'Puzzling' Photos Of Happy, Carefree Jewish DPs In Post-War Germany, Acting As If Nothing Happened

Children of Jewish DPs — Displaced Persons — have been exchanging photos taken by their parents and friends in the year following the end of World War II, but instead of showing saddened, morose survivors of a catastrophic “genocide” where they narrowly escaped the Gas Chambers™, they are met with ‘puzzling’ images of people laughing, partying, and enjoying themselves without a care in the world — as if the “Holocaust” hadn’t just happened:

After my parents passed away, I began to look through a pile of photos showing them when they were refugees in Germany after the Holocaust. The photos are puzzling: My parents’ families have been murdered in Poland by the Germans, dark clouds hang over the future, and yet they look like they are on vacation. They are smiling, lounging in bathing suits, and drinking beer in cafes.

Together with other descendants of survivors, I have been trying to figure out what was going on during this period our parents seldom mentioned.

Between 1946 and 1949 about 250,000 survivors took refuge in American-occupied Germany. Fleeing anti-Semitism and Communism, they hoped the Displaced Persons (DP) camps set up by the American Army would serve as a gateway to the emerging Jewish state or to the West.

As the British blocked their entry to the nascent Jewish homeland and the United States, Canada and other countries refused to let them in, a long waiting period ensued. Bolstered by food and clothing from American Jewish relief organizations, the DPs soon launched a huge baby boom.

Seven decades later, these “babies” are connecting with one another through Facebook groups and reunions — even though most of them last saw each other while lying in a baby carriage.

One thing many of us have in common, oddly enough, is an inheritance of large numbers photos from the DP era, left behind by our parents, whose stories about the Holocaust tended to overshadow reminiscences of the period that followed.

In the last few years the children of Jewish DPs who lived in Bad Reichenhall, Feldafing, Eichstatt, Foehrenwald, St. Ottilien and other Bavarian towns have either met up in Germany or via the internet in order to piece together what life was like during that time.

Many of the photos handed down to other descendants convey the same carefree atmosphere that mine do. At the St. Ottilien meeting one participant even quoted his parents as describing those days as the happiest of their lives.

“They were young people who now had a secure place to stay,” said Burt Rochelson, an American physician whose father reached St. Ottilien along with a group of Lithuanian Jews who escaped from a bombed train. “They didn’t dwell on the past. They were human. They finally had the opportunity to have a good time and dammit if they weren’t going to do it.”

The desire to not look back was a sentiment that Abe Mazliach recalls his father expressing about his time at Feldafing.

“When my father was on his way to Feldafing, an American army officer told him to try to forget the past and start a new life,” says Mazliach. “That’s what Feldafing became for him and that’s why you can see many happy moments in those photos.”

…Yet it is the anguish associated with these joyous moments, that were the moments most often recalled in later years.

“In almost every story I heard about a DP wedding, someone would say how they remembered a sad moment when they realized their mother and father weren’t there,” says Atina Grossmann, a historian who notes that it may have been awkward for the survivors to speak about that period later on.

“It was an ambivalent time for them. They were able to jump into a lake and swim in the perversely beautiful German landscape. It was blood-soaked earth, but it was defeated earth,” she says.

Grossmann makes a distinction between the type of photos that appear in public archives and the private photos that the survivors had taken of themselves. She explains that the former, which are the ones most often used to teach the history of the DP era were usually taken by fundraising organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Development Committee.

“The JDC wanted to show surviving Jews as hardworking in workshops as auto mechanics or sewing or learning agriculture. They didn’t want to show young couples flirting in the mountains,” Grossmann says.

She hypothesizes that photos like those of my parents were likely intended as mementos, though they may have had another purpose. “They may have been trying to send a message to distant relatives that they were young and strong and not traumatized — even if they were,” Grossmann says…

I continued to try to understand why the DP period was often neglected while on a trip to Germany, where I visited the places my parents stayed in Bad Reichenhall. I soon discovered that the Jewish DPs were not the only ones who seldom spoke about that era.

“They were difficult times when we were grateful if an American soldier would give us a banana,” recalled an elderly man at a German military cemetery. Decked out in traditional Bavarian costume with a feather in his cap, he pointed out that unlike the Jewish refugees, no one supplied the Germans with food at a time when food was scarce.

As Grossmann points out in her book “Jews, Germans and Allies,” the only jobs available for many Germans was working in the DP camps, where the tasks were often quite menial. I could not help but notice a great irony of history: Only a few years after German leaders had described the Jews as vermin, many Germans found themselves washing the clothes of Jews and scrubbing their toilets.

…Finally, one other reason why the DP phenomenon has often faded into the background seems to be related to the relatively late stage in the lives of the survivors when the rest of the world started to take an interest in them.

During the 1950s and ’60s, those survivors who did talk about their experiences usually only found listening ears in their families or limited Jewish circles. This was certainly the case for my parents and their survivor friends in Canada, where they lived after immigrating there in 1949.

The turning point was the American TV series “Holocaust” in the ’70s, which along with Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah” in the ’80s and Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List” in the ’90s, were all milestones that put the Holocaust on the world map.

New awareness culminated in 2005 with the United Nations declaring an annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was only then, decades after the Holocaust, that schools began to seek out survivors as speakers and communities started to build Holocaust memorials and museums around the world.

Consequently, when the day of recognition for the survivors did come, it was the stories of the Holocaust that people wanted to hear. The days of the DP camps were seldom asked about, and the topsy-turvy events of a period when the tables were turned on victims and perpetrators didn’t fit the narrative of the genocide.

As I look once again at the photos, even after all the explanations and speculations, in some ways the truth of what those days were really like continues to elude me. Yet, as Mazliach pointed out: “Now that our parents are no longer here to tell their stories, it’s up to our generation to pass on whatever we can.”

This is a textbook example of Occam’s Razor — the simplest explanation is most likely the truth — and the simplest explanation as to why these DP Jews do not look like they had just survived the world’s greatest genocide is because they hadn’t.

What the writer of this article is engaged in is, ironically, ‘historical revisionism’ — he is imposing his own years of Holocaust indoctrination — since the late 1970s — onto these photos and finding that his indoctrination doesn’t match the facts before his very eyes.

So instead of doubting the indoctrination, he doubts the reality that he sees right before his eyes — which is that his parents and their friends didn’t have a care in the world — because life was indeed good for them, and it was going to just get better and better.

Very little has been written about the life of Jewish DPs at this time because — as this writer himself acknowledges — it doesn’t conform to the official Jewish Version of World War II™.

In reality, Jewish DPs were treated exceptionally well by the Allied occupational forces — almost like royalty — they were given priority with food, clothing, and lodging — private German citizens were literally dragged out of their own homes to give housing to many DP Jews — for which the Germans to this day were never compensated.

Remember, poverty was widespread at this time — and very few people had cameras, let alone the money to take and develop expensive pictures — and yet this was not a problem for these Jewish DPs — who apparently didn’t realize they’d survived the Holocaust until a television show in the 1970s told them that they had.

If you would like a glimpse of the reality of these years, read John Sack’s Eye For An Eye: The Story Of Jews Who Sought Revenge For The Holocaust — and compare the life of those Jewish DPs to the fate of the surrendered Germans in James Bacque’s must-read Other Loses.

While these Jewish DPs were partying and living it up, Germans were being starved to death and gang raped by the Allied armies — the documentary Hellstorm exposes this reality in the most graphic terms.

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