Sh'erit ha-Pletah
Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Hebrew: שארית הפליטה, romanized: Sh'erit ha-Pletah, meaning surviving remnant, and is a term from the Book of Ezra and 1 Chronicles (see Ezra 9:14; 1 Chr 4:43) is a Hebrew term for the more than 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps after the end of the Holocaust and Second World War, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities.
[1][2] A total of more than 250,000 Jewish survivors spent several years following their liberation in DP camps or communities in Germany, Austria, and Italy, since they could not, or would not, be repatriated to their countries of origin.
About 136,000 settled in Israel with the assistance of organised underground efforts by Jewish groups such as the Bricha, 80,000 in the United States, and another 20,000 in other nations, including Canada and South Africa.
[5] In an effort to destroy the evidence of war crimes, Nazi authorities and military staff accelerated the pace of killings, forced victims on death marches, and attempted to deport many of them away from the rapidly shrinking German front lines.
[citation needed] Shelter was also improvised in the beginning, with refugees of various origins being housed in abandoned barracks, hotels, former concentration camps, and private homes.
[14] General George Patton, the commander of the United States Third Army and military governor of Bavaria, where most of the Jewish DPs resided, was known for pursuing a harsh, indiscriminate repatriation policy.
[17] By June 1945 reports had circulated back in the United States concerning overcrowded conditions and insufficient supplies in the DP camps, as well as the ill treatment of Jewish survivors at the hand of the U.S. Army.
Nearly 90% of the approximately 200,000 Polish Jews who had survived the war in the Soviet Union chose to return to Poland under the Soviet-Polish repatriation agreements [pl].
Between fall 1944 and summer 1946 as many as 600 Jews were killed in anti-Jewish riots in various towns and cities,[22] including incidents in Kraków, around August 20, 1945;[23] Sosnowiec, on October 25; and Lublin, on November 19.
[24] In the course of 1946 the flight of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe toward the West amounted to a mass exodus that swelled the ranks of DPs in Germany and Austria, especially in the U.S.
[citation needed] The Allies had begun to prepare for the humanitarian aftermath of the war while it was still going on, with the founding of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), on 9 November 1943.
[26] The military authorities were, in any case, reluctant to yield significant responsibility for the DP assembly centers to a civilian organization, until it became clear that there would be a need to house and care for the DPs for an extended period of time.
[26][27] At the point when it was supposed to begin its work the UNRRA was woefully understaffed in view of the larger than expected numbers of DPs, and additional staff that were hastily recruited were poorly trained.
[28] The agency began to send staff into the field in summer 1945; its mission had been conceived mainly as a support to the repatriation process, including providing medical services, and assuring the delivery of adequate nutrition, as well as attending to the DPs' needs for comfort and entertainment; however, it often fell short of fulfilling these functions.
[citation needed] The refugees who found themselves in provisional, sparse quarters under military guard soon spoke up against the ironic nature of their liberation, invoking an oft-repeated slogan "From Dachau to Feldafing.
In the American sector, Zalman Grinberg and Samuel Gringauz and others led the formation of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews, which was to establish offices first in the former Deutsches Museum and then in Siebertstrasse 3 in Munich.
Over time, the emphasis shifted to promoting the Zionist goals of allowing immigration into the British Mandate in Palestine; political divisions within the Sh'erit ha-Pletah mirrored those found in the Yishuv itself.
This came to a head when Lieutenant General Sir Frederick E. Morgan – then UNRRA chief of operations in Germany – claimed that the influx of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe as "nothing short of a skillful campaign of anti-British aggression on the part of Zion aided and abetted by Russia... [meaning] death to the British."
[35] All the while, the Sh'erit ha-Pletah retained close relationships with the political leadership of the Yishuv, prompting several visits from David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders.
A delegation (consisting of Norbert Wollheim, Samuel Schlumowitz, Boris Pliskin, and Leon Retter flew to the United States to raise funds for the community, appealing to a sense of pride over "schools built for our children, four thousand pioneers on the farms... thousands of youths in trades schools... self-sacrifice of doctors, teachers, writers... democratization... hard-won autonomy,"[36] and also met with officials at the US War Department and Sir Raphael Salento over the formation of the International Refugee Organization.
[5] Although the community established many of the institutions that characterize a durable society, and indeed came to dominate an entire section of Munich, the overriding imperative was to find new homes for the refugees.
[citation needed] The last DP camp, Föhrenwald, closed in February 1957, by then populated only by the so-called "hardcore" cases, elderly, and those disabled by disease.
In 1947, Dr. Aharon Persikovitz, a gynecologist who had survived the Dachau concentration camp gave a lecture called "The Psychological State Of the New Immigrant" in which he said: "Holocaust survivors do not commit suicide; they heroically prove the continuity of the Jewish people".
