JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Brigadier H.L. Glyn Hughes, deputy director of medical
services of the British Army of the Rhine appointed Dr. Hadassah
(Ada) Bimko, a 32-year-old Jewish dentist from Sosnowiec,
Poland, to organize and head a team of 28 doctors and
620 female and male volunteers from among the survivors,
only a few of whom were trained nurses, to help the military
medical personnel care for the camp’s thousands of critically ill
inmates. Despite their desperate efforts, however – it was not
until May 11 that the daily death rate fell below 100 a day – the
Holocaust claimed 13,944 additional victims at Bergen-Belsen
during the two months after liberation.
To contain the different epidemics rampaging through
Bergen-Belsen, the British evacuated the survivors to the military
barracks of a Panzer training school located about a mile
away which in short order became the *displaced persons (DP)
camp of Bergen-Belsen. On completion of the relocation on
May 21, 1945, the British set fire to the concentration camp’s
wooden barracks.
Bergen-Belsen became the largest DP camp in Europe.
From 1945 until 1950, it was an autonomous, self-governed,
and largely self-contained Jewish community. Within days after
the liberation, the camp’s Jewish survivors elected their
own political leadership headed by Josef *Rosensaft, a Polish
Jew who had also survived Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Dora-
Mittelbau. They focused on four main tasks: the physical rehabilitation
of the survivors, the search for relatives, spiritual
rehabilitation and – often against the will of the British military
authorities – the political fight for rights and immigration
to Palestine, or Ereẓ-Israel.
The Jewish population of Bergen-Belsen was in constant
flux, numbering approximately 12,000 within a few weeks of
liberation, remaining around 10,000 through 1947, and then
steadily declining as emigration from Germany became more
feasible. While Jewish survivors from Western Europe and
Czechoslovakia were repatriated in a matter of weeks after
liberation, most Jewish survivors from Poland and many from
Hungary chose not to return to their native countries. In 1946,
when the British sought to prevent thousands of additional
Polish Jewish refugees from entering the British zone, Rosensaft
and his colleagues openly defied the Military Government
by giving them sanctuary in Bergen-Belsen.
By June 1945, the Jewish Committee of the Bergen-Belsen
DP camp was enlarged to represent all Jewish DPs throughout
the British zone of Germany. In September 1945 the first Congress
of Liberated Jews met at Belsen and elected the Central
Jewish Committee for the British Zone, representing both the
Jewish DPs from Eastern Europe and the newly reconstituted
German Jewish communities of cities such as Hamburg, Cologne,
Bremen, Duesseldorf, and Hanover. Josef Rosensaft
served as its chairman and Norbert Wollheim, an Auschwitz
survivor originally from Berlin who had organized the Kindertransport,
was vice chairman. Rosensaft headed both the Central
Committee and the Bergen-Belsen Jewish Committee until
the DP camp was closed in the fall of 1950.
As Rosensaft explained 20 years later, “Our feelings and
bergen-belsen
ideas, unfortunately, were at variance with the political climate
in 1945, and the calculations of those who held our fate
in their hands. There were political factors in Germany that
attempted to deny the Jewish character of the problems, which
confronted the world as a result of the Hitler catastrophe. They
sought by all means at their command to loosen the strong
grip that Jewish pain and suffering and the tragic Jewish situation
had on world conscience.”
When the British officially renamed the DP camp
“Hohne” in an attempt to at least nominally sever its relationship
with the notorious concentration camp and thereby
dilute the impact of the survivors’ struggle for Jewish rights
in international public opinion, Jewish leadership simply ignored
the new designation. They understood full well the
dramatic news value of the Bergen-Belsen name and were
not about to surrender it. Official communications sent by
the British military authorities to Rosensaft at “Hohne” were
responded to on stationery that gave “Bergen-Belsen” as the
Central Committee’s address.
Yiddish was the official language of the Bergen-Belsen DP
camp and Zionist politics were the order of the day. The first
handwritten and mimeographed issue of the Bergen-Belsen
newspaper, Undzer Shtimme (Our Voice), appeared on July 12,
1945. At first declared illegal by the British military authorities,
it soon received official sanction and then appeared regularly.
The first book published in Bergen-Belsen (on September 7,
1945) was a listing, in English and German, of the camp’s Jewish
survivors to facilitate the reunification of family members
and friends, and some 60 other publications followed.
Several hundred children were liberated at Bergen-
Belsen, and many more came there from Poland and other
parts of Eastern Europe during 1945 and 1946. As early as
June 1945, the first school was opened in Bergen-Belsen with
separate classes in Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian. Jewish
children from different parts of Eastern Europe soon joined
them. In due course Bergen-Belsen had a kindergarten; an
elementary, high, and vocational training school; and a full
complement of Jewish religious educational institutions. In
addition, the camp had a rabbinate, a hospital, its own Jewish
police force, a library, two theater companies, an orchestra,
and a host of youth and sports clubs.
Determined to create new lives for themselves, the Jewish
DPs of Bergen-Belsen began to marry soon after liberation.
More then 2,000 children – a vertitable population explosion –
were born in the DP camp between 1946 and 1950.
Bergen-Belsen was at the heart of the Zionist struggle to
establish a Jewish state, resulting in frequent confrontations
with the British authorities. At the September 1945 Congress
of Liberated Jews, the Jewish DPs formally adopted a resolution
calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine
and expressing their “sorrow and indignation that almost
six months after liberation we still find ourselves in guarded
camps on British soil soaked with the blood of our people. We
proclaim that we will not be driven back into the lands which
have become the graveyards of our people.”
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 421