How did the surviving Jews rebuild their lives after liberation?

Answer 1

In 1945, when Anglo-American and Soviet troops entered the concentration camps, they discovered piles of corpses, bones, and human ashes testimony to Nazi mass murder also found thousands of survivors suffering from starvation and disease. After liberation, many Jewish survivors feared to return to their former homes because of the anti-Semitism that persisted in parts of Europe and the trauma they had suffered. Some who returned home feared for their lives and witnessed violent anti-Jewish riots. The largest of these occurred in the town of Kielce in 1946 when Polish rioters killed at least 42 Jews and beat many others.

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One important element of the Holocaust was that the Nazi genocidal machine was aimed not only at the destruction of the European Jewish Community, but also at the Jewish seed itself. It was a war not only against the Jews racial existence, but also against the Jewish procreative potential.

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In the first weeks after liberation, the Allies did not recognize the Jews as a separate group. Nor did they consider them a nationality. This had far-reaching consequences because it meant that camps that housed only Jewish survivors were the exception and that Jews who had suffered persecution were often forced to live in camps alongside their former tormentors, for instance, concentration camp guards.

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With few possibilities for emigration, tens of thousands of homeless Holocaust survivors migrated westward to other European territories liberated by the western Allies and some labored for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.

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Following the war, Jewish immigrants who came to the United States were strongly encouraged by their relatives to abandon their European culture, language, religious practices and so on, and to suppress the memory of their experiences. This was no doubt a result of the guilt American relatives felt over not doing more to sufficiently aid the rescue of the European Jews. They were encouraged to look to the future - that this was more important than the past. Denial, however, proved to be ineffective. In the 1950's, when the children of survivors were of age to be Bar Mitzvahed, painful memories were stirred when survivors and their children became acutely aware of the absence of many relatives at these celebrations.