Josef Rosensaft and the Displaced Persons Camp of Bergen-Belsen: Remembering My Father

My father, Josef Rosensaft, who died 50 years ago this week at the age of 64, was a Polish Jew who, but for the Holocaust, might have led an unexceptional life. Instead, he emerged as a force of nature from the inferno into which he and millions of other European Jews had been cast. Thrown into an unlikely role as the recognized leader of the Jews who found themselves in the Displaced Persons (DP) camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany after the end of World War II, he became the protector of and fierce advocate for his fellow survivors. I often thought that, having cheated death on innumerable occasions, he had become fearless, prepared—even eager—to defy authority rather than to yield to it.

Sam E. Bloch, who succeeded my father as president of the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Associations after his death, recalled that his defiant voice demanded “understanding and respect for our feelings, for our experiences, for our suffering, for the survivors’ rights, for their honor and dignity.”

To understand my father and his central role in the aftermath of the Holocaust, one first must acquaint oneself with the phenomenon that was the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen. The Belsen DP camp’s unique character, and, consequently, its place in history, was due in large measure to my father.  

For more than five years, from the spring of 1945 until the summer of 1950, this DP camp in northern Germany was one of the most vibrant Jewish communities anywhere in the world. It emerged almost phoenix-like in the immediate wake of the horrors, misery and death of the Holocaust, providing a haven, a respite, and a lifeline for thousands of its survivors who only recently had seemed doomed. 

Improbably, and for reasons rooted in the geopolitics of the post-World War II period, the Belsen DP camp ended up existing for three years longer than the infamous Nazi German concentration camp of the same name. The British government’s concerted efforts to limit Jewish immigration to British Mandatory Palestine, coupled with immigration laws that severely restricted the ability of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to enter the United States, Canada and other Western countries, forced many of these survivors to remain in a state of limbo, officially designated “displaced persons,” in camps throughout Germany, Austria and Italy for weeks, months or even years. Belsen was the largest of these DP camps.

In a sense, Bergen-Belsen constituted both the end of the Holocaust and the beginning of new life, a literal rebirth for the thousands of Jews who found themselves in the DP camp. Among them were Jews who were liberated there, Jews who came there from other DP camps in a desperate search for family members or friends, and Jews who came to Belsen from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and other parts of Eastern and Central Europe to escape the antisemitism of their former neighbors and on their way to new homes far away from the vestiges of death and nightmares.

Escaping from Auschwitz

My father’s horrific experiences in Auschwitz and other camps go a long way toward explaining his impact in Belsen. Historian Yehuda Bauer wrote, “His courage, steeled in the political ‘bunker’ of Auschwitz, knew no bounds—he was fully the equal of the all-powerful British officials in wit and intellect, though he had no formal education and could speak no language correctly except for his native Yiddish.” Bauer recalled that my father “ruled the [Belsen DP camp] with an iron hand; he was accused of being a dictator, but he was elected and reelected again and again because…they had confidence in him.” 

I have told the story of my father’s war experiences elsewhere; it is essential to understanding him. Born into a prominent Hasidic family in Będzin, Poland, on January 15, 1911, he had studied at a yeshiva in Warsaw and worked in his family’s scrap iron business. Sometime around the beginning of World War II, he married Brandla Bajtner, the widow of a friend of his who had died in February 1939. 

On June 22, 1943, he was deported from the Będzin Ghetto to Auschwitz together with his wife  and her 12-year-old daughter, Micia. Usually, Jews were transported in windowless cattle cars, but this time the Germans used a passenger car. As the train crossed the Vistula River not far from the camp, Brandla and Micia prevailed on him to try to escape, hoping that he might be able to help them from the outside. He was an excellent swimmer and dove out of the train’s window. German soldiers shot at him, and he was hit by three bullets: one grazed his forehead just near his eye, leaving a visible scar; a second entered his arm; and a third was never removed from his leg. (Years later, my father made a point of teaching me not just to swim but also to dive, because being able to swim and dive had saved his life.)

