1/ One thing I talk about in my book is what I euphemistically call "hitting the Israel button".
The Holocaust was a crime so enormous that many decades later, we still cannot process it. But one aspect of the crime that gets under-reported is how the nations of the world stood by when it happened.
2/ That is, if they didn't gleefully participate, like Vichy France did.
The USA, for example, knew about the Holocaust but continued to restrict Jewish immigration, and kept those restrictions up after the war.
The Holocaust murdered one third of all Jews, and two thirds of European Jewry.
3/ After the war, hundreds of thousands of surviving Jews were still in the camps, now repurposed as "displaced persons camps". The Allied authorities, consisting mostly of the US, the British, the Soviets, and the Free French, had no idea what to do with them. They certainly didn't want them.
4/ Some of the DP camps were still around in 1951. Not kidding.
Here's the terrible secret shame: US Jewish leaders didn't want them, either, for the most part. The kind of people who rose to the top of Jewish orgs in the 1940s were mostly highly assimilated Jews, often of German origin.
5/ Their families had come to the USA in the 1850s, as voluntary emigrants rather than refugees. They settled themselves in the USA, assimilated, and mostly had very comfortable lives. Then things got bad for Jews in the Russian Empire and two million refugees ended up in the USA.
6/ These newcomers spoke Yiddish. They were poor and dirty. They were overtly religious, for the most part, or worse, socialists and anarchists. They were fucking embarrassing to the assimilated German Jews. I'm 1/4 Yekke, so I don't feel bad calling them out.
7/ My great-grandmother had no problem dropping the k-word on Eastern European Jews. She was embarrassed by religious Jews, and she despised Eastern European Jews. She felt that posh German Jews had a hard enough time assimilating without the Eastern European Jews screwing it all up.
Does this anti-immigrant, racist sentiment among assimilated Jews help explain why the Jewish Baltimore real estate mogul, Joseph Meyerhoff, (no relation to me) discriminated against fellow Jews?
I've been reading about this in Dan Stone's excellent 'Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust'. Highly recommended, but deeply unsettling.
global.oup.com/academic/pro...
I understood that Raul Hilberg established less than 100,000 Continental Euopean Jewish people survived the Shoah, in which case that would be the extermination of >95% of European Jews.
(Not to detract from your post)
Yes, but not all the people in Displaced Persons camps were Jewish, as I understood? Roma, Sinti, Polish/Ukranian/Russian from along that wildly messed-up overlapping land area and other east european non-Jewish?
