Aftermath, Sweden, and Emigration (April 1945 to December 1951)

Phase 6: Recovery, Sweden and Emigration (April 1945 to December 1951)

The first weeks after liberation

When the 11th Armoured Division entered Belsen on 15 April 1945, it found about 60,000 living prisoners and about 13,000 unburied corpses. Typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid and dysentery were epidemic, and the dead and dying lay in the same barracks. The Swedish Holocaust Museum puts the total deaths from disease in the spring of 1945 at almost 35,000, counting both before and after liberation. Over 9,000 people were later brought to Sweden from Bergen-Belsen. That figure matters, because it places her inside a mass operation, not an individual rescue.

The first British medical problem was that food, the obvious remedy, killed people. Starved intestines could not absorb army rations. Medical officers, among them Brigadier Glyn Hughes and the researchers Janet Vaughan and Jack Drummond, moved to graded feeding with milk-and-sugar mixtures, then to hydrolysed protein, and finally to intravenous feeding for the worst cases. Roughly 13,000 to 14,000 people died after liberation, mostly of typhus, tuberculosis and the consequences of starvation. The chaos of the first days, with the storehouses opened, some prisoners eating what they could find, and the weakest unable to reach any of it, belongs to this phase. Her sauerkraut and the shared rutabaga come from the interval before the British organised controlled feeding.

The camp’s last weeks shaped the situation. Under a truce negotiated around 12 April, Wehrmacht and Hungarian troops guarded Belsen alongside a skeleton SS staff. When the British arrived, they arrested the commandant, Josef Kramer, and many of the SS and kapos. The Belsen Trial opened at Lüneburg in September 1945, after she had left Germany. Kramer was hanged in December 1945.

Within days the British began evacuating survivors to the Hohne barracks, a Panzer training school about two miles away, which her statement and testimony both treat as the “clean camp where the German soldiers used to be.” The process was called the “Human Laundry.” People were dusted with DDT, undressed, washed, issued clean clothing and sorted by medical need. The most seriously ill went to an emergency hospital that eventually held thousands of beds. This is why her sister was separated from her and sent to a hospital ward. The Belsen medical effort also drew in medical students from London teaching hospitals, who arrived in early May, as well as the Red Cross, a Jewish Relief Unit from Britain, and the army chaplain Rabbi Leslie Hardman, who reached Belsen on 17 April. Her recollection that the Red Cross arrived later with clothing belongs to this period.

The war itself ended while she was in this convalescent setting. German forces in northwest Germany surrendered at Lüneburg Heath on 4 May, and the general surrender followed on 7 and 8 May. Between 19 and 21 May the British burned the emptied huts of the original camp with flamethrowers, because of the lice and typhus infestation. The survivors at Hohne could see the smoke.

The displaced persons camp, May to July 1945

The Hohne site became a displaced persons camp. Museum records say that by mid to late May Bergen-Belsen assumed the status of a displaced persons camp, and in July the Red Cross took former inmates to Sweden for convalescence while the rest stayed to await repatriation or emigration. Her German statement’s phrase, a camp “taken over by UNRRA,” reflects the same transition. UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, shared administration with the British military in this period, and it was the agency through which the Swedish operation described below was organized.

Jewish survivors organized themselves almost immediately. A Jewish committee formed within weeks, and Josef Rosensaft, an Auschwitz survivor, came to lead it. The physician Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, who had served in Auschwitz, directed much of the medical work among the survivors. This body grew into the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone, founded in September 1945. The camp became the largest Jewish DP camp in the British zone, with schools, theatre, a Yiddish press and an intense political life that peaked in 1946 and 1947. It closed in 1950. She left in July 1945, so she saw only its earliest months.

In those months the Allies registered survivors by nationality, not as Jews. Policy treated repatriation as the norm, and Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Polish missions collected their citizens. The change came later. The Harrison Report, written after Earl Harrison’s inspection of the DP camps in the summer of 1945 and delivered to President Truman in August, condemned the treatment of Jewish survivors and led, over the following months, to recognition of Jews as a group needing separate provision. In July 1945 that shift had not yet happened. When she says she and her sister “wanted to go home to Czechoslovakia,” she is describing what the system expected of her and what most survivors from her region wanted.