My father recalled losing consciousness, then being resuscitated by the ice-cold water. Somehow, he managed to drag himself out of the river. He saw a dim light emanating from a cottage. He risked knocking and was lucky: A peasant woman and her son took him in, gave him coffee, bandaged his wounds, allowed him to dry his sopping wet clothes, and gave him a cap to hide the bullet scars on his head. (After the war, my father tried to find them, but without success.) He walked through the night back to the ghetto, where he was reunited with his 80-year old father and learned that virtually the entire transport, including Brandla and Micia, had been taken directly to the gas chambers upon their arrival at Birkenau. His father died soon after, in his arms, of natural causes. In an oral testimony taken by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Będzin survivor Sigmund Strochlitz recalled my father warning the Jews of the ghetto after his return “that we will all be brought there [to Auschwitz, that is] and to expect the worst.”

Less than six weeks later, the Będzin Ghetto was liquidated. My father avoided deportation to Auschwitz once more by first hiding in a bunker for several days, and then escaping to the nearby town of Zawiercie. In late August of 1943, however, he arrived at Birkenau as part of a transport from Zawiercie.

Once at Birkenau, he attempted to escape together with two friends from Będzin, Zeev and Maniek Londner, but they were betrayed by a German Unterkapo, an assistant to one of the inmates assigned by the camp’s administration to supervise his fellow prisoners. The three men then spent four days in one of the standing cells in the cellar of the notorious Block 11, the so-called Death Block, in Auschwitz. Decades later, Zeev Londner, who as Zeev Liron became one of the highest ranking officers of the Israel Air Force in its formative years, recalled that as the three were taken down to the standing cells, my father quipped with “black humor” that it was a shame they didn’t have a deck of cards to pass the time. Even at Auschwitz, even in Block 11, even when confronted with what seemed imminent death, my father refused to give in to despair or fear. 

On my first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1995, I saw the page of the Block 11 registry, according to which my father, Josef Rosensaft, inmate number 140594, arrived there on September 30, 1943, and left, alive, on October 4.

Toward the end of 1943, my father was transferred from Birkenau to Łagisza, a labor camp near Będzin. Sometime in the winter of 1944, he managed to escape from there and was hidden by a Polish friend for some weeks until he was recaptured by German soldiers, severely beaten, and returned to Auschwitz where he was tortured repeatedly for months in Block 11. The Germans wanted to know the name of the Pole who had hidden him, something my father stubbornly refused to disclose, a stubbornness that I am certain saved his life. For the remainder of the war, through several other camps, my father was forced to wear a uniform with a special red circle— the so-called Fluchtpunkt—identifying him as an escapee.

On one occasion, the Jewish kapo of Block 11, Jakub Kozalczyk, publicly gave my father 250 vicious lashes at the direction and under the supervision of an SS doctor. In an example of the surreal nature of the Auschwitz-Birkenau experience, on September 26, 1944, the same Kozalczyk wanted my father to conduct the Yom Kippur service in Block 11. Emaciated, starved, my father chanted Kol Nidre from memory and then led the prayers there that evening and the following day for his fellow prisoners, all while the gas chambers were operating at full force. As a reward, Kozalczyk gave my father and the other inmates of Block 11 an extra bowl of soup to break the fast. 

On December 2, 1944, he was deported from Auschwitz to the concentration camp of Langensalza in central Germany, and from there, on January 30, 1945, to another camp, Dora-Mittelbau, where Wernher von Braun’s V-2 missiles were manufactured in caverns carved deeply into the Harz Mountains. On or about April 10, 1945, he arrived in Bergen-Belsen on one of the transports from Dora. He was liberated there on April 15.

Shaping the DP Experience

Within days after British troops had liberated Belsen, my father emerged as the undisputed leader of its Jewish survivors. For the next five years he chaired both the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany and the Jewish Committee that administered the Belsen DP camp, established in the former German military barracks a kilometer away from the concentration camp’s mass graves. 

Long before Auschwitz became the defining term of the Shoah, the images of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, featured in newspapers and shown in newsreels throughout the world, brought the horrors and enormity of the Holocaust to London, New York, and throughout the free world. When British officers and soldiers entered the camp, they encountered a devastation of human misery for which they were utterly unprepared. More than 10,000 bodies lay scattered about the camp, and the 58,000 surviving inmates, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, were suffering from a combination of typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, extreme malnutrition and countless other virulent diseases. Most were too weak even to walk. In the main camp, more than 40,000 prisoners were crammed into barracks that should have held no more than 8,000. Belsen thus epitomized the final chapter of the Holocaust. Most of its victims perished during the final months of World War II and almost 14,000 of the liberated Jews died there in the weeks and months following their liberation, many of them after V-E Day.

