Archival Audio, The New Americans propaganda film:
“Past the Statue of Liberty and into New York Harbor sails an Army troop ship with over 860 refugees from Europe. Victims of Nazi persecution, many of them spent long terrible months in concentration camps but this is a happy day. In the notorious Auschwitz Camp, these girls’ arms were indelibly tattooed with prison numbers but in America life will begin again. Also aboard are Polish Catholic priests, survivors of Dachau. A Jewish chaplain kept this Torah with him through all his travels. Of the children aboard, 75 are orphans, many of them are without any records of their homes or even their nationalities. Relatives and friends are here to meet the newcomers and they get a welcome they’ll never forget. America opens her heart to those who long for life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: It is estimated that after World War II, 140,000 Holocaust survivors settled in the United States. These refugees, the majority of whom were between 20 and 40 years old, largely came to the United States due to efforts from HIAS, United Service for New Americans, and other organizations. Once they arrived, these survivors worked to build new careers, start families, and find community among their neighbors.
But life in the United States was not without its challenges, and survivors worked to overcome language barriers, homefront antisemitism and xenophobia, and what would later become known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: Year Zero. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. This week’s episode, The Survivors, explores what life was like for those dubbed “the New Americans.”
Archival Audio, The New Americans propaganda film: “On the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty are carved the words ‘send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,’ the sweeping invitation inspired by immigrants, addressed to immigrants and speaking today more directly than ever to the refugee. A refugee is an immigrant who has been pushed, driven by force. Why is old hatred of oppression. Johan lund is a refugee, an average peasant. Vienna knew him before Hitler marched in as a furniture designer and Lisbon to him some time later as a man with one drive and one dream: America. It’s hardly possible for an American-born and bred to sense it once the value put up on these entrance visas or the feel that drama tragedy behind this.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Dr. Hasia Diner, professor emerita at New York University, and author or editor of more than 20 books, including We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust.
Hasia Diner: So, I think, when we think about the refugees who arrive, we might put them in two classes or two categories. And one were people who had pretty close family, you know, family already in the United States. And they did not have to—for one thing, they had that kind of family support system, and kind of on an emotional as well as economic context. And they didn’t necessarily—they didn’t go through Jewish communal agencies because they didn’t need to. And so, you know, they had an uncle who owned a store. They provided. So they didn’t go—they weren’t assigned a place to live or they weren’t settled, but they went to their uncle in Miami or their brother in Kansas City. And in some ways, while they always had Jewish communal resources to tap into through Jewish Child and Family Services or Jewish Board of Guardians—whatever the local agencies was—they were much more on their own. And that was obviously a relief to the community because everything the Jewish community does depends on somebody paying for it. They’re not getting government money.
But the largest number of the survivors do go through HIAS and then the subsidiary agencies around the country. And so there’s a great deal of communication. It’s really amazing to think of this before the internet and before fax and before email. The HIAS national organization asks communities, how many families can you take? And taking them means making sure they have jobs because the government does not want anybody who’s going to be potentially a public charge. Jewish community doesn’t want anyone who’s going to be a public charge. Okay, so how many people can you take in terms of finding work, finding a place to live and the like? National Council of Jewish Women is very active—again, all over the country—and particularly working with the women, the survivor women, showing what does an American grocery store look like. I mean, how do you know, when there are eight different kinds of toothpaste—you know, how do you navigate this? Stocking their kitchens. Helping them get on their feet.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The main goal was to resettle Jewish refugees in communities around the United States. Organizations like United Service for New Americans worked in coordination with local agencies and Jewish communal chapters to relocate newly arrived refugees to as many locations as possible, which would limit the financial and housing burdens that some cities and towns faced with the new influx of residents. While some states were hesitant to allow in the refugees, nearly all ultimately sponsored newcomers to their communities.
Hasia Diner: Now, most of these survivors—again, based on anecdotes—once they get on their own feet and they don’t have to depend on the communal help do move out and join the rest of the Jewish community, geographically. But, yeah, it had to be totally disorienting. It’s Pittsburgh or Kansas City or wherever. It’s just really different than the places they had lived. And most of them had—in a way, because—they were around twenty, thirty—they had been, for so many years, living in privation.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Many of the newcomers to the United States had spent much of the war in the Soviet Union. During World War II, a large number of Polish and Soviet Jews fled east, away from Nazi-occupied Europe. Others had been deported. The majority of these exiles lived in labor camps in Siberia, and in some cases, Central Asia, for most of the war. Once the war was over, displaced Jews living in the Soviet Union accounted for the largest group of survivors. As the brutality of the Stalin regime continued unabated, the exiles sought to leave the USSR.
Hasia Diner: Many of them go back to Poland, and they don’t want to stay there. First, there’s so much antisemitism. There’s this horrible massacre in Kielce in ’46. And Poland itself is becoming communist, and they don’t want to live there. So they flee to the West. They are called the infiltrators or the infiltrees into the DP camps where, theoretically, they are not permitted to be. But the US government—the US Army sort of allows them in. Very complicated story.
