Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (review)

Between 1946 and 1954 approximately 140,000 Holocaust survivors reached the United States, making new lives for themselves in that country. In Case Closed, Beth B. Cohen charts the first years of their lives in America and, in her words, challenges "the unfailingly upbeat" public-relations images of their resettlement which, she claims, had little to do with the harsh realities of rebuilding their existence. Using interviews, casework files from the New York Association of New Americans (NYANA), social workers' and physicians' reports of that period, she attempts to painstakingly reconstruct various aspects of the displaced persons resettlement process while focusing on topics that have received little attention in earlier studies.

Cohen's narrative is definitely a compelling one, and the case stories she cites show an unfortunate parallel between various resettlement issues facing prewar refugees in the United States and those facing their postwar counterparts. Among these were distant relatives who were willing to send affidavits and promises of support, but who then reneged in practice from assisting their kin after their arrival if they did not live up to expectations. Such expectations included viewing the newcomers as potential domestic help, marriage partners for children, underpaid factory labor, and the like. Another was the attitude toward "special" groups of DPs who were potentially hampered in their resettlement by structural, and not only conjectural factors. These include those with circumscribed physical or mental health or limited by religious dictates.

The two unique groups of DPs upon whom Cohen focuses—the Orthodox and the orphans—were equally problematic in their pre-war refugee form. However their postwar exemplars had undergone the additional trauma of wartime experiences. The stories she brings show, in the words of one orphaned survivor, how some felt that they had exchanged "one hell for another" (103). Most of the orphans were not young children but adolescents who had experienced years of violence, trauma, and displacement. Arrival in America was not always the panacea for these tribulations. Cohen relates the story of two orphaned sisters taken in by an aunt only because she received payment for them, who infected their sixteen-year old cousin with lice. As a result the aunt shaved their heads, forbidding them to go into the living room or to the fridge or to speak in a language she didn't understand. The sisters were ultimately placed in a Jewish orphanage in another city. Other orphaned children had more positive memories of relatives in America but could nevertheless not live with them because of unsuitable living conditions. Nevertheless, many of these children managed to focus on the future and achieve what Cohen refers to as "spectacular success both professionally and financially" (114).

The situation of Orthodox DPs was equally complex. Cohen describes the plight of the young, bearded, skull-capped, Sabbath observer, reaching America during the late 1940s, untrained for anything except possibly being a religious functionary. Although resettlement agencies were supposed to make efforts to place these DPs in suitable positions, she shows how many placement workers in secular agencies were unable to transcend their own assumptions and prejudices in order to truly assist these survivors.

A third poignant chapter relates to the physical and emotional difficulties of certain survivors who reached the United States, showing how these prevented them from starting a new life in America. Cohen brings the stories of a survivor unable to shake off the torment of seeing her children murdered by the Nazis; of another confused and disappointed over not being able to go to school in America after the Joint had arranged for him to attend university in Germany; of a third who, finding herself newly married and pregnant in America, decided to give away her baby as she was supporting her husband while he learned a trade. From Cohen's narrative it is difficult to determine whether these are the ordinary or the extraordinary, particularly in view of her closing remarks...