When the Israelites were liberated from Egypt after centuries of slavery, they presumably felt elated but it wasn't very long before the rumbling started and Moses was dealing with serious complaints and demands. The liberation from Belsen was, of course, even more miraculous. As the survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch put it: "We were very slowly exchanging our preoccupation with death for a new concern – life." But, she added, "we were still in Belsen."
Bergen-Belsen had swiftly been converted into a place to live, not a place to die - although, in the first days, many of the weakest and most starved still succumbed.
There was great gratitude to the British but in a matter of days there was conflict. The British plan had been to repatriate the survivors to their countries of origin but many of them obviously regarded the places where they had been persecuted and had lived with their families, now perished, as lands of no return. Go back to Poland? As far as the British were concerned Jews from Poland were Poles.
There was another way. On May 16, 1945, the Christian army chaplain Dr Arnold R Horwell wrote home to his wife in England that giving Jews the right to call themselves stateless had been approved by the 2nd Army: "Well, darling, I feel immensely happy about this success, I count this as one of the great days of my life."
This rendered the term "repatriation" meaningless. It also put an end to any notion that those living at Bergen-Belsen would soon be dispersed. It became a semi-permanent community. Jews were still living there five years later.
Quickly a Jewish committee was formed in Bergen-Belsen under the leadership of Josef Rosensaft. He paid tribute to the British: "They did everything in their power, both materially and administratively, to help and to ease the physical suffering and mental anguish." But his demands were absolutely at odds with British policy and he was a formidable leader. "A continual source of trouble," was how an army commander described him (Professor Rainer Schulze of Essex University, an expert on this period, made that quote the title of an excellent essay on the tensions in Bergen-Belsen).
The two sides were furthest apart over Palestine. At the first congress of She'erit Hapletah (the Surviving Remnant) at Bergen-Belsen in September 1945, a resolution was passed to designate Palestine a Jewish state. To many, stuck at or very near the place where they had suffered so terribly, Palestine was the dream, the promised land, but the British, who ran both Bergen-Belsen and Palestine, made it the more-or-less forbidden land.
So there was the dream and the reality. And the reality at the camps remained deprivation and physical and emotional need. Members of the JRU (Jewish Relief Unit), the operational arm of the British Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA), weren't allowed into Germany until June, two months after liberation. Then a team of 12 arrived. Their leader, Rose Henriques, a woman who with her husband Basil, devoted her life to Jewish welfare, arrived the following month. She immediately wrote home to Basil: "One comes into the camps and sees the miserable crowds still in miserable surroundings miserably wailing for 'something to be done.'"
By the summer of 1946, there were 92 JRU volunteers working alongside UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration).
Most of the JRU work was organising cultural and educational programmes, vocational training and child-care. There were very pressing present needs, physical and emotional, but at least as important was preparing deprived and traumatised people for the future. The majority of the JRU were Zionists but they could not be at odds with the British. Anyone found assisting infiltrators smuggling people out to go to Palestine was sacked by the JCRA.
The JRU did difficult, selfless, ongoing work with distressed people whose past had been terrible, their present deprived and their future uncertain. At first, in the face of crippling shortages of food and clothing, they scrabbled for survival with all the strategies they could muster. Sadie Rurka ran the Kinderheim at Bergen-Belsen for 83 orphans (she reports with amazement that, among all the thousands of people at Bergen-Belsen, only 83 orphans survived). One evening, she handed out blankets to them all. The following morning, the blankets were all gone, traded for other things the children wanted more. She got them more blankets and told them this time they must keep them, which they did.
The politics of the future of these children was a vexed question. "One day," recalled Rurka, "we received a message from the British government: 'please ready the children. We are going to take them to England; by next Saturday they should be at the airport; we are going to send planes for them'.
"But Josef Rosensaft, the Jewish leader, was adamant: 'Those children are not going to leave Bergen-Belsen.' I said, 'Josef, we have to let them go. The British will take good care of them and they have promised that these children would be the first allowed to go on a quota to be allowed into Palestine.
"Josef said: 'Sadie they are not your children, these are our children. If we let these children go we will be here for years longer. As long as people are writing stories in London and New York about children in Bergen-Belsen we have a chance to get out.'
"I went to sleep that night not knowing what was going to happen. I knew the planes were arriving at Celle airport the following morning.
"About 6am, the camp commander invited me to his office. He was not alone. His guest said: 'How old are your Sadie Rurka?' I said 'I'm 22.'
"'Well, Sadie Rurka,' he said, 'you're a bit too young to have the problems of the Jewish people on your shoulders so I came.' I realised he was David Ben-Gurion."
The children did go to England.
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