The Last Million

 

David Nasaw has written a marvelous book that deeply resonated with me.   The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War is a meticulously researched book dealing with the human aftermath of WWII.  The convulsions and destruction of the war were so vast and the administration of the countries devastated by the war, the immediate onset of the Cold War, and lingering antisemitism and fears of displaced Jews and survivors of the camps together created difficulties for the Allies for years.

These were people with no place to go—Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, along with European Jews that were liberated from Hitler’s camps.    Their homes had been destroyed, their livelihoods taken from them.   They were caught between the West and the Soviet partitioning of Europe, with a Soviet Union that sought to gobble up parts of war-torn Europe. 

The Displaced Persons (DP) camps presented a terrible sorting problem for the U.S. and U.K.    As post-war labor shortages loomed, Western nations were also facing pressure from the Soviets to repatriate peoples from the territories over which they had dominion and control.  Most of the Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians were fiercely anti-Communists and did not wish to return to their Soviet dominated homeland.

The most difficult and wrenching issue were the Jews, who were so horribly abused by the Third Reich.  Nasaw notes that there were no Jewish children or elderly in the DP camps—they had been killed by the Nazi regime.  The Brits actively blocked them from being resettled in Palestine out of the concern that it would trigger bloodshed with the Arabs.  They often couldn’t go back to their homes and the Americans didn’t give them priority either, and many foundered for years in these camps.  Jared Kushner’s grandmother spent 3 ½ years in a DP camp.  “Nobody wanted us,” she said.

The book clarified a great deal with me.  I grew up among these people in the 60’s and early 70’s in Chicago.  While my family fortunately was here before the war (my grandfather slipped out of Austria in 1929), the parents of many of my friends either escaped the Stalin deportations from Lithuania or were Poles from the DP camps.   Indeed, two parishes—one Lithuanian and one Polish were adjacent to each other a few blocks away (they have since been combined and to this day the parish says Masses in Lithuanian and Polish). 

Many of these people were reluctant to speak about their wartime and post-wartime experiences, although all were virulently anti-Communist. I still recall some of the antisemitism that permeated the community.  “He’s only crying because he can’t keep the money,” I recall one Lithuanian saying as he watched Jerry Lewis break down at the end of one of his telethons.  There were a few more insidious characters as well.  One of my friends disclosed that he had seen his father’s Waffen-SS uniform in a box in the attic.  One saloon keeper actually fought for the Wehrmacht and would sometimes show his scars to patrons.   I recall an instance in which young children were gathered round a two-flat chanting “Nazi. Nazi” where a middle aged man lived alone in an attic apartment and didn’t interact with his neighbors.  Nonetheless, there were a few Jews that lived peaceably in the community—mostly small shopkeepers.

Nasam’s book gripped me in many respects.  Growing up, I was oblivious to what these people experienced and endured during the war and its immediate aftermath.   He reminded me of the trials that they endured, and yet, torn from their community, transported to a place where they didn’t know the language, they were able to piece their lives back together, raise families and live together in peace—sometimes along side people they had fought against a few years earlier. 

The problems of sorting and vetting immigrants are still with us, decades later.  The advent of the Cold War and the absence of documentation prevented us from doing a robust job of screening out Nazi collaborators and war criminals and bringing them to justice decades ago.   We are similarly today locked in a political battle  to prevent human traffickers, MS-13 members and drug dealers from slipping across our border.   We had a tremendous problem vetting refugees from war torn Syria and the travel ban imposed by Trump on terrorist hotbeds caused great controversy. 

Somehow, we generally do seem to muddle through and incorporate these peoples into our country.