http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/lesson_plans/liberation_and_survival.

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The first concentration camp to be liberated was Majdanek. The prisoners in

Majdanek were liberated by Soviet troops in July 1944. Soon thereafter Soviet troops
found other Nazi camps, and freed their inmates. British and American troops
reached Nazi camps in the spring of 1945, liberating tens of thousands of prisoners.
These prisoners had been living under extremely harsh conditions. Many were
starving and others were very sick. Many of the people who had been liberated had
survived "death marches," forced to march over long distances. The death marches
occurred towards the end of the war as the Allies advanced on the German army
and the Nazis tried to move prisoners further west into Germany. The German
leadership believed that the Third Reich would survive the war. They therefore
attempted to move concentration camp prisoners within Germany's borders, so that
they could still be exploited for slave labor. Upon entering Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Soviet soldiers found only 7,650 prisoners. Most of the 58,000 remaining camp
prisoners had been sent on death marches at the end of 1944. Prisoners were
abused and sometimes killed by the guards accompanying them on these marches.
Approximately 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died on death marches.
Other than survivors of the camps, some of those liberated had been hidden during
the war or had masqueraded as Christians with false identity papers. Still others
were surviving ghetto fighters, partisans and those who had fled to the forests.

Colonel Lewis Weinstein, a member of the US Army, liberated Jews who were in Nazi
camps. He recalls:
" We had heard all kinds of rumors and stories, but they were so horrible that they
were indescribable; we just couldn't believe them. I had a great guilt feeling when I
actually found out about what happened in these camps. I had talked in terms of
possibly a few thousand having been murdered, but thinking in terms of six
million... murdered - I was obviously very much taken aback."[1]

Father Edward P. Doyle, a chaplain in the US Army during WWII, participated in the
liberation of Nordhausen. He recalls:
"I was there. I was present. I saw the sights. I will never forget. You have heard the
story many times before. On the night of April 11, 1945, my division, of which I was
the Catholic chaplain, took the town of Nordhausen. The following morning, with the
dawn, we discovered a concentration camp. Immediately the call went out for all

medical personnel that could be spared, to be present. [] On that morning in

Nordhausen, I knew why I was there. I found the reason for it - man's inhumanity to
man. What has happened to that beautiful commandment of the Decalogue, the
commandment of God to love one another?"[2]

Eva Goldberg was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Horneburg camps, and was
liberated at Salzwedel, Germany, by American soldiers. She recalls:
"And what I remember most is the convoys of Americans who were standing on both
sides of the road and looking at us. They did not believe what they were looking
at!"[3]

Liberation should have been a happy day for the survivors. Finally they were free of
the constant fear of death they had lived with for so many years. For the Jewish
survivors, however, liberation had come too late. Entire communities in Eastern
Europe, especially, had been wiped out and all their Jews exterminated. Over 90% of
the Jewish community in Poland, the largest in Europe, had perished.[4]
In Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Balkan States, the outcome was nearly the
same. The Jews of Western and Southern Europe also suffered terribly, though the
proportion of those exterminated was lower. In many cases, whole families had been
slaughtered, and only single members were left. A survey taken by the Organization
for Jewish Refugees in Italy, for example, found that 76% of the Jewish refugees had
lost all of their immediate families and all of their relatives, and were the sole
survivors from their families.[5]

More than anything else, however, with liberation the survivors were struck
suddenly by the immensity of their losses. Up until liberation, survivors had
expended all their efforts on the struggle to survive: they scavenged for food, they
tried to protect themselves, they lived from minute to minute. This struggle to
survive didnt leave room to focus on the world they had lost: their family and
friends, their occupations and habits, their neighborhoods and their possessions.
Suddenly they were confronted with a new reality. Their families were gone, and
their lives would never be the same. An almost superhuman effort was needed to
pick up the pieces of their broken lives and to start over again. While the rest of the
world was counting the dead, the Jews were counting the living.

Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, a member of the underground who fought, among other
battles, in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, testified:

That day, 17 January, was the saddest day of my life. I wanted to cry, not from joy
but from grief. [..] How could we be happy? I was completely broken! You'd kept
yourself going all the terrible and bitter years, and now... we were overcome by
weakness. Now we could suddenly allow ourselves to be weak [..] Ultimately there is
an end to war. We had lived all that time with a certain sense of mission, but now? It
was over! What for? What for? [..] I had never cried; they had never seen me
depressed, not once; I had to live strongly, but on 17 January its not easy to be
the last of the Mohicans." [6]

Yosef Govrin was born in 1930 in Romania. He was deported to various ghettos and
camps in Transnistria. Yosef was liberated by Soviet soldiers in December 1944. He
recalls:
"The devastation caused by the war and the fact that I was an orphan came to me
very forcefully on Victory Day. I saw the destruction that the war had wrought much
more realistically, I suppose, than I had before. The destruction had been all around
me day and night, but only on Victory Day did I notice it on the street where I was
walkingIt was then, as a boy, that I grasped the full scale of the destructionand
really, Victory Day is engraved in my memory to this day as a day ofnot as a day
of celebration!"[7]

