Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America

Conclusion

Conclusion
By mid-1954, annual European Jewish immigration to America had slowed to a trickle. Fewer than seven thousand newcomers arrived that year.1 USNA, whose offices had bustled in 1949 with a staff of 787, was reduced to 51 people.2 The agency had outlived its original purpose. It merged with the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in August and formed the United HIAS Service. NYANA’s doors remained open to its New York clientele, but it also felt the effects of the slowed immigration. Once an agency with 568 employees in 1950, NYANA cut its staff to 46 by the conclusion of 1954.3 The era of Holocaust survivors’ postwar immigration to the United States drew to a close. Of the surviving remnant of European Jewry, 140,000 immigrated to America. In this study I have explored what happened to those men, women, and children in their first years in America and Americans’ first face-to-face confrontation with the Holocaust through those who survived. It illuminates a time before survivors were “survivors” in their own eyes and in those of the greater society and the term “the Holocaust” was yet to become ubiquitous. Their numbers are relatively small, but the impact of this group transcends the statistic. And its impact grows even as the numbers shrink. If the only impressions we had of their reception were gleaned from contemporary media reports and Jewish organizations’ accounts, or from the place of honor that survivors hold in our society today, we would be led to believe that America had welcomed survivors warmly and the refugees had acclimated without delay. It is a comforting thought from many perspectives . But, unfortunately, it is false. The experience of Holocaust survivors in America has generally been narrated as a victory. The mere ability to go on living has been viewed as 173 ample proof of their triumph over Hitler. Such blanket statements veil important issues. As Case Closed shows, the postwar reality was exceedingly complicated. For many survivors, this era was imbued with vast and irrevocable loss. Through the focus on an external and uniformly happy ending, the complex and arduous period immediately after the Holocaust has been trivialized, minimized, obscured. It has been reinvented into a story that is comforting but untrue. This myth hides another painful truth. It masks the way that survivors were treated when they arrived in America. How can we understand a survivor confined to life after Auschwitz in a state asylum? An orphan banished from a foster family’s home? The downward spiraling of a family when its case was closed because the year of agency support was up? A new arrival waiting at the dock for a sponsor who never shows? These are not stories of triumph or welcome. Undoubtedly, these postwar immigrants presented an enormous challenge to their hosts, battered as they were in body and spirit. The Jewish communities’ response to the Holocaust survivors in America, however, was shaped by other concerns and other receptions in immigration history. But these new Americans were unlike any immigrants before them. This was the surviving remnant of the Holocaust’s obliteration; that tiny fraction still alive after the cataclysmic event of the twentieth century. That is precisely why, presented with the opportunity, the communities and individuals should have responded differently. Giving short-term material relief and pushing the DPs to work privileged the agencies’ agenda first and the survivors’ needs second. On both the community and the personal level, this pattern was repeated; it was the survivors’ needs that were secondary. Conventional wisdom holds that the survivors themselves wanted to move on, forget their past, live normal lives after the chaos they had recently experienced. And that their memories were too raw, too painful, to confront. They repressed them, the accepted account insists, and forged ahead, becoming successful “survivors.” But Case Closed shows otherwise. Yes, many survivors did go forward, but it was hardly a seamless progression . There were those whose energy was depleted. There were those whose grief prevailed. Even when survivors seemed to be acculturating according to plan, a host of ailments cropped up unbidden. Births, eagerly anticipated, evoked loss that could not be staved off. Other pitfalls materialized. The road was bumpy and fraught with dangers. Over and over, survivors emphasize the difficulty rather than the ease that characterized this period. 174 Case Closed Despite what refugees...