The suffering of many Holocaust survivors did not end with the end of the war. In Germany, Austria and Italy, around 250,000 Jews waited in camps for DPs (Displaced Persons) until the early 1950s to be allowed to leave the continent: as the rabbi and jurist Serah Wahhaftig put it, they were “the escaped death”, but not yet “freed for life”. Yet they formed a unique extraterritorial community that was prolific in every sense of the word: they established cultural institutions, had children (their birth rate was among the highest in Europe), and published newspapers.
Jewish displaced persons often used the biblical term
bamidbar
, Hebrew for "in the desert," to refer to their plight.
The fourth book of the Torah with the same name, which tells of the Israelites’ exodus from oppression and their perilous journey through the Sinai desert, reflected the survivors’ own liminal existence, their journey to their longed-for home far away from Europe, which they would only reach years later.
The newspaper as the mouthpiece of the camp
"Bamidbar" was also the name of the newspaper of the Föhrenwald DP camp, one of more than 70 Jewish newspapers published in the DP camps.
Such newspapers appeared almost immediately after the liberation, long before the basic material needs of the survivors were met.
The first of these, the "Landsberger Lager-Cajtung" ("LLC", later renamed "Jidisze Cajtung"), was founded in 1945 by the Lithuanian Jew Rudolf Valsonok and soon grew from a four-page circular to an influential sixteen-page newspaper covering sold 20,000 times a week.
Paper was scarce, Hebrew fonts and typewriters were mostly non-existent (the “LLC” and other newspapers had to use the Latin script for Yiddish), but each camp tried to have its own mouthpiece: “Unzer Weg”, “Dos Fraye Wort” , "Aheim", "Unzer Shtimme" were all formed in 1945 or 1946, with many more to follow.
Early editions were often handwritten, photographed and then printed, others were typed and duplicated by machine before Yiddish matrices became available for Linotype typesetters.
A new form of commemoration
The content depicts a unique community shaped by an extraordinary trauma that was not recognized as such by the survivors themselves or the world at the time.
This community grappled with the recent past and created a national identity for a state that was not yet born.
DPs created a new form of commemoration – so-called mourning academies (
troyer akademyen
) – to document the stories of their pre-war homes and their destruction.
Newspapers followed the work of commissions that collected thousands of testimonies and documents, laying the foundation for the field of Holocaust studies long before historians took an interest in it.
Anti-victim and addiction remedies
The headlines reported flaming demonstrations and hunger strikes demanding entry into Palestine or denouncing anti-Semitic actions by the occupation authorities.
The newspapers also bear witness to fierce political strife (in which Zionism has won a clear victory), religious life no less divided, and a flood of creative articles, poetry and memoirs.
In addition to endless wanted ads for missing relatives, there are also reports on the work of the DP “courts of honour” that exposed wartime collaborators and informants.
These diverse activities helped the Jewish DPs to overcome forced inactivity and humiliating dependence on the Allied authorities and to shed the role of passive victim dependent on charity in order to become capable and imaginative human beings and ultimately actors of retribution, justice and commemoration work . After the closure of the DP camps, most newspapers were discontinued and their contributors headed for new shores, where the reception was often less than expected. But that is a completely different story.
Ksenia Krimer
studied Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and received her doctorate in history from the Central European University in Budapest.
She has been involved in research projects at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC