Bergen Belsen Survivors

A photo spread on Page One of the Second Section of the Sunday Herald Tribune showed a group of young concentration camp survivors who had begun a new life in Palestine, thanks to the intervention of US aid agencies. The accompanying article presented their harrowing story, drawn largely from a report by Joseph Wolhandler, who had spent 10 months with the survivors at Belsen after the war as a welfare worker for the Joint Distribution Committee formed to help European Jewry. Wolhandler had since joined the staff of the United Jewish Appeal. A conscientious objector, he had served with the American Field Service as an ambulance driver during the war. He later became a top show biz press agent.

The article begins with the arrival of British officers at Belsen where Uberstumfuhrer Josef Kramer assured officers that the interns consisted only of 1,000 of the worst criminals, homosexuals, murderers and the insane. It is appalling how lumping gays in with murderers in the 1940s as among the worst of the worst was acceptable. In any case, when the troops entered the camps they found 10,000 corpses and 80,000 emaciated inmates, 70,000 of whom were Jews. This scene has become familiar through newsreels of the day, which the reporter noted did not convey the awful stench of the place. Less widely known was the fact that due to rampant typhus and the effect of starvation, 13,000 of these survivors died within a week of their liberation and another 15,000 perished before the summer was out. That would be about one-third of the total liberated. Only a minority of the inmates returned to their former homes with the remainder sent to displaced persons camps. More than 20,000 were still living in the camp in April 1946. Most of these were Poles, about half of them Polish Jews, who were afraid to go back to Poland out of fear of Antisemitism or Communist retribution. As a story that day in the Sunday Times reported, the Soviets were insisting that all Polish nationals be forcibly returned to Communist Poland to weed out supposed traitors.

Among the Belsen survivors were 250 Jewish children. They had constituted a work force to gather wood to be used in the crematoriums. After the war they had been housed at an estate in Blankanose, about an hour from the town of Bergen where Belsen had been located. The previous Friday, 115 of them began their journey to a new home in Palestine. All but one of the 250 had developed heart irregularities during their captivity and the lone exception was tubercular. The Nazi guards frequently had forced the children to stand for hours bent over touching their toes.

Wolhandler also had visited Buchenwald, where 1,000 boys under 14 had been relocated to Palestine within a month after liberation. They were quiet and unusually well-disciplined and lacked “the sauciness of American children,” according to Wolhandler. Many suffered from chronic ailments.

A training school had been set up on 10-acres at Fulda to teach farming to the former inmates in preparation for a new life in Palestine. The spread had 10 cows and a few chicken. Relief agencies had sent 5500 new shoes to the women at Belsen, 1,000 men's overcoats and children's shoes. Food had been donated and parcels sent in from Switzerland. A search bureau had been set up in an attempt to trace families. There was an immigration center, a school, theater groups, children's homes and magazines at the locations. Many of the DPs were housed at former concentration camps. The 20,000 displaced persons remaining at Belsen were living in barracks that formerly had housed the SS Panzer guards, The stench remained even though the British had burned the area where the inmates had been confined. Medical problems and hunger persisted