In some ways, the term “liberation” is a misnomer when applied to Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Uniquely among the Nazi concentration camps, Belsen was handed over to the British as part of a negotiated truce because the Germans were terrified of the typhus epidemic somehow spreading beyond the perimeter of the camp and infecting the general population of Lower Saxony. As a result, it took several days for the British to exercise full control over Belsen, and a group of Hungarian guards remained in positions of authority and even shot some of the liberated inmates who were scavenging for potatoes outside one of the camp kitchens.

In his book Belsen Uncovered, published in London in 1946, Captain Derrick Sington, one of the first British officers to enter Belsen on April 15, 1945, recalled that my father “described the methods of the Hungarian guards at the time. They used to stand thirty yards away on the sandy path of the barrack square and take potshots with their rifles. In this way they killed scores of starving prisoners.”

In order to contain the different epidemics that were rampant throughout Belsen, the British evacuated the survivors to the barracks of the nearby Wehrmacht military base, a Panzer (tank) training school. More than 15,000 prisoners who had been brought to Belsen from Dora-Mittelbau between April 8 and April 12, my father among them, had already been taken there when the main camp had become too overcrowded even for the SS. On May 21, 1945, when this relocation to what would in short order become the Belsen DP camp had been completed, the British set fire to all of the concentration camp’s wooden barracks.

Belsen’s postwar DP era, however, became a very different and equally important story—one that radiated light, life, and hope rather than darkness, death and despair. Within days of the British arrival at Belsen, its Jewish survivors, who could easily have given up on humankind, wrested control of their lives, of their destiny, from any and all outsiders. They were grateful to the British for ending their captivity, but unwilling to obey their or anyone else’s orders blindly. As soon as the yoke of persecution was lifted from them, they elected a political leadership of their own, headed by my father. They had had a national Jewish consciousness before the war; now they insisted on transforming that consciousness into, and having it recognized as, a national identity.

To grasp the significance of Belsen and the other DP camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy in the years after the end of World War II, one must bear in mind that their inhabitants, many of whom were left entirely alone in the world, found themselves in a state of suspended animation. My mother, then Dr. Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, who had been an inmate at Belsen since November 1944, recalled many years later that, “For the greater part of the liberated Jews of Bergen-Belsen, there was no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes. We had no place to go, nobody to hug, nobody who was waiting for us, anywhere. We had been liberated from death and from the fear of death, but we were not free from the fear of life.”

In late spring of 1945, most Jewish survivors from Western Europe left Belsen and returned to their homes as soon as they could, leaving behind primarily those from Poland and Hungary whose families and communities had been destroyed, many of whom did not want to live under a Stalinist dictatorship. Within a few weeks, the camp’s Jewish population stabilized at around 12,000. Most had lost entire families. On their own, they were now forced to come to terms with their shattered universe.

The years the survivors spent in the DP camps were a period of critical transition and resuscitation. As Allied soldiers began to return home in 1945, they, like millions of others, wanted only to get on with their lives. Jewish military chaplains and a handful of Jewish organizations took up the cause of the Jewish DPs, but the human condition of homeless European Jews was otherwise a matter of relative indifference for most of the Western world, including the vast majority of the international Jewish community. Thus, the Jewish survivors of the Shoah—the Sh’erit HaPletah, the Surviving Remnant, as they called themselves—were left to cope as best they could.

They coped by creating life in every meaning of the term. As early as June 1945, the first school was opened in Belsen for the children who had been liberated there, with separate classes in Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian. Other Jewish child survivors from different parts of Eastern Europe soon joined them. In due course, Belsen had a kindergarten, an elementary school, a high school, and a vocational training school, as well as a full complement of Jewish religious education institutions. In addition, the camp had a rabbinate, its own Jewish police force, a library, two theater companies, an orchestra, and a host of youth and sports clubs.

Yiddish was the lingua franca, the common language of the Belsen DP camp. Zionist politics became the order of the day. The first issue of the Belsen newspaper Unzer Sztyme (Our Voice), handwritten and mimeographed, appeared on July 12, 1945. The first book published in 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. Some 60 other publications followed, including a religious tract relating to the status of Jewish survivors whose spouses were presumed, but not definitively known, to be dead, and that enabled these survivors, including my parents, to marry anew and form new families.

