For the rare Jewish children of Eastern Europe who survived the Shoah,1 there could be no return in the sense commonly given to that term: “to come back from where one set out.”
In the vast majority of cases, the place of return no longer existed: houses destroyed or occupied by former neighbors, synagogues and cemeteries dismantled, and the silence of the words of before had transformed that place into a territory of non-existence. These young people had to undergo the experience of temporary “elsewheres”: displaced-persons camps (DP camps), sanatoria, hostels, foster families, etc. These stages of non-return had the character of a suspended time, of a haphazard anchorage and of a social re-stitching in which precariousness, strangeness to the language and to customs were the rule.
Relatively numerous were those who, after these migrations, continued their itinerary as far as Israel. For them the word return was to take on meaning in an approach with multiple strata: the return to (ordinary) daily life — iberleiben — and the Return in the sense Zionism intends (and the Jewish tradition), that is to say the return to the place of origins. All this was inscribed within a stage generally considered difficult in the formation of every individual: adolescence. How were these components combined? In what way did the two projects — the individual project (return to life and personal reconstruction) and the collective project (reconstruction of the country and a feeling of insertion into a global dynamic) — articulate themselves at this moment of the onset of adulthood? What relations did they maintain? Was there resonance? Friction?
Such are the questions that underlie the reflections that follow. They are based on the numerous interviews I conducted with “the young people of that time,” today grandparents, in the course of preparing the book Survivre, les Enfants dans la Shoah (Surviving: Children in the Shoah).2
These interviews do not constitute what sociologists define as a “representative sample”; however, their number and their diversity seemed to me sufficiently significant to propose a few avenues of reflection. These might illuminate and complete certain notions such as resilience, described in particular (in relation to the notion of return) by Boris Cyrulnik in Je me souviens (I Remember).3 They might help us to understand better what was the impact of the “place of return,” as an ethno-social element, in the recovered lives of these children who survived the Shoah.
The group of people I interviewed shares a set of common references which, despite individual differences, confers on it an internal coherence: the region of origin (Eastern Europe), the age at the start of the conflict (between 10 and 13), and for most of them, Yiddish as identity-language, and, between 1945 and 1948, arrival in “Palestine/Israel” at the age of adolescence. Moreover, at the end of the conflict, all these young people were orphans, or at least believed themselves to be: one of them did in fact recover the trace of his mother — a survivor of the Stutthof camp — thanks to the search organizations set up in the aftermath of the war.
These “particularities” had a profound influence on their approach once they were “free.” Adolescents, describing themselves as “wild things,” they had to relearn the social conviviality of which they had been stripped during their “stolen” adolescent years (an expression of Stanislas Tomkiewicz4 taken up by many witnesses5). Insofar as all of them, without exception, had been last-minute miracles (typhus, tuberculosis or illnesses associated with prolonged undernourishment), the first act that followed their convalescence was to attempt the return to where, for the last time, they had the memory that their ordinary life had unfolded, that is to say their childhood.
What awaited them was a triple destruction: topographical, individual and collective.
“Then, for all of us women, the urgent thing afterward was to return home! But it was not so easy. The lines were cut, the trains packed, prisoners on the roads. From train to train, we reached Bratislava, then, thanks to the Joint,6 we arrived in Budapest. There, they put us in a hostel for refugees. I still had the hope that someone from my family would be alive. Of all those who were deported I was the only survivor. Murdered: my father, my mother, Elie my big brother, David, Yehuda, Jérémie my little brothers, and murdered too my two young sisters, Rachel and Esther. Most of my cousins had suffered the same fate. Of my own age, no one had survived.”
“The return to Khust was brief. Our house was occupied by another family; but above all the rumor circulated that the Soviets were going to close the borders and that we would be caught in a trap.7”
It is testimonies of this type that recur, with a few variants, in all the interviews. The place is devastated, the family fabric annihilated, the language vanished, and the social environment frankly hostile, even dangerous. In other words, the “place of return is only a place of non-return” that revives the trauma and accentuates the immensity of the loss.
