Dan Stone, a professor of modern history at the University of London and the author of fifteen books on the Holocaust, has written a comprehensive book on the plight of Jewish survivors following their “liberation” from the numerous concentration and death camps after the Nazi defeat that ended World War II in Europe. Stone argues that following the deliverance of the Jews from the hands of the Nazis, there was little joy or relief among the freed prisoners. Barely alive from illness and starvation, still taunted by anti-Semitism, and with no possibility to return to their former homes, Jews — unlike German, Polish, Ukranian and other victims of the Nazis — could not be repatriated. Only Palestine and the United States were seen as possibilities for a new life. Thus, for those who survived the forced marches, starvation, tuberculosis, and typhus, the road back to normality was a slow and bitter journey.
Dividing the book between accounts of the Soviet liberation of the death and concentration camps and of those rescued by the Western Allies, Stone describes the maltreatment of Jews in displaced persons camps by both the Soviets and the Allied Forces as the United States prepared for the Cold War. Stone notes that as the Cold War commenced, it was partly at the expense of Jewish survivors of the Shoah. Nazi prisoners were treated better than the Jewish DPs, and in the British camps there was not only hostility toward the Jews but a policy to prevent Jews from emigrating to Palestine. It was not until the Harrison Report of 1947 that President Truman pressured the British to allow 100,000 Jews to enter the Yishuv. Stone notes, however, that Truman’s action was not entirely altruistic: “urging 100,000 Jews to enter Palestine” was “designed to appease both the Jewish and anti-immigration vote in the U.S. At the same time, many American Jews, though moved by the plight of the European Jews[…] were worried that admitting Jews to the U.S in large numbers would provoke anti-Semitism.” This important book adds to our understanding of the tragic aftermath that affected the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
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