Similar scenarios took place in other DP camps throughout Germany and Austria, resulting in the ultimate irony that the very land that Hitler had wanted to make Judenrein became, for the years immediately following World War II, one of the most vibrant, flourishing centers of Jewish life of all times, with one of the highest birthrates.

In a January 2000 lecture at a conference on the DP era sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Yehuda Bauer credited “the establishment of a Jewish DP presence” at Belsen and in the British Zone of Germany “that had to be taken into account” as “the work, to a large degree, of one man – Yossel Rosensaft.” According to Bauer, my father

can be seen as the quintessential DP survivor. He became the head of a camp committee immediately upon liberation of Bergen-Belsen, while thousands of Jews were still dying of the effects of hunger and disease following the last tragic weeks of German rule. Yossel demanded recognition by the British of a Jewish camp of survivors in the place. He received some, but very little, help from Jewish bodies in Palestine, the U.S., and Britain, and had to face an overbearing British military more or less by himself, with his colleagues. The British refused, for quite some time, to recognize the existence of a Jewish camp, because they feared that the survivors, who in their majority declared they wanted to immigrate to Palestine, would be a rallying point of opposition to their Middle East policy. They were right. But they failed to appreciate the stamina of the survivors, and in the end had to yield. Yossel Rosensaft, a very ordinary and a very extraordinary Polish Jew, by no means an angel, but a determined defender of his people and their interests, with his Shakespearean Będzin English, as he used sarcastically to say, gained, single-handedly, the upper hand. In the teeth of British opposition . . . education, religious observance, social, economic, and political activity were developed by the survivors themselves.

Building Governance in the Camps

On April 18, three days after the liberation, the survivors in Block 88 elected a committee, headed by my father, to represent them vis-à-vis the British. Two other blocks—83 and 86—elected similar committees. These three blocks were in the so-called “new” camp, also known as Lager 2 or Camp 2, that is, the barracks of the German Panzer training school rather than the actual concentration camp, where the inmates from Dora-Mittelbau had been housed in early April. These latecomers to Belsen were also among the healthier survivors because they had not been exposed to the typhus and other epidemics raging through the main camp that the British called the “horror camp.”

In short order, these various block committees merged into a single committee under my father’s leadership, and by the first week of May, he was elected head of a broader committee representing all the Jews at Belsen, at this point also including those who were still in the barracks of the concentration camp. In this capacity, he was already becoming a central political figure in what shortly became the largest DP camp in Germany.

Shortly thereafter, the committee expanded its scope to also represent German Jews in the British Zone of Germany who had returned to cities such as Hamburg, Hannover, Bremen, Lübeck, Cologne, and Düsseldorf. (After Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies on May 8, 1945, Germany was divided into U.S., British, Soviet, and French zones of occupation.) 

Captain Derrick Sington, the British intelligence officer who had announced to the inmates of Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, that “Ihr seid frei,”—“You are free”—described my father as “an energetic leader” and “a Jewish réfractaire,” that is to say, an individual of unusual stubbornness. “I find it difficult to imagine, this small, militant, oversensitive man as the iron-foundry owner which he was before the ‘round ups’ started in Poland,” Sington wrote, “so associated is he in my mind with the inhuman maltreatment he had endured for two years, and with his efforts in Belsen to help restore the confidence of the few survivors of his race.”

Writing in 1953, Leo W. Schwarz, who had been an official of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Germany, observed that during April and May, 1945, my father had become recognized as the undisputed leader of the Jewish DPs of Belsen,

leaving nothing undone to assist his people. When the British military were selecting a limited number of the sick for convalescence in Sweden, he interceded for members of families who were again being separated. With an unfailing nose for German and Hungarian collaborationists, he hunted down dozens who had concealed themselves among the liberated. He spurred British soldiers to collect clothing for the thousands being discharged from the temporary hospital, in the former Panzer Training School. He possessed an uncanny ability to locate danger spots and to hammer at the highest authorities for action.

Fighting the British Authorities

In the words of historian Jo Reilly, “[t]he name Rosensaft remains a symbolic expression of the Jewish remnant after the war.” As head of both the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany and the Jewish Committee that administered the DP camp, my father became the lightning rod for an often stormy relationship with the British military authorities. 

The first serious confrontation between his committee and the British occurred in late May of 1945 and involved his thwarting an attempted transfer of several thousand Jewish DPs from Belsen to DP camps in Northern Germany.