François Mauriac wrote, evoking his native city of Bordeaux: “Impossible to live again in this city; all the streets are blocked by my childhood sorrows, by the memories of my joys, worse than those of my sorrows.8” One can easily imagine the magnitude of the “impossible” that must have gripped the young survivors in their quest for a possible footbridge, thrown “over” the chasm (iberleiben) into which they had been plunged, and that bound them to the life of before, that is to say to life itself. This quest was, by its very nature, irremediably doomed to failure. The chasm — the Shoah — was beyond genocide.9 It was the engulfing of a world. They were therefore not only orphaned of their family, they were the survivors of an engulfed continent.
In Western Europe, the survivors could most often “go back home.” Not that the return was festive — the house was empty and the incomprehension generalized; but, to take the example of France, despite the pain, a certain future was conceivable.
“A single visit to the Polish office, where the same gazes laden with hatred as before shone, was enough to convince us that nothing had changed… and to dissuade us definitively from returning home,” recalls Adam Wexler, in Vienna, in 1945.10 Ida Grynspan, deported from France, confides to Karine Habif:11
“I believe there are two kinds of deportees. There is the deportee who comes back12 and has the good fortune to find his family again: he remakes himself, he adapts. And then there is the deportee who comes back without family… What I suffered from… is that everyone was happy… and then I found myself, just like that, unable to share the joy of return…”
Ida describes with accuracy the feelings that were, for many, those of the return to France; she evokes them as occurring within a process of return considered as “taken for granted.”
Most of the young people whose paths Survivre retraces were deprived of this option. Whatever their paths of personal reconstruction over the years, they were all affected by this parameter of non-return, perceived by each of them as an ineluctable given.
This adolescence — an improbable gift of circumstances, of personal will and of chance — these young survivors must not only discover its marks but invent its modes of being. The essential thing, after the acknowledgment of rupture, will be to turn toward the future, indispensable as a project of survival.
“I will always have to go forward, never to weep, never to complain, not to look back.” “That has been until now my strategy of survival, like all those who set in motion a process of resilience.13”
There were those who opted for a radical elsewhere: since return was excluded, better to be rid of it surgically. Canada, the United States, Australia ruled out the very idea of return. Over there became synonymous with a magnificent blank page on which, in a new language, on a new continent, in a new society, one could write a future without a past. That, over time, this fine optimism was strongly altered does not fall within the scope of our reflections. But that this approach undoubtedly constituted one of the ways out for overcoming the trauma of the absolute “non-return” must be mentioned.
Why were those who chose to leave for Israel so numerous? The answers are diverse. For some, it was the natural continuation of a Zionist training from before the catastrophe; for others, there was the existence of a close or distant relative settled in Mandatory Palestine between the two wars; for still others, the end of a wandering was tied to the feeling — less ideological than cultural — that the only possible “home” was henceforth “the country of the Jews,” and sometimes, finally, there were the chances of an encounter.
“Rumors circulated. [For those who were interested,] the surest way to acquire American nationality, it was said, was to enlist in the US army, which was recruiting to go fight in Japan. One day, a man appeared in the camp: tall, handsome, fair hair, tanned skin, a radiant smile, wearing a fine British uniform with the insignia of the Jewish Brigade. The apparition nailed us to the spot. He was a soldier of Eretz Israel, a Jew like us, but who did not resemble us.14”
What then was the situation of those who had decided to return to what was then Mandatory Palestine? First of all, a portion of them found themselves, once again, behind barbed wire even before having been able to set foot in their new “home.”15 They had to wait in Cyprus for the proclamation of the independence of the State of Israel. This wait, although it remained very present in the memories of those interviewed, does not seem to have had a significant impact on the way they account, today, for their first years of settlement. Perhaps because the time spent in Cyprus remains inscribed in their memory as a link in the chain of the topographies of the provisional, it serves for several of them to revive, by contrast, the feeling of happiness that was theirs when they reached — at last — the shores of Israel at Haifa.