So, when they come to the United States, they hadn’t come from being in concentration camps or in hiding in Poland, but they had actually been in the Soviet Union. But to live in Pittsburgh in the 1950s is not exactly the same as living in a labor camp in Siberia. So it’s a real kind of cultural disorientation. And because they weren’t your sort of classic immigrants who—obviously, we have this very large American history of immigration, Jewish and others—you know, where people very rationally planned, first, the father is going to come with the older children, and then the mother and the younger children. Best to go in an April, in the spring, not the winter. This was, we’re getting out of these DP camps. And so they didn’t have that same sort of process of sort of preparing mentally for it before arrival. So it was disorienting. And they are living on the goodwill of the Jewish communal agencies, which has to have been uncomfortable.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: With the Cold War looming, some of the newcomers were hesitant to let anyone know they came from the Soviet Union, which was rapidly becoming America’s greatest foe.
Hasia Diner: Those who came from the Soviet Union were pretty—well, because they come into an America where the Soviet Union is, like, the enemy, they pretty much make up stories about themselves because they—you know, their kids are told, don’t say you were born in Soviet Union, but you were born in Germany. Because that’s just really unacceptable. And so it’s interesting.
Those survivors—and, again, a kind of demographic arc because there’s some survivors—most of the survivors were young people in the DP camps and even—wherever they had been before, and they marry in the camps. They have their first child in 1946, 1947, and then subsequent children in the United States. But there’s some who come with somewhat older children, kids who are born in 1940, 193—they could not have been in concen—you know, under German domination. They were in the Soviet Union, where they had kind of relatively normal lives. And so there was a kind of age disparity within the kind of child population among the survivors. But I think the—in terms of their initial steps, unless they have close family in the United States that can house them and clothe them and shelter them and get them work, they are the wards of Jewish community social service agencies. And that shapes their lives.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Even as they acclimated, many survivors faced an uphill battle when it came to language barriers and finding employment. Local Jewish communities around the country set up English and citizenship classes, and provided employment services.
Hasia Diner: Really, you name it, they were providing it. Was it clunky? Was it done with a heavy hand? It’s hard to say. It was done with, I’d say, the best resources these Jewish communal agency workers thought they had at their command. Might we look back with a different level of, say, social work sophistication and see what was wrong with how they did it? Probably. But they did it with what they had. And the Jewish communal agencies, by the way, play a really important role in helping survivors when restitutions are made possible, to help them file their claims so that they can get funding that was owed to them from the German government. And these are often things that the individual could never negotiate on their own. And it’s the Jewish, the local Jewish community that stepped in to facilitate what they could.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Celia Razovsky, who worked for the National Council of Jewish Women, spent decades working on behalf of new Americans. Born in St. Louis in 1891, she began her advocacy career teaching English as a second language in 1911, and in 1917, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she served in the United States Childrens’ Bureau. After World War I, she worked in the immigrant aid department at the National Council, work she continued well into the 1930s, and through World War II.
Hasia Diner: She was not only involved in the settlement of DPs around the United States—or survivors, not all of whom come through the DP act—but she would hear—I mean, her papers are amazing—she would hear that there are a couple survivors in a particular town who are arguing with each other. She’d go down there and try to sort of smooth out their contentiousness. So Celia Rozovsky gets into a kind of Hall of Fame on this.
And there’s a woman named Jane Evans from National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, okay? The women of the Reform Movement. And she is coming up with programs galore to aid Holocaust survivors. She actually developed a program sponsored by the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods to go through the DP camps and to find young people—they were almost all men, but there’s at least one woman—who had been studying for the rabbinate and the cantorate before they couldn’t do that, now they’d been incarcerated in concentration camps, and to bring them to Cincinnati to finish their rabbinical and cantorial training and then to get them set up in careers in the United States. And so I would call Jane Evans a hero of this effort.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Survivors also faced challenges because of the trauma they experienced – what we now know today as “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Very little was known about how to treat this anxiety, and when survivors disclosed to Jewish communal agencies that they had these mental struggles, the answer was typically to simply move on.
The written word became a form of therapy – a way for survivors to tell their stories and to share with the larger public.
Hasia Diner: So many of the—particularly Polish towns and larger cities—there were joint undertakings of survivors and people from those towns who had come to the United States earlier to write these yizkor bikher, memorial books. And they are usually the life and death of Wasilla, the life of Drohobycz and its destruction. And so there are essays in it in English, in Yiddish. And these are actually, again, really phenomenal because they’re transnational undertakings, and they have writings in Hebrew because of those who are in Israel, and they have essays—a Yiddish essay by somebody living in Havana. So it’s amazing, again, in thinking of the primitive technology at their command that they could do these global projects. But these are very much in the hands of the survivors that they write these—they put together these books. And they’ll have the list—all the names of the people from the town who were killed. And many of them have the names—you know, so-and-so—and then, after each name are the Hebrew letters H yud dalet, Hashem yikom damam, God will avenge their blood. H—hey yud dalet. And half the book is telling about the town before its destruction. I remember the teachers. I remember—and then the chronology of what happened. And it’s the survivors who are behind this. And so that—you could see the emotional—one might say payback. You know, like, this is something we can do because we can’t bring those people back.