Refusing to recognize the Jewish DPs as a separate national group, the British authorities were intent on repatriating them as soon as possible to their countries of origin. To do so effectively, the survivors had to be separated according to their prewar nationalities. The first move in this particular chess game was the decision in May 1945 to transfer about 2,800 Polish Jewish DPs to the town of Celle, some 27 kilometers from Belsen. The Jewish Committee insisted on inspecting the new accommodations, and, finding them to be satisfactory, raised no objection of consequence.

Next, the British announced that more than 1,000 Jews were to be transferred to a camp named Lingen, near the Dutch border, which would have the status of a Red Cross camp. The survivors were assured that they would have better opportunities to emigrate from there and that the conditions were satisfactory. Although several Jewish military chaplains supported the military authorities on this point, the members of the Jewish Committee were suspicious.

As a precaution, the committee made sure that the 1,117 Jewish DPs who left Belsen on May 24th did so under false names, leaving their original identities as registered Belsen DPs. When the group arrived at Lingen, they discovered that the camp already housed 2,336 Russian, 2,086 Polish, and some 100 other non-Jewish DPs, and that the accommodations offered to the Jewish DPs were horrendous, without electricity or running water.  My father and several members of Belsen’s Jewish Committee visited Lingen and confirmed for themselves that conditions there were far worse than in Belsen. My father thereupon demanded that the Jewish DPs be allowed to return to Belsen. When the British refused, he simply told his DPs to return “home” to Belsen, which many of them did, and he prevented a second transport from leaving Belsen. 

Furious at my father for defying both their orders and their authority, the British put him on trial before a military tribunal. My mother recalled that he told the court: “You liberated us from slavery and we became free people again, so we have the rights of free people to decide about our lives and future. I am representing my people, my fellow Jews in Belsen, and I will not accept orders against them.” In due course, my father was acquitted, but it was clear to both the British authorities and the Jewish DPs that he would have gone to jail rather than back down.

In a succession of official British Foreign Office documents, my father is referred to as an “extreme Zionist” and a “dangerous troublemaker.” “The difficulties our authorities have had in dealing with Jewish DPs in the British zone,” one senior British official complained, “are directly attributable to him.” Already in August 1945, Maurice Eigen, the JDC director in Belsen, reported that “Rosensaft, a veritable Jewish Lincoln, is a national leader but is always incurring the wrath of the Army officials here. He is always threatened with arrest. Rosensaft had been a labor organizer in Poland and has a tremendous following here. He thinks nothing of flaunting military regulations repeatedly and has made my task of interpreting the committee to the military an exceedingly difficult one.”

On one occasion, the British military commandant of Belsen, a Major Jones, refused to speak to my father, or to any other Jews, for that matter, through an interpreter, insisting that only English be used. My father’s response to his face: “How about you learning Yiddish? It is easier for one person to learn Yiddish than for 10,000 to learn English.”

In July 1945, Earl G. Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, traveled to Germany at the behest of the U.S. State Department, with President Harry Truman’s support, “to ascertain the needs of the stateless and non-repatriables, particularly Jews, among the displaced persons in Germany…Mr. Harrison has also been directed to determine in general the views of the refugees with respect to their future destinations.” Harrison was taken through numerous DP camps in the American Zone of Germany by Rabbi Abraham Klausner, a U.S. Army chaplain who had taken the Jewish DPs there under his wing but whom Harrison found “young, aggressive, irritating.” 

On July 23, Harrison came to Belsen where he met with my father, who, Harrison noted in his diary, was “only 33—looks older” (in fact, my father was 34 at the time) and told him that the Jewish DPs, having lost their families, unable to go back to their homes, and confronted with antisemitism, wanted “Peace & quiet—live out remaining years.” Harrison further recorded my father as saying, “Don’t leave us in this bloody region” and “Make effort to have doors of P [that is, Palestine] & other countries open so can find homes and be with relatives.” 

“Seldom have I been so depressed,” Harrison wrote in his diary after visiting Belsen. “Only seven hours spent there but it seems like a life-time.” It would seem that his encounter with my father and other Jewish DPs at Belsen made a profound impression on him. In his report to Truman, Harrison wrote that “the first and plainest need” of the Jewish DPs was “a recognition of their actual status and by this I mean their status as Jews.” He also called for 100,000 Jewish DPs to be allowed to immigrate to Palestine, a recommendation that the British government predictably ignored.