What became, after their arrival in Israel, of the score or so people who were willing to entrust their stories to me? All retired today, they were the “Mr. and Mrs. Everyman” who contributed to the construction of the new State: members of kibbutzim, office employees, engineers, civil servants or teachers, a department head in a hospital, a seamstress, an artist who became a professor of lithography. Their group forms a kind of fairly faithful panorama of the ordinary components of Israeli society. Few or no housewives figure in it; “kibbutzniks,” on the other hand, are overrepresented, since they make up about a third of those interviewed. But this proportion, even if it does not reflect the demographic map of Israel,16 does account for the importance of the kibbutzim as a reception structure in the State’s formative years.17
With a few exceptions, each of them has a difficult memory of the early times in the place of return. How could it have been otherwise? It seems that the reception in the hostels/boarding schools of the Jewish Agency generated more negative memories than that of the kibbutzim, even for the people who did not stay in them afterward.
One may hypothesize that, in the kibbutzim, several factors played a positive role in the elaboration of this memory. On the one hand, there was an impression of stability, after the wanderings of the postwar period, which was not necessarily found in the difficulties of adapting to urban life; on the other hand, there was a strong feeling of the return of meaning given to life, under the influence of the credo of pioneer ideology. The collective and the reconstruction of an entire country, busy being reborn, echoed the imperative of rebirth — as individuals — that generally inhabited the young survivors of the Shoah. The collective also played another role: it reduced the difference, omnipresent in the city, between those who had a family and the others. The kibbutz was that family. Whether these principles were internalized (for the veterans of the Zionist youth movements) or regarded with skepticism, they played in most cases a strong role in the first period of arrival in Israel. It is only later, when these same young people will in turn become parents, that the collective will be experienced as constraining and even negative. There was added, too, a material consideration: as economically destitute as the kibbutzim were in the 1950s, their system guaranteed each person a roof and a meal, modest but assured. By contrast, some of the survivors who arrived “individually,” like the painter Yehuda Bacon, recall having been “almost as hungry” as in certain of the war years. For Yehuda Bacon, this difficulty was compensated by the fact that it had been possible for him, thanks to certain forms of solidarity, to realize his dream: to be admitted to Bezalel, the equivalent of the School of Fine Arts, in Jerusalem.
For the people who settled in the city, the period of working life is generally recounted rather briefly, as if to underscore the access gained to normality. What is brought to the fore in the memorial account are the beginnings and the present period, that of liberated speech and of reckoning.
In the testimonies, one also finds — especially in the memory of the first years following arrival — the trace of wounds still raw today. Those relating in particular to the attitude of the Yishuv18 who saw in the new arrivals representatives of a world from which they wanted at all costs to set themselves apart. In this domain the kibbutzim were no exception.
How is one to decode these memories today?
The answers — plural — refer back to the question of non-return, or rather to the perception the survivors may have had, no longer in the immediacy of the trauma but over the course of their life’s journey. The “non-return” being intimately associated with the trauma, its memory partakes of a traumatic memory (the Shoah, or Hurban) amplified by this paroxysmal high point, the double tearing. Under the heading of “return to life,” what will come into place is not only the tearing of the lived experience of the Shoah itself, but also that of the return to nothingness, an inseparable fragment of the intimate and social fabric of each person. According to Boris Cyrulnik: “At the moment one suffers, one is dazed, one is afraid, one is not afraid, one defends oneself, one struggles as best one can. But in the aftermath, when representation is possible, when the family or cultural milieu makes it possible to do this work of representation, one then searches for words, one tries to convince, one elaborates psychological strategies so that the trauma may never come back.”19
In Israel, despite the immense difficulties tied to the elaboration of the resilience strategies of the people I listened to, one can say that two tendencies emerge. The majority evoke these difficulties as part of the “price to pay.” In their case, the individual “return to life” and the “return to Israel,” as imperfect as they may be, by articulating themselves mutually, allowed the “broken chain” to take form again. For a minority, the reconstruction is only the deceptive façade of an edifice forever cracked. However, these people do not think that elsewhere they could have done better.
