Bringing humanity to the Holocaust
of the JRU (Jewish Relief Unit), the operational arm of the British Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA), weren’t allowed into Germany until June, two months after liberation. Then a team of 12 arrived. Their leader, Rose Henriques, a woman who with her husband Basil, devoted her life to Jewish welfare, arrived the following month. She immediately wrote home to Basil: “One comes into the camps and sees the miserable crowds still in miserable surroundings miserably wailing for ‘something to be done.’”
By the summer of 1946, there were 92 JRU volunteers working alongside UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration).
Most of the JRU work was organising cultural and educational programmes, vocational training and child-care. There were very pressing present needs, physical and emotional, but at least as important was preparing deprived and traumatised people for the future. The majority of the JRU were Zionists but they could not be at odds with the British. Anyone found assisting infiltrators smuggling people out to go to Palestine was sacked by the JCRA.
The JRU did difficult, selfless, ongoing work with distressed people whose past had been terrible, their present deprived and their future uncertain. At first, in the face of crippling shortages of food and clothing, they scrabbled for survival with all the strategies they could muster. Sadie Rurka ran the Kinderheim at Bergen-Belsen for 83 orphans (she reports with amazement that, among all the thousands of people at Bergen-Belsen, only 83 orphans survived). One evening, she handed out blankets to them all. The following morning, the blankets were all gone, traded for other things the children wanted more. She got them more blankets and told them this time they must keep them, which they did.
The JRU arrived at Belsen to create a future for those survivors