A great book that addresses the subject of nursing the victims back to health is Marguerite Duras’ memoir The War. Both Duras and her husband had been in the Resistance. The first half of her memoir is about her attempts to find out, in the tortuous final weeks of the war when the camps were being liberated, if her husband had survived his internment which had been known to have begun in Buchenwald (and which turned out to have ended in Dachau); her friends in the Resistance (one of whom was “Francois Morland,” A.K.A. Francois Mitterand) smuggling him out (he’d been left to die in a quarantined part of the camp where the typhus cases were sequestered because the American authorities thought he was too far gone to survive); and his lengthy, agonizing rehab at home in Paris.
When he and Marguerite were finally reunited, he weighed 82-84 pounds. For seventeen days, they fed him (under a doctor’s strict supervision) six or seven teaspoons’ worth of gruel a day. Even that tiny amount would nearly choke him. (Yet, she’d also written that en route to Paris, he’d requested and received a trout to eat, and had managed to swallow several mouthfuls.) His neck was so thin, she wrote, you could wrap your hand completely around his neck. As soon as he was put on the gruel diet, he developed a very high fever that lasted for days and nearly killed him.
It wasn’t until he’d recovered enough strength (so that he could hold his own spoon or fork) that he was wracked with constant hunger, feebly complaining they didn’t understand, they couldn’t understand, but that he needed more food…
German police were used along with Americans in regards to keeping the DP camps orderly and such. After German police raided one barrack and killed a guy (who had survived Auschwitz), they were no longer allowed near the Jewish camp.
Honestly, they really should have figured they can’t trust Germans around Jews.
Seen the film. Very interesting. A long, convoluted way of getting home. Lot’s of surreal things.
An uncle of mine was a POW in Germany and, well, it was rough. After liberation the food was carefully limited. Clothing and lice was also an issue. Showered, dusted, new clothes. Wait a couple days, repeat. Several times. Shipped home, the last leg was a bus trip. Got into town late at night. Called his folks for a ride. Can’t imagine who tough it was for people who didn’t get assistance.
For those who want to see a profound and extensive film documentary on prison camp, the film Shoah is held in high regard by critics and Dopers alike.
I did not know about the Holocaust until I was a freshman in college and read a book called I Cannot Forgive. Please understand that I came from an isolated small rural town with no Jews. I was born during the war. My history class stopped before WWII. No one close to me was in the military.
The Holocaust Museum is worth the time spent there if you are in Washington. There was a lot of thinking that went into the creation of that exhibit. Some things are subtle, but I think I fell into all of their traps.
I had no idea that the Displaced Person’s Camps were open that long. I heard about them when I was small, but I didn’t know what they were. Then I forgot about them. It was terrible that they were displaced for so long. I wonder if Europe was rebuilt faster than families were relocated. Your father is five years younger than I am!
Maybe it would be a good idea for you to ask your father what happened in those two years between the end of the camp and their coming to America. It is part of your family history. Don’t let it be lost for all time.
Why is it contradictory? Loads of people, many not involved in the Holocaust in any way, ended up in displaced persons camps. The mother of a former coworker was born in a displaced persons camp; her family were Latvians (ETA: they were Catholic, I think, definitely not Jewish) who had been displaced by the war and ended up in a camp somewhere for years before gaining refugee status and coming to the US. Her grandparents’ experience had had a really profound effect on my coworker and she spoke of it often.