Eva Braun was born in 1927 in Slovakia. During WWII she was imprisoned in
Auschwitz-Birkenau, and liberated by US soldiers. Eva recalls:
"You were praying all those months to be liberated and then it hits you all of a
sudden - here you are free. But after it sank in, the freedom - I am speaking for
myself - I realized that I was hoping the whole time that I would see my father and
maybe, hope beyond hope, my mother, although I knew that this was not a realistic
hope. But my father, I was sure I would meet him. I was positive. But still there were
doubts, and I realized that I had to start thinking about the fact of what would
happen if I would not... Freedom is relative. Very much so. The thought of the future
weighed very heavily on me. Obviously we knew that it was no longer our problem
but still we have to make a future for ourselves and how would we make that
future?"[8]

Miriam Steiner testified: "[..] The great crisis had not yet hit us. It began when my
cousin came home a few days later. I barely recognized him, because that kid, that
big slob, had two big ears, a big nose and two cavities for eyes. He began to recover
from his "Musselman" condition. For the first time I cried, I fell on him and I cried at
how he looked, because then I suddenly woke up. He was the start of my crisis, of

the crisis of ours as a whole... He embraced me and said only this: "You should know
one thing, don't wait for your father and your brother." He repeated that many times
[..] "Now we began to realize the enormity of the loss, we began to understand that
Grandfather and Grandmother and hardly any of our relatives had returned, only
that one cousin, and his father also returned later on. People said we shouldn't wait
for them, but the truth is that we waited all the time for my father. And I only want
to say that I often look around, as though I am still searching... not for Father, it is
my brother for whom I am still looking all the time. I know it is completely
unrealistic, because formally I am not searching, I.. I cast about with my eyes..."[9]

Classroom Discussion:

Why do you think Yitzhak Zuckerman, Yosef Govrin, Eva Braun and Miriam Steiner
did not feel that liberation day was a day of celebration?
Many prisoners survived the Nazi camps by focusing only on their most immediate
daily needs, and thinking about almost nothing else. How do you think this situation
affected their experience of liberation?
One of the greatest difficulties that liberated survivors faced was intense loneliness.
Prof. Hanna Yablonka, a Holocaust historian and the daughter of a Holocaust
survivor, describes her mother's sentiments upon graduating from nursing school, a
few years after the Holocaust. According to Hanna, her mother was elated that she
had finished her degree, and yet plagued with an overwhelming sense of loneliness
- she truly had no one with whom to share her news. What do you think is the
difference between the loneliness that we all sometimes experience and the
loneliness that Holocaust survivors felt after liberation?
The Allied soldiers cared for the survivors they had liberated. They fed the survivors
and gave them the medical attention that they so desperately needed.

Ephraim Poremba was born in Poland. Ephraim was deported to several Nazi camps,
and he was liberated by the US Army at the age of twenty. He recalls:
"The Americans organized a hospital, they started doing tests, they set up tents
with water and showers. We washed, they gave us soap. When did I last wash? I
couldn't rememberFirst of all hot water; whoever saw hot water? It was a dream.
As much hot water as you want, to wash with soap, with soap! You could even wash
your head, your body, it was heaven, it was heaven on earth!"[10]

What Did the Survivors Do Following Liberation?

By the end of 1945, those Jews who had managed to survive forced labor camps,
concentration camps, extermination camps, and death marches, or who had
survived in hiding, in forests, or with the help of local individuals (later to become
Righteous Among the Nations), wanted only to go home. Some found that they
had no homes or families left. Others found that going home involved a dangerous
journey through chaotic, post-war Europe. Those who succeeded in reaching their
old homes had to confront a new reality: the local populations in their homes,
particularly in Eastern Europe, were antisemitic and hostile toward Jews, and saw
their return as unwelcome.

Shoshana Stark testified:

I went home. I didnt have anywhere I could stay... The gatekeeper was living in the
house and wouldnt let me go in... I also had aunts and family. I went to see all their
apartments. There were non-Jews living in every one. They wouldnt let me in. In
one place, one of them said, What did you come back for? They took you away to
kill you, so why did you have to come back? I decided: Im not staying here, Im
going.[11]

Avraham Dobo (Dabri) wrote:

After some initial difficulties, I got what I needed and set out on the one thousand
kilometer journey, which took three weeks or more. I arrived in my town, and just as
I got off the train I met a man, a Christian acquaintance, whom I had gone to school
with. I asked, How are you? He said, Your sister arrived a week ago. I knew
where she lived. I went on foot. My clothes were half military and half civilian. I
didnt have any other clothes but one shirt just my rumpled pants and an army
jacket. This is how I came home. I walked into my sisters house. I met her there,
and she asked, Who are you looking for? Two years before, we said goodbye now
she doesnt know me. I was skin and bones, with no hair. I looked like I could be ten
years old and I could be eighty. I spoke with her a few minutes I wanted to know
what was new. Then, we burst out crying.[12]

