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Chapter 5 Jewish Survivors and the Reckoning with the Nazi Past In “The Battle of Grunwald,” Tadeusz Borowski interweaves the story of liberated Polish political prisoners with that of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. While the politicals are debating the Polish future in the DP camp, a group of Polish Jews arrives. They are on their way to Palestine. The story’s narrator Tadek makes the acquaintance of a young Jewish woman named Nina, who is eager to put Poland behind her. In one of the story’s pivotal scenes, an American GI mistakenly shoots and kills Nina as she and Tadek try to sneak back into the camp. An indictment of U.S. policy toward victims of National Socialism, this scene can also be read as a meditation on the dif‹culties of reconstructing one’s life after the war. Skeptical of all nationalisms, Borowski portrays the exodus of Jews from Poland and the assertion of a Jewish identity as an unsatisfactory solution to the problem of ‹nding a home in the postwar world. In killing his one real Jewish character, he also critiques the Zionist solution to this problem. Among Jewish DPs, the repatriation debate did indeed revolve around the possibility of rebuilding one’s life at home and the meaning of home more generally. This chapter focuses on the Jewish repatriation debate. One of the key issues I consider here is support for Zionism. This issue has been hotly debated in the literature on Jewish DPs. However unsatisfactory the Zionist solution may have appeared to Borowski, many scholars believe that it enjoyed strong support. According to Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, “the Zionist position was the only one of the many Jewish philosophies of life whose program still made sense after the catastrophe.”1 Similarly, Zeev Mankowitz argues that Jewish DPs demonstrated “a potent proto-Zionism .”2 Yehuda Bauer puts things even more strongly, arguing that the “ideological orientation [of the DPs] was clearly, overwhelmingly, and right from the beginning, Zionist.”3 At the other end of the spectrum, Yosef 153 Grodzinsky argues that Zionists forced their agenda onto survivors, for example , by pressuring young Jewish DPs to join the emerging Israeli army.4 Other scholars take a middle position, arguing that Zionism among Jewish DPs is best understood as the product of noncoercive interaction with representatives of the yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine.5 While the political visibility of Zionism among Jewish DPs is indisputable , the sources and strength of Zionism remain unclear. What did Zionism mean to Jewish DPs? How was support for Zionism related to the Holocaust? To what extent was it a mass phenomenon? In order to adequately address these questions, one needs to consider the regional background of Jewish DPs, their experiences during the Holocaust, and their prospects for rebuilding their lives in postwar eastern Europe. The regional history of Zionism during the earlier twentieth century is especially important . For most Jewish DPs, Zionism was a familiar political idiom. Far from being the only philosophy that still made sense, it was the philosophy that made most sense to survivors from countries with a strong Zionist tradition . American DP policies and practices also helped the Zionist camp by progressively recognizing Jewish DPs as a distinct national group. This process began with permission to create separate Jewish committees in the liberated concentration camps, continued with the Harrison Report and the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, and culminated in the recognition of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in September 1946. Still, it is not clear that Zionism was the mass phenomenon many scholars suggest or that support for Zionism meant support for emigration to Palestine . Although survivors were quite willing to turn their backs on Europe, emigration plans were also directed at the United States and other countries and were linked to the more general desire for a safe and digni‹ed existence . Moreover, mass rejection of diaspora life did not come until well after the war, in the context of renewed persecution in Poland and other eastern European countries. Although the Jewish repatriation debate was thus quite different from the repatriation debate among Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, the two debates were nonetheless intertwined. Jewish decisions about the future were made in the context of a common framework of American and German policies toward displaced persons and persecutees. These policies came to recognize Jews as a distinct group, but in many respects treated them like other DPs. As Daniel Cohen notes, “[Holocaust] survivors shared little with the...

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