There are enough memoirs written mostly in Yiddish by the mid-fifties, before there’s the facility with English—there are enough memoirs written by survivors in Yiddish that a book that came out—I don’t know if it’s published any longer. It was called the Jewish Book Annual, and it started in 1944. And the person who’s the editor of it said, there’s so many books coming out on this that we will now have a special section called—and then Churban literature, okay, the Destruction literature. And it just lists all the books that were written, many of them in probably mimeographed form or in some kind of very out-there publication. But they’re writing their stories.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In the 1950s, the United States experienced a small but terrifying resurgence of proto-Nazi and white supremacist groups, and American Jewish communities, many of which were home to survivors, became hyper-vigilant against this rising tide of hate. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League began tracking these groups.
Hasia Diner: And if you read—I think one of the best sources is the American Jewish Year Book. And, you know, go through. On May fourth in Chicago, somebody came into a bar and said, Heil Hitler. I mean, they were down to—the ADL is also issuing reports, and they are exposing all of this stuff. The American Jewish Committee was involved in commissioning a vast range of books by some of the nation’s most important social psychologists. It was called the “Studies in Prejudice” series. And these are state-of-the art, sociology, psychology, on what makes people behave the way the Germans did. Okay? So that’s something the American Jewish community is doing. They are putting up films to be shown in schools and libraries and union meetings on why prejudice is stupid. And so these are all responses to the Holocaust.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In the late 1950s, George Lincoln Rockwell, an American fascist and founder of the American Nazi Party, began to hold demonstrations that were designed to instill fear and intimidation into communities with large Jewish populations, as well as communities home to Black, Asian, and Latino Americans, and other religious and ethnic groups that Rockwell deemed quote “degenerate” unquote.
Hasia Diner: And so Rockwell—I mean, he has a very small following. They walk. They go to demonstrations. They have demonstrations. They wear stormtrooper uniforms. They do Heil Hitlers. They goosestep, do the goosesteps. And the larger Jewish community—New York, Boston, Chicago, et cetera, DC—intended to approach Rockwell like they had long approached kind of demagogic antisemitic lunatics, which was what—you know, the very technical term of sha-sha politics. Look, don’t have counter-demonstrations. Don’t try to suppress their speech. Ignore them, because all Rockwell and his ilk want is to be on the front page of the paper. If you have a counter-demonstration, then there are going to be crowds gathering. Once there are crowds, there are going to be police. Once there are police, somebody’s going to flare up. There’ll be some punches. Now it’s on the front page, and it’s on the evening news. So ignore them.
When Rockwell surfaces, the survivors show up in every one of the larger cities and say, no. We lived through Auschwitz. We were—you can’t. You have to confront him.
Archival Audio – Holocaust Survivor Confronts American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell:
Rockwell: I do not believe in, in dictatorship and we don’t believe in the narrow nationalism of Hitler either. I believe there’s got to be International order. I think the UN is communistic and it’s got to go but we’ve got to replace it with some kind of international, uh, I would say Nazi type order.
Reporter: Why then use the term Nazi which is an origin which came from the Nazi Hitler party? Rockwell: Because the word Nazi is very clear to people. It means race, it means standing up for the white race. People know that and it also shocks people awake.
[Music]
[Music]
[Yelling]
Holocaust survivor: People out here, listen! I spent four years in concentration camp, and I was an underground. This man talk the same way the that Hitler talk in 1930 in 1931. That’s exact words!
Reporter: What are you here for?
Holocaust Survivor: What I’m here for? I’m here for the worst case! I just came – I accidentally hear, but I hear him my blood! My whole family was killed! My…my everything was wiped out! Allow, permit like that to talk right in America, United States? Free speech is alright, but not hate against man!
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In spite of this resurgence of hatred, the New Americans formed strong community bonds, started families, found new careers and educational opportunities, and became a true part of the fabric of the United States. Many chose to become American citizens, and proudly recited the oath of allegiance at naturalization ceremonies in big cities and small towns alike, all around the country.
Archival Audio – The New Americans propaganda film: “I hereby declare on oath that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I had heretofore been subject or citizen. That I will support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God. We believe this oath. We believe it as our fathers believe some of them swore some of them only herded echoing down ascension but all believed for as long as you believe it this is America.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: FIn our next episode, we’ll hear more from Dr. Hasia Diner as we continue to explore the ways that American Jewish communities were shaped in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written by executive director Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the U.S. National Archives, the University of Kentucky Special Collections, and the Walter J. Brown Media Archives at the University of Georgia.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review, which helps others discover our series.