Her home was in territory that was no longer Czechoslovak. Soviet forces took Uzhhorod in October 1944. A Transcarpathian National Committee voted in November 1944 for union with Soviet Ukraine. The Czechoslovak–Soviet treaty ceding Subcarpathian Ruthenia was signed in Moscow on 29 June 1945, three weeks before her sailing, and the region was formally incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR as the Zakarpattia oblast in January 1946. A return to the village would have meant a return to a Soviet republic.

Survivors who did go home found houses occupied, property absorbed and almost no family left. Anti-Jewish violence broke out in Topoľčany, Slovakia, in September 1945, and in Hungary at Kunmadaras in May 1946 and Miskolc in July 1946. Many returnees turned around and left again through the clandestine Brichah routes. Her remark that it was good she did not go home is consistent with what returnees from her region reported.

The Swedish operation and the medical selection

The Swedish rescue had two distinct phases, and the difference matters for her case. In spring 1945 the Swedish and Danish Red Cross, under Folke Bernadotte, ran the White Buses, which brought Scandinavian prisoners and then other prisoners, mostly from Neuengamme and Ravensbrück, to Denmark and Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross counts about 15,000 people rescued in that operation. The second phase began after the German capitulation. A Swedish museum account describes it this way: through UNRRA and the Red Cross “White Boats,” another 9,000 former prisoners reached Sweden in June and July 1945. Her sailing belongs to this second operation. Most of the people in it were Jewish women from Belsen, many of them young.

Sweden’s offer rested on a medical logic. The Swedish authorities were afraid of importing epidemic disease, and they built what a recent Swedish study calls a “medical barrier.” The treatments began at the Swedish transit hospital in Lübeck and continued through reception stations, quarantines, emergency hospitals and reception centres around Sweden, including DDT treatment and close physical examinations. Candidates were therefore chosen for medical need and for their ability to recover with care. That context explains the role of the French doctor in her account. A physician at Hohne recommended Sweden for her sister, who was ill with typhus, and the process favoured keeping relatives together. Her statement that she and two other girls “said we were relatives” and that a friend, Sarah, came too fits a pattern that appears across survivor testimony: young women who had kept each other alive in Auschwitz and on the marches presented themselves as sisters or cousins, and examiners sometimes accepted it. The same Swedish study notes that survivors developed their own tactics in dealing with the system. I cannot identify the French doctor from the transcript. The international medical personnel at Hohne included British, Belgian, Dutch, French and Swiss staff as well as liberated prisoner-physicians, and she herself mentions a Belgian woman doctor from Auschwitz.

The route ran from Belsen by ambulance train to Lübeck, where Swedish teams deloused and examined people, and then by ship across the Baltic. A photograph dated 20 July 1945 shows women from Bergen-Belsen being deloused in Lübeck before their journey to Sweden. The German statement gives 21 July 1945 as her date of arrival in Göteborg, so she was in one of the first transports. The Swedish authorities did not call these people refugees. They used the term “repatriandi,” while the Jewish communities called them “the Rescued of 1945.” I cannot say from the documents which port she landed at or which vessel carried her. Reception arrangements covered several southern ports, and the statement names Göteborg.

Arrival and quarantine, July to September 1945

Her arrival fell in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, which ran from 17 July to 2 August. Attlee replaced Churchill at the table on 26 July. Hiroshima was bombed on 6 August and Japan surrendered on 15 August, so the end of the Second World War occurred while she was in Swedish quarantine.

The quarantine regime was strict. Around 25,000 camp survivors came to Sweden in the weeks around the end of the war, and the new arrivals were first placed in strict quarantine to protect the general population against infectious disease; they were housed in sanatoriums, hospitals, schools and other public buildings. Her recollection of about three weeks of quarantine fits, and the actual length varied by group and by medical condition. The gradual refeeding she describes, with Swedish fat-rich food first and then toast, follows the cautious reintroduction of food that the medical staff applied after the lessons of Belsen. The daily spoonful of cod liver oil was a standard Swedish vitamin supplement. Her sister’s recovery of weight and hair is the typical course after starvation and typhus. Typhus and severe malnutrition both commonly cause hair loss, and it grows back.

The first arrivals included some who were too ill to survive. The Swedish Holocaust Museum records that more than sixty of the rescued died in Sweden in the following months and years. Her sister’s hospitalization and survival was thus one of the better outcomes.