Shmuel Shulman Shilo was born in Poland in 1928. He lived in the Lutsk Ghetto, and
immigrated to Israel in 1946. He testified:
Suddenly Im standing in the middle of the city [..] and I ask myself, So what?
Home gone, family gone, children gone, my friends are gone, Jews gone. Here
and there would be a Jew I hardly knew. This is what I fought for? This is what I

stayed alive for? Suddenly I realized that my whole struggle had been pointless, and
I didnt feel like living.[13]

The DP Camps
Understanding that the Jewish survivors could not, in most cases, be repatriated to
their homes, Allied forces and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), an organization created in anticipation of a great refugee
crisis when World War II ended, cared for them by improvising shelter throughout
camps in central Europe known as Displaced Persons' (DP) camps. Conditions in
these camps, especially at the beginning, were very difficult. Many of the camps
were former concentration camps and German army camps. Survivors found
themselves still living behind barbed wire, still subsisting on inadequate amounts of
food and still suffering from shortages of clothing, medicine and supplies. Death
rates remained high. Yet, despite the wretched physical conditions, the survivors in
the DP camps transformed them into a flurry of cultural and social activities. More
than 70 Jewish newspapers were published. Theaters and orchestras were
established.
Educational institutions were set up. Commemoration projects were initiated. The
survivors had a strong drive that led them to try to find new meaning in their lives.

An emissary from Palestine described the DP camps as follows:

"There are always people out in the narrow street, usually young men, wandering
around and looking for something. I feel that they are looking for some meaning in
their lives. They get up in the morning and don't know why. The day passes and
night falls, and another day and another night passes by. And if you should once
look into the eyes of one of these young men, and knew how to read his soul -- you
would understand that his soul is still wandering in his past, he is remembering the
past and yearning for tomorrow. The present is unnecessary, serving only to bridge
the gulf between the old life and the future. The sense of impermanence is tangible
in every step. There is no stability -- neither material nor spiritual. Yesterday was
spent in hell on earth, tomorrow will be in a heavenly paradise -- and in between
there is nothing but emptiness and inaction.
The camp is full of posters -- here a wall newspaper and there an announcement
board. Endless posters, flags and slogans. To the stranger who enters, life here
seems active and full of culture and spirit. But on closer inspection, you will shudder
at the terrible abyss opening at your feet. There is something special in the sounds
of music, the dances and the cafe life, a sort of frightened and irritable undertone.

Everything is seen in too sharp a light and is heard too loudly. Everything is beyond
the human scale; and if you have breathed that air, you will understand that here
live people who have already experienced their deaths long ago. Camp eyes are still
saturated with the visions of suffering, camp lips smile a cynical smile, and the
survivors' voices cry, 'We have not yet perished'."[14]

More than anything else, though, the Jewish survivors had a deep desire for human
relationships in order to banish their despair and loneliness. Many of the survivors
were young men and women between twenty and thirty years of age, who were all
alone in the world. They formed couples and married quickly. One DP who had lost
his family proposed to another DP with these words, I am alone. I have no one, I
have lost everything. You are alone. You have no one. You have lost everything. Let
us be alone together.[15]

The survivors were in a rush to have children and to raise new families as the
symbol of the future their own future and that of the Jewish people. In the DP
Camp at Bergen Belsen alone, 555 babies were born in 1946.[16] The birth rate in
the camps was among the highest in the world. Eliezer Adler was born in 1923 in
Belz, Poland. He spent most of WWII in a forced labor camp in the Soviet Union.
After the war Eliezer spent three years in DP camps. He recalled:
"...This issue of the rehabilitation of She'arit Hapleta ("surviving remnant"), the Jews'
desire to live, is unbelievable. People got married; they would take a hut and divide
it into ten tiny rooms for ten couples. The desire for life overcame everything - in
spite of everything I am alive, and even living with intensity.
When I look back today on those three years in Germany I am amazed. We took
children and turned them into human beings, we published a newspaper; we
breathed life into those bones. The great reckoning with the Holocaust? Who
bothered about that... you knew the reality, you knew you had no family, that you
were alone, that you had to do something. You were busy doing things. I remember
that I used to tell the young people: Forgetfulness is a great thing. A person can
forget, because if they couldn't forget they couldn't build a new life. After such a
destruction to build a new life, to get married, to bring children into the world? In
forgetfulness lay the ability to create a new life... somehow, the desire for life was
so strong that it kept us alive"[17]

In this quotation, Abba Kovner, a leader of the Jewish underground and partisan
movements in Lithuania, reflects on the activities of survivors after the liberation:
"Nor would I have found it surprising if they had turned into a band of robbers,

thieves, and murderers []. They had come forth hungry, dressed in tattered rages,
broken and defeated, and the first thing they wanted was to seek the basic things:
bread, shelter, and work. All of this could have deteriorated into the misery of their
so-called rehabilitated lives."[18]