In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

76 4 LiberationandLegacy On May 9, 1945, four months after the final Allied assault on Germany, the war in Europe officially came to an end. For the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, the long-awaited liberation was a complicated endeavor, logistically and psychologically. The victims of the Holocaust were consumed with the struggle for daily survival. Few could anticipate the profound sense of alienation and abandonment that awaited them. The members of Irgun Brith Zion, however, had never been satisfied to live in the moment. They had anticipated an emotional and ideological vacuum after the war, and they had put their underground efforts to good use, preparing to assume leadership roles in the postwar Zionist movement. Of course, nothing could prepare them for the profound disorientation they would experience upon liberation. But their persistent focus on the future would provide the same centering influence after the war as it exerted under the Nazis.1 A critical facet of the resistance work in Dachau-Kaufering was the preparation of the She’erit Hapletah (literally, “Surviving Remnant”) for their recovery after liberation. Dr. Zalman Grinberg, who had participated in meetings of Brith Zion in the ghetto, would soon become the first president of the Liberated Jews in Bavaria and the whole American zone of occupation .2 In the camp, he and Michael Burstein, a leftist Yiddish writer who had fled from Poland to Kovno before the war, had discussed the possibility of establishing an organization that would both maintain morale in the camps and provide direction to the survivors after liberation.3 As for Irgun Brith Zion, it had begun at an early date to ready its members, and the Jewish community as a whole, for life after the Holocaust. Indeed, the first known use of the term She’erit Hapletah to refer to the survivors appears in Nitzotz. Liberation and Legacy . 77 What, precisely, would building a Jewish state entail? What lessons did the authors glean from their experiences in Nazi Europe? What ideals would they borrow from prewar Zionist thought, and what would they abandon? What would a postwar just society look like? The members of Irgun Brith Zion faced a unique challenge. In the wake of unspeakable tragedies, they would be poised to forge a new agenda for the Jewish people. As one author expressed this task: “The Hebrew nation first introduced the world to the idea of social justice. . . . [W]hen it builds its homeland on its own ancient soil, it will create a social order that conforms to the ideas of justice and social equity that suffuse our holy scripture.”4 As the end of the war approached, the question of survival became increasingly painful. For the first time, the youth of Irgun Brith Zion faced the possibility of a life after Dachau—bereft of their families, friends, and material possessions. The last surviving issue of Nitzotz before liberation, which was delivered to only a few members, featured realistic evaluations of the probability of survival, as well as thorough examinations of various strategies for promoting Zionism in the international forum. The members of Irgun Brith Zion recognized that a Jewish state could exist only with the approval of the West, and they believed that such approval would be forthcoming only if the Jews were to play an active role in restoring humanity to the postwar world. The path to rehabilitation would be multifaceted. First, it would mean continuing to speak and to write, asserting Jewish identity through all the channels developed during the war. The survivors of Dachau-Kaufering would reach out to those survivors who had lost everything and awaken them to the Zionist cause. They would assume the leadership of a unified Zionist movement buttressed by the wartime experience, and they would be a crucial voice in negotiations over Jewish statehood. Still, politics alone—even statehood—would not heal the wounds of the Jewish nation. True recovery would entail a fundamental revolution in the Jewish way of life. And here, the members of Irgun Brith Zion adopted the mantra of the prewar Zionists. “In the process of our excessive intellectualization in the Diaspora,” wrote Chaim Rosenberg, “we have perhaps become a nation that deals too much with politics. But we are not yet a political nation. We have evolved in a dilettantish manner but have not arrived at political maturity.”5 Liberation, insisted the authors of Nitzotz, would reestablish the Jews as actors in history—a role lost to them over two millennia [18...

Share