Life in Sweden, 1945 to 1948

After quarantine the Swedish system dispersed survivors to hospitals, convalescent homes and then to work and private households. The Swedish government eventually decided that everyone who came in the rescue operations could stay. Women were commonly placed in textile mills, hospitals, domestic service and the sewing trades, and many were taught Swedish. Her sister had been learning dressmaking before the deportation, and the needle trades absorbed many young women with her skills. The “aristocrat family” with which Lanka was placed and the “old couple” who took in her friend reflect a Swedish pattern of households taking survivors in, sometimes as employees and sometimes almost as adopted daughters. Postwar Sweden had a severe housing shortage, with rent controls and long waiting lists, so when she says that she could not get an apartment and the group had to split up, she is describing the national situation as well as her own.

Her observations on the Jewish community and on antisemitism need context. Sweden’s Jewish population before the war was roughly seven thousand, and its institutions in Stockholm and Göteborg were stretched by the arrivals. The Joint Distribution Committee and other organisations helped, but local resources were modest next to the need. Survivors elsewhere in Sweden describe the same mixture of private kindness from Swedes and a limited institutional response. Swedish society was neutral, undamaged and not free of antisemitism. Sweden had restricted Jewish immigration in the 1930s, a policy documented by Steven Koblik and Paul Levine, and the stereotypes she quotes, the “crooked nose and black hair,” circulated in popular speech. The writer Hédi Fried, who came to Sweden in 1945 after Auschwitz and Belsen, describes in her memoir a similar mixture of generosity, curiosity and ignorance.

Swedish men took an interest in the young women, and Swedish dating norms were looser than those of the Carpathian Orthodox households the women came from. This worried survivors and Jewish community leaders, who feared intermarriage and the loss of the few who remained. Her insistence on going out only in groups and her protectiveness toward her sister belong to this setting, as does her sister’s relationship with the airman. The age of majority in Sweden was 21 until 1969, which explains why 21 mattered so much for her sister’s decision to travel.

The wider world changed quickly in these years. The Nuremberg trial opened in November 1945. Sweden joined the United Nations in November 1946. The Czechoslovak communist coup of February 1948 closed that country to most movement, and the State of Israel was declared on 14 May 1948. After that, many survivors in Sweden moved on to Israel, North America or elsewhere. Sweden had accepted them as temporary refugees and most eventually left, and her family’s departure in 1951 is part of that pattern.

The husband’s return and the marriage

Her husband’s route out of the Soviet Union also belongs to this history. Czechoslovak citizens from Subcarpathia who fled east around 1939 to 1941 were often interned in Soviet labour camps and released after the amnesty that followed the July 1941 Soviet–Polish agreement. Some joined the Czechoslovak army unit formed under Ludvík Svoboda, and others stayed in Soviet custody or exile until the war ended. The transcript does not say which applied to him, so I do not assign him a path.

The transcript says he was allowed to leave in 1947 and that the Soviet side “begged him to stay.” The Soviet authorities had reasons to do so, since the region now belonged to the USSR and labour was scarce. A Czechoslovak–Soviet agreement of July 1946 allowed people of Czech and Slovak nationality to opt for Czechoslovakia and leave the annexed region, and my understanding is that Jews who declared Czech or Slovak nationality could use it, though I could not confirm the detail in this revision. When he reached Uzhhorod and learned that no one remained, he found what most Jewish returnees found. Of the roughly hundred thousand Jews in the Subcarpathian region before the deportations, only a small fraction came back.

His next step, a visit to cousins in Michalovce in eastern Slovakia, followed a common pattern, since Slovakia lay just across the new border and was where scattered families tried to reconnect. The letters he then wrote to Sweden crossed borders that were closing. The communist coup of February 1948 and the hardening of the Iron Curtain left a narrow window for his departure. In her words he was in Sweden for three years by the time they left in 1951, which puts his arrival in late 1948 or so. The marriage with a man her mother had favoured in her youth resembles the many postwar reunions of people from the same prewar world. She calls it “shikzal,” fate, an idea survivors often used.

The daughter’s birth, August 1949

Her daughter was born in August 1949, premature at eight months. Her doctors attributed the difficulty to the typhus. Medical literature of the period associated typhus, severe infection and prolonged starvation with complications of pregnancy in survivors. Swedish maternity care in the late 1940s was among the best in Europe, and the birth took place within a functioning welfare system and not in a camp. Births among survivors rose sharply between 1946 and 1949 across the DP camps and in Sweden, and they were among the most visible signs of reconstruction.

