Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America

Introduction

Introduction
The May 1950 issue of New Neighbors, a newsletter about Jewish refugees in the United States, contains a cheerful photograph of a young girl peering into the camera. The caption beneath it reads: Propitious Arrival: Happily displaying her pigtails is bright-eyed Bracha Rabinowicz, 13, who arrived in the United States from a DP camp in Germany on the day the Senate approved legislation liberalizing the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. The youngster, a native of Poland who survived the war by hiding in caves with her mother until liberation, symbolizes the new hope of the homeless men, women and children still in the DP camps abroad.1 Bracha Rabinowicz was one of 140,000 Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who emigrated to the United States from Europe in the years 1946–1954.2 The pages of New Neighbors are filled with their snapshots. The pictures are poignant and the accompanying accounts overwhelmingly happy: refugees succeed in new professions, play on soccer teams, celebrate holidays in freedom, and are gathered in by Jewish communities around the nation. But what do these images hide? About what are they silent? What lies in the gap between these public relations portraits and the way in which Bracha, a child survivor of genocide, became part of the fabric of American life? The history belied by the celluloid is the subject of Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America. Case Closed returns to the time before the “Holocaust” occupied a central place in American consciousness and those who had endured this event had not yet secured a place of honor and reverence as “survivors.” This work gives voice to these individuals as they were then: “refugees,” “DPs,” “New Americans,” “greeners,” “units,” “immigrants.” And their first 1 years here were harsh—not, as the PR images projected, unfailingly upbeat. The postwar narrative of triumph is a construct that the media promoted then and that has persisted to this day. And while it may be comforting, it effaces Holocaust survivors’ struggles and impedes our understanding of the impact of genocide on the individual and on society, as a whole. In Case Closed I challenge this accepted narrative by scrutinizing survivors ’ first years in America through the eyes of those who lived it. To do so, I synthesize a wide array of archival material, including case files of refugees recorded by agency social workers, letters and minutes from agency meetings, contemporary journal articles written by social workers and physicians, and oral testimonies. These tools add texture and depth to our understanding of the experience and throw a bright light on the survivors’ perspective. The hundreds of case files I analyze give an unvarnished account of the newcomers’ experiences and contrast sharply with the glowing media accounts of the day. What becomes immediately and devastatingly apparent is that these newcomers were refugees from genocide. The reason they found themselves in America made them immigrants like no other. Unlike those who flocked to the United States fifty years earlier, they did not leave the old country out of a desire to better themselves economically, nor did they save to send earnings home or to bring their families to the new country. 2 Case Closed DP Booter: New American soccer team in Denver, Colorado. New Neighbors 3, no. 4 (May 1950). Collection of author. They had no homes, no families to save for. They were the tiny remnant of a group that had been targeted for murder. Every last one of them. Having endured, the surviving Jewish remnant desperately wanted to get out of Europe: out of the DP camps, and out of the place that had become a symbolic graveyard to them. But the world was not particularly welcoming to this small group. In Chapter 1, I begin by exploring this dilemma, the refugees’ choices and the obstacles to reaching them. Palestine and the United States were their preferred destinations, for a host of reasons , ranging from ideological to practical. But entrance to both countries was limited, in the case of the former, by Britain’s rigidly controlled flow of Jewish refugees and, in the case of the latter, by America’s restrictive immigration laws. The American public, both Jewish and gentile, favored sending the DPs to Palestine. As it became increasingly clear that this would not happen quickly, some U.S. politicians and Jewish leaders began to advocate for admitting more DPs to America. In December 1945...