All wished to conclude their account on positive notes. Three hypotheses may make it possible to interpret this attitude: the present age of the interviewees, all grandparents (and sometimes great-grandparents); the act of speech that constituted their account; and finally the fact of having, at the moment of adolescence, been associated with the rebirth, on “The Place of Return,” of the Jewish people, whereas they had been the witnesses of the attempt at its annihilation.
Their status as “source of future generations” allows them a reappropriation of time and a reinscription in a reconquered continuity:
“Smiling at my second great-grandson, I weave into the chain of life the history of our decimated family, the good fortune of having survived, and the hope that his future will be, for its part, placed under the sign of Peace.20”
Putting things into narrative through speech does not only make it possible to gain distance and, in communicating, “to be no longer alone with one’s inner uproar, one’s improbable wound.” It is in fact a re-creation, that of a true site of a substitute memory, a return at last made possible because “dedicated.” It is one of the functions of testimony, rarely studied. Destined for the children, for others, for the future, it allows the speaker, because it makes sense, to reappropriate in another way the places that are no more.
If the first two elements are not necessarily the prerogative of the survivors living in Israel, the third distinguishes them without any doubt from those of their fellows who made other choices. The profound feeling, even when accompanied by criticism, of having done the work of builders seems to have contributed to retying in an acceptable manner the broken threads of non-return.
Notes
For Poland, the number of Jewish children still alive in the aftermath of the Shoah is estimated at fewer than ten thousand (out of a million children on the eve of the War).↩︎
Survivre les enfants dans la Shoah, Ouest-France ed., Histoire collection, June 2011.↩︎
Boris Cyrulnik, Je me souviens, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2010.↩︎
See Stanislas Tomkiewicz, L’adolescence volée, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1999.↩︎
See in particular Karine Habif’s interview with Ida Grynspan, who says: “I never was fifteen years old… they stole part of my adolescence from me,” in Karine Habif, Le Jour d’après, Patrick Banon ed., Paris 1955, p. 111.↩︎
International Jewish aid committee, American.↩︎
Testimony of Ruth Ben Moshe, Survivre, p. 105.↩︎
Quoted by Boris Cyrulnik, Je me souviens, op. cit.↩︎
The definition of the word genocide was created in 1943 by Lemkin, a Jewish jurist from Warsaw who took refuge in the United States during the Second World War. The term was used for the first time at the trial of the Nazi criminals at Nuremberg in 1946. It was officially ratified as a concept of international law by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 by the 58 members who then made up the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization.↩︎
Adam Wexler, J’étais cet enfant juif polonais, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2004.↩︎
Karine Habif, Le jour d’après, Paris, Patrick Banon ed., 1995.↩︎
Emphasis ours.↩︎
Boris Cyrulnik, op. cit., p. 49.↩︎
Adam Wexler, op. cit., p. 283.↩︎
I use the word home to render the Hebrew word “Bayt,” itself rather close to the English expression “home” (Balfour Declaration) and the German “Heimat.” In French, the word “maison” corresponds to it only in the expression “to come back home.”↩︎
At the moment when they were most popular, the kibbutzim — all tendencies combined — constituted about 7% of the total population of Israel.↩︎
The majority of the adolescents arriving in Israel up to the 1960s had been taken in charge by the “Youth” branch of the Jewish Agency, the Aliyat Hanoar (youth immigration).↩︎
Yishuv is the term designating the organized community in Mandatory Palestine before the independence of Israel. By extension, the word designates the community of Jews settled since the end of the nineteenth century, the veterans, considered in a certain way as the “Founding Fathers” of the Mayflower in the United States.↩︎
Boris Cyrulnik, op. cit., p. 78 (emphasis mine).↩︎
Survivre, op. cit. p. 111.↩︎