll find in the historical overview the museum prepared and included in our portfolios for this conference. They saw themselves as the remnant that saves, that redeems, the family and the community as a whole, the community from which they came. That is why the first book-length history of the displaced persons, Leo W. Schwarz's 1953 work, was titled "The Redeemers." And when Herbert Agar published a history of the D.P.'s and the Joint seven years later, he called it "The Saving Remnant." In the title page of that volume, Agar quotes a sentence from Chaim Weizmann, written in 1933: "If, before I die, there are a half-million Jews in Palestine, I shall be content, because I know that this 'Saving Remnant' will survive." The earliest reference to this concept that I'm aware of in Jewish texts occurs in Genesis, chapter 45, verse 7: "Vayishlakheni elokim lifneykhem lashum lakhem sherit ba'aretz u'le'hakhayot lakhem lifleyta gedolah." It occurs when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, who now fear that the second to the Pharaoh in Egypt will exact retribution on them for what they did to him. But Joseph tells them no, that it was in fact God's plan to save them and their family: "And God sent me before you to give you a remnant on the earth, and to save you alive for a great deliverance."

They didn't call themselves survivors, though they knew the term: In Yiddish, it is "lebn-geblibene." Later, when we arrived in America, Americans and American Jews called us "refugees" at first. Still later, when we entered the public consciousness ofAmerica, it was as "survivors" and children of survivors. That term may be fine for external consumption, but for understanding ourselves and the sources of our parents' motivation, sheris ha'pleyte tells us more. Perhaps we can even get America to use the term "saving remnant."

Far from the Holocaust having created the state of Israel, it was the instinctive need of the survivors to save Vilna, to save something of the destroyed families and the destroyed Jewish communities from which they had come, that animated them and other Jews who created the Jewish state.

I'd like to close with one more personal recollection. I remember, in 1987, during the shloshim after my mother, standing in a minyan at the Teaneck Jewish Center, when a feeling came over me that it was now up to me to give her life, that the genetic and biological relationship between us—that she had given me life—was now reversed. I know I'm not the only one to have had that feeling while mourning the death of a parent. I don't know whether it's common among children of the sheris ha'pleyte, whether it is in fact a feeling known to every mother's child. But of one thing I am certain: that our parents felt exactly that feeling in 1945 and 1946. And here we are.