Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust

As World War II drew to a close in 1945, panic swept over the continent of Europe. In Western Europe the populations scrambled to get out of the way of the defeated, retreating German army. In Germany itself, intense bombing had created some two million homeless German refugees. Perhaps the most profoundly affected population at this time of chaos, however, was the approximately 100,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Liberation of these camps by the victorious Allies at the end of the war was not the happy occasion one might expect, for the liberated had nowhere to go. Forced out of their homes throughout Europe in the decades preceding the war, Jews had no place and nothing to which to return. the anti-Semitism that had allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place did note end with the war. Indeed, it manifested itself in more violence toward Jewish survivors, who had already endured unspeakable conditions; in restrictive immigration laws, including those of the United States, that created an enormous, desperate population of refugees; and in wide-spread resistance to the establishment of a Jewish homeland. No study of the Holocaust is complete without a look at the phenomena of the displaced persons. Nazi aggression caused World War II, and the hatred that accompanied this aggression caused the Holocaust, including its sad conclusion in the years following the war's end.