The sister’s attempt to emigrate and her return

Her sister’s trip to America in the late 1940s followed the standard course for survivors in Sweden, though it ended differently. Sweden was a country of temporary refuge. The American Displaced Persons Act of June 1948 was written for people who had been in Germany, Austria or Italy at a cut-off date, and people living in Sweden generally fell outside it. A congressional report of 1951 on a family in Göteborg shows what that meant in practice, since Congress was asked to admit a mother and her two sons residing in Göteborg by a private bill under the Immigration Act of 1924. Survivors in Sweden otherwise had to enter under the national-origins quotas of that act, which were small for Czechoslovakia and Hungary and heavily oversubscribed. They also needed affidavits of support from relatives in the United States, which is the exchange she describes with her cousins, who were slow to send them.

Her sister was sponsored to join relatives in Scranton and came back after one or two months, preferring to return to the man she loved. Cases of this kind, with homesickness and divided loyalties among young survivors, appear often in the literature. Her protectiveness toward her sister, shown when she walked out with another girl to meet her on the way home from the cinema and later forbade the outing with the airman, was a small episode in a much larger postwar pattern of older survivor sisters acting as guardians, which in her case ran into the airman’s own wish to be alone with her sister.

The road to a displaced persons visa, 1950 to 1951

The German statement shows that her own emigration went through the displaced persons program. The last page reads that she left Sweden on a “D.P. Visum” and travelled on to the United States, and that she arrived in New York on 4 December 1951. Most of these lines are struck through, and the sentence giving the arrival date remains. I cannot tell from the images why the lines were struck, and I do not read anything into it.

The program has a clear history. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 authorised up to 202,000 visas over two fiscal years, outside the ordinary quotas, and reserved at least 40 percent of them for displaced persons whose place of origin had been annexed by a foreign power. Her birthplace had been annexed by the Soviet Union. The 1948 law favoured agricultural workers and Baltic applicants and disadvantaged Jews, and Truman signed it reluctantly. The 1950 revision moved the required date of residence from 1946 to 1948. It raised the authorised total to 400,744 visas, including 172,230 issued by 31 May 1950. The program’s cut-off date was 30 June 1952, so her visa came in its final year.

What I cannot establish is the legal route by which a resident of Sweden obtained a DP visa. The Act’s presence requirement is the obstacle, since she left Germany in July 1945. The statement’s wording may reflect a visa category or a sponsorship arrangement that I cannot reconstruct from the page. A ship manifest or her visa papers would settle it.

The sponsorship system explains several details in her account. Under the program each applicant needed a sponsor in the United States who gave written assurances of housing and employment, which is the role of the aunt who sent train fare to Detroit. Arriving DPs were met in New York by Jewish resettlement agencies, and the aunt’s offer to send them anywhere they wished, followed by the train ticket to Detroit, fits that arrangement. Her daughter turned two in August 1951, which matches her statement that the child was two when they came.

The dates also say something about the journey. The statement has her in Sweden until 21 November 1951 and in New York on 4 December, a span of thirteen days. A direct crossing from Göteborg on a Swedish American Line ship took about ten days, and the military transport ships that carried DPs from Bremerhaven took a similar time. Either route would fit with some days for travel and processing, but I cannot say which she took.

The world she left and the world she entered

Her departure fell in a very bad week for Czechoslovak Jews. Rudolf Slánský, the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, was arrested on 23 November 1951, two days after she left Sweden. His trial in November 1952 was openly antisemitic, and eleven of the fourteen defendants were of Jewish origin. In the Soviet Union the same campaign was under way in the years before the “Doctors’ Plot” of January 1953. The region where she was born lay entirely inside that system.

The statement’s own purpose also gives context. It is typed in the form claimants used under West German compensation law, which required a chronological account of persecution and of later residence. The Luxembourg Agreement was signed in September 1952, and the federal compensation laws followed in the 1950s. This explains the statement’s exact dates and why it condenses six and a half years in Sweden into a single sentence.

She arrived in an American Jewish community that had mostly not heard what happened to people like her, which links to her later remark that Americans did not believe survivors. The country she came to was also in the middle of the Cold War, and the McCarran–Walter Act of 1952 was about to rewrite its immigration law.