Remembering the Holocaust and today’s ‘stateless’
AS YOU WERE SAYING ...
When British troops entered the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany on April 15, 1945, they found some 58,000 surviving inmates, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. Most were suffering from a combination of typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, extreme malnutrition, and a host of other virulent diseases.
One of the survivors at Bergen-Belsen was my mother, Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, a dentist from Sosnowiec, Poland, who had by then spent 15 months at AuschwitzBirkenau after her parents, first husband, and 5 1/2-yearold son were gassed upon arrival at the death camp. Assigned to Birkenau’s infirmary because of her medical training, she saved countless women by performing rudimentary surgery, camouflaging their wounds, and sending them on work details ahead of selections for the gas chambers.
In November 1944, she was sent to Bergen-Belsen where she and a small group of Jewish women kept 149 Jewish children alive through the harsh winter of 1944-1945.
A few days after liberation, the senior British medical officer at Bergen-Belsen appointed my mother to organize and head a group of sufficiently healthy survivors to help care for the camp’s thousands of critically ill inmates. For weeks on end, my mother and her team of 28 doctors and 620 other volunteers, only a few of them trained nurses, worked round the clock with the military personnel to try to save as many lives as possible. Despite their desperate efforts, the Holocaust claimed 13,944 additional victims during the two months following liberation.
“For the greater part of the liberated Jews of BergenBelsen,” my mother recalled many years later, “there was no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes. We had no place to go, nobody to hug, nobody who was waiting for us, anywhere. We had been liberated from death and from the fear of death, but we were not free from the fear of life.”
By May 21, 1945, the survivors of Bergen-Belsen were moved from what the British called the “horror camp” to a nearby German military base that became the largest of many Displaced Persons camps. An Aug. 17, 1946, New York Times editorial estimated that there were “about 157,000 homeless Jews in British, French and American zones of Germany, in Austria and in Italy. Another 100,000 are expected to leave Poland.”
These Jewish DPs included not just physicians like my mother, but also lawyers, rabbis, engineers, scholars, merchants, writers, actors, artists, musicians, and athletes who had been successful, productive members of their communities before the war, but were now subjected to disparagement and discrimination.
As early as July 1945, the World Jewish Congress charged that the Jewish DPs “not only are detained as virtual prisoners in Germany in conditions of abject misery but are treated with a callous and shameful neglect by Allied Military Control authorities.”
Gen. George S. Patton, the American military governor of Bavaria, wrote in his journal that he considered the Jewish DPs to be “lower than animals.” U.S. Sen. William Chapman Revercomb (R.-W. Va.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee, reportedly told his colleagues that, “We could solve this DP problem all right if we could work out some bill that would keep out the Jews.”
I am one of approximately 2,000 Jewish children born in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp. In due course, our families established new homes for ourselves in the United States, Israel, Canada, and elsewhere. But just as Jews are commanded at the Passover Seder to remember that we were slaves in Egypt, I can never forget that my parents and I were once stateless refugees.
Today as we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I would ask you to engage on a personal level to make sure that the murder of six million Jews remains an integral part of our collective consciousness. The process is simple — take a photo of yourself holding a “We Remember” sign, and post it to social media using the hashtag #WeRemember. By doing so, you will forge a link in a sacred chain of memory.