From September 25 to 27, 1945, my father convened and chaired the first congress of Jewish DPs in the British Zone of Germany, against the wishes and without obtaining the permission of the British military authorities. The British were concerned that the congress would focus adversely on the British government’s refusal to open the gates of Mandatory Palestine to the Jewish DPs. Their apprehensions turned out to be warranted.

Speaker after speaker, starting with my father, denounced the British on this issue, and the cover sheet of a British military overview of the congress emphasized: “It is impossible to read this report without seeing that the main motive in arranging this ‘congress’ was Zionist.”

In his report, Major C.C.K. Rickford noted: “It became obvious very early on that a claim to return to Palestine was the main objective, and as a corollary the demand for segregation now [of the Jewish DPs] into Jewish camps in order to train the community for its future life in Palestine.” At the same time, Rickford acknowledged that, “All factions were accorded a hearing at the insistence of the Chairman, including communists and those advocating a return to their previous countries. Both these latter views were extremely unpopular with the large majority.”

Among the resolutions adopted by the congress was a demand that Palestine be designated as a Jewish state. One resolution expressed “our 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.” Another proclaimed “that we will not be driven back into the lands which have become the graveyards of our people.”

Yet another read: “We call on the world to realise that the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belsen and other centers was possible only because of the homelessness and statelessness of the Jewish people.” Still another proclaimed: “We affirm our right of immigration to Palestine, sealed with the blood of millions, and demand its immediate realization.”

The most confrontational of these resolutions left little to the imagination: “We vow that no obstacle or political restriction will bar our way to Palestine and warn those concerned of the consequences which will flow from a policy in conflict with the vital interests of the Jewish people.”

My father closed the congress with unambiguous words rooted in the Passover Seder: “We are now entering an era in which we must fight for our rights. We have been slaves, but now we are free, the children of a free nation…May we be blessed to convene our next congress in Eretz Yisrael.”

The delegates to the congress reaffirmed my father’s leadership by formally electing him to chair the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone with Norbert Wollheim of Lübeck as his deputy. This committee was not a pro forma body but had significant administrative and operational responsibilities. For instance, my mother, Dr. Hadassah Bimko, was head of the health department, while Samuel Weintraub from Belsen and Carl Katz from Bremen co-headed the economics department, in charge of the allocation of food, clothing and housing.

Commandeering Public Opinion  

In November 1945, my father infuriated the British by denouncing the living conditions of the Jewish DPs in Belsen in the pages of The New York Times. Interviewed for an article on the “worse plight” of Jews in the DP camps, his accusations were specific and detailed:

In this camp, according to Dr. [sic] Joseph Rosensaft, chairman of the Jewish committee for the British zone, there is no provision for heating the buildings and many inmates still have only the one suit of threadbare clothes in which they entered the camp. Hundreds have no shoes or socks and almost all lack overcoats, he said. At night, in the cold, damp dormitories, half the inmates have only one blanket. There is a grave shortage of medicines. Although the camp’s inmates are freezing, they are not allowed to go out to chop wood, Dr. Rosensaft said…Jewish nationalists and Zionist activities are discouraged, Dr. Rosensaft added, charging that the British exerted censorship over the inmates’ news sheets in that the Jews are not allowed to proclaim in print their desire to emigrate to Palestine.

One must bear in mind that this was a scant six months after the end of the war. The British Zone was under military occupation. Movement by the DPs was restricted. My father spoke not one word of English. How on earth, the military authorities must have asked themselves, did The New York Times correspondent get to him, and how did he manage to make his case over their heads in the powerful American media? The resulting political pressure from the United States considerably strengthened the survivors’ hand. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the British considered this “the last straw.” While they considered my father’s charges in The New York Times article to be “grossly exaggerated,” they begrudgingly acknowledged that they were losing the public relations battle. In a dispatch dated November 25, 1945, five days after the article appeared, they noted that “Jews seem to be using Belsen as a focal point for world agitation to emigrate to Palestine. If we move Jews from Belsen they will not be able to use the magic word Belsen in connection with this propaganda.”

By this time, however, it was already much too late. My father and his colleagues understood full well the dramatic news value of the Belsen name and were not about to surrender it. When the British formally changed the name of the camp to Hohne, the leadership of the Jewish DPs ignored the new designation. Official communications sent by the British military authorities to my father at “Hohne” were responded to on stationery that gave “Bergen-Belsen” as the Central Committee’s address.

Demanding Jewish Statehood

My father, who taught me that love of the Jewish people and love of the State of Israel are the most important elements of Jewish leadership, understood that the goal of a Jewish state was a spiritual lifeline that gave the survivors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and all the other centers of horror a sense of purpose and a basis for hope.

In December 1945, when he was invited by the JDC to address the first post-war conference of the United Jewish Appeal in Atlantic City, my father was notified by the military authorities that he was free to leave the British Zone, but that if he did so, he would lose his DP status, would be forced to give up the chairmanship of the Central Committee and would not be allowed to come back. He traveled to the United States anyway, without official permission. He reported to the assembled leadership of American Jewry in Atlantic City about the state of European Jewry, emphasizing, according to a report in the New York Herald Tribune, that their sole hope was emigration to Palestine, the only place in the world “willing, able and ready to open its doors to the broken and shattered Jews of war-ravaged Europe.” The following week, speaking at an emergency conference on Palestine at the Manhattan Center in New York City, he declared: “We know that the English are prepared to stop us with machine guns. But machine guns cannot stop us.” In January 1946, he returned to Belsen, still without official permission, and resumed his leadership role.

He repeatedly and publicly criticized the British Government’s anti-Zionist policies. Testifying before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine in early 1946, he told its members, as reported by the Anglo-Jewish journalist S.J. Goldsmith, that if the survivors would not be allowed to go to Palestine, “We shall go back to Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and you will bear the moral responsibility for it.” In 1946, when the British sought to prevent thousands of additional Polish Jewish refugees from entering the British Zone, my father and his committee openly defied the Military Government by giving them sanctuary in Belsen. 

Small wonder that the British were frustrated and kept trying, without success, to get rid of him. The local commanding officer wrote to headquarters of the Prisoners of War and Displaced Persons division on March 12, 1946, “It is felt that unless Mr. Rosensaft is removed from the Brit. Zone and forbidden to return, under pain of imprisonment, it will not be possible to control his activities satisfactorily.” 

The relief agencies were not treated with any greater deference. In order to increase the available supply of food, and to be able to take in and feed the so-called illegal Jewish DPs from the East, the names of Jews who had left Belsen or had died were kept on the camp rolls by my father’s Committee. In late 1945, the then JDC director attempted to take a census of the camp. My father quickly put an end to this initiative. To quote Yehuda Bauer, “Rosensaft was not going to allow a JDC worker with a penchant for exact reporting to deprive his people of food.”

Surprisingly, perhaps, despite my father’s frequent confrontations with the British military authorities in the British Zone, his overall relationship with the British, especially in London, was actually mostly positive, characterized by mutual respect. This was in large part due to his close and extremely warm relationship with the leaders of the British Section of the World Jewish Congress, in particular Dr. Noah Barou and Alexander Easterman. They were among the very few Jews from outside Germany who visited Belsen soon after the liberation, offered friendship and support, and provided my father with a political lifeline through which he was repeatedly able to get objectionable military orders countermanded in Whitehall.

As Easterman subsequently recalled:

Many a time and oft, my late colleague, Noah Barou, and I were awakened during the night by telephone calls from Josef Rosensaft. Now there was a problem of the refusal of the Central Committee to have armed non-Jewish guards. Then, there was a dispute about enclosing the camp with barbed wire. Next, there was the resistance of the Committee against military search of homes and premises for alleged concealment of arms or the hoarding of illegal supplies. Again, there was conflict concerning assemblies against Ernest Bevin’s Palestine policies and actions. And a hundred more issues requiring negotiation, tact and patience, but always involving rights and resistance to infraction of liberties.

In late 1947, Menachem Begin, the leader of the militant lrgun Tz’va’i Leumi, the underground Zionist paramilitary group engaged in a violent armed struggle against the British in Palestine, sent an emissary to my father in Belsen with an urgent, desperate request. Four young Jewish DPs affiliated with the Irgun—Abraham Hubert, Richard Orlinski, Jacob Redlich, and Jacob Kryczek—had been tried and sentenced to death by a British military court in Hanover for attempting without success to place explosives on railroad tracks between Hamburg and Hanover. Their intended target was a troop train carrying British soldiers. My father was their last hope.

My father flew to London where he met with senior British government officials, including the anti-Zionist Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. My father was accompanied on this occasion by Col. Robert Solomon, the advisor on Jewish affairs to the British military occupation authorities in Germany. As my father recalled the encounter, Bevin asked him whether he believed the four Irgun men to be innocent. My father replied that he did not. “Do you think that they did not receive a fair trial?” My father again replied, “No.” “Do you have any doubt that if they had been successful, they would have killed British soldiers who had nothing whatsoever to do with Palestine?” Again, my father replied, “No.” “Can you offer any mitigating circumstances?” Once again, my father’s answer was an unequivocal “No.” 

“In that case,” Bevin then asked, “on what basis are you asking for clemency on their behalf?” My father’s reply to this final question: “We will not allow you, less than two years after the end of the war, to give the Germans the satisfaction of seeing Jewish boys executed in Germany. If you want to execute them, bring them to London and execute them here.”

My father never learned whether Bevin ever considered or explored such an option. Shortly after their meeting, however, the four men were retried. Redlich and Hubert were resentenced to 20 years imprisonment, and Orlinski and Hubert were acquitted. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, my father was instrumental in getting Redlich and Hubert released as well.

The DP years were also not without humor. On one occasion, in February 1948, when the British were searching for black market merchandise in Belsen, they found only a handful of illicit items and one unauthorized cow. Reporting on the incident, Samuel Dallob, the JDC director in Belsen at the time, noted that the cow in question “was confiscated. No one claimed ownership, and Yossel told me, off the record, that the cow had no right to be in the Camp anyway, since it had no DP card.”

Preserving Memory: “How Could I Not Come?”

My parents, both widowed, married in August 1946 and I was born on May 1, 1948, one of approximately 2,000 children born in the Glyn Hughes Hospital of the Belsen DP camp. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the somewhat greater ease of DPs, including Jewish DPs, to immigrate to the U.S. under the DP Act of 1948, the Jewish population of the DP camps generally began to wind down. After the Belsen DP camp was closed in the summer of 1950, my parents and I lived in Montreux, Switzerland, for eight years before settling in New York City. My father went on to play a critical role in the early phase of the negotiations that led to the historic 1952 German-Israeli-Jewish reparations agreements, and continued to be the voice of the survivors, the assertive, defiant voice of Belsen, until his death.

Before leaving Belsen in 1950, my father “bid farewell” to the “dearly beloved and hallowed dead” buried in its mass graves and vowed to them, almost prophetically, that they “would not be abandoned amid a hostile surrounding and that, meantime, care would be taken that the graves were not tampered with.” He proved to be true to his word. 

Eight years later, when French officials sought to exhume some 139 French nationals from one of the Belsen mass graves under a 1954 Franco-German agreement, my father spearheaded an eleven-year-long political and legal struggle to prevent what he considered to be a desecration of the dignity of the dead from taking place. Under pressure from my father and others, the West German government refused to allow the exhumations to proceed but the French authorities remained intransigent. In 1966, the two governments placed the dispute over the Belsen graves before the Arbitral Commission on Property, Rights and Interests in Germany.

On May 6, 1969, as reported in The New York Times, my father returned to Belsen to meet the members of the Arbitral Commission who had come there before reaching a decision. “In 1945 we couldn’t tell a dead man from a dead woman, so many bodies were bulldozed into the graves,” my father explained to them. “Now they’re going to try and tell French bones from the others? It’s a macabre fantasy.” Asked by one of the jurists whether he had made a special trip from New York in order to accompany them on their visit, my father replied, “How could I not come?” Several months later, the Arbitral Commission ruled that the Belsen mass graves were not to be opened.

At my father’s funeral, his friend and fellow Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel eulogized him in Yiddish, their shared language: 

I remember our pilgrimage to Belsen—and Kaddish at the graves. I remember evening walks in Jerusalem at the Western Wall. I remember feverish, endless conversations: how to help the survivors and how to defend the honor of the victims. I remember his deep concern for Klal Yisrael. I remember his Ahavat Yisrael. I remember his prayers, his niggunim, the songs he would hum, the stories he would tell. 

Single-handedly he waged war against our melancholy. He would not allow us to yield to sadness. We did not dare—and we were unable—to be sad in his presence. He brought warmth into a cold world. He spread goodness in an evil world. He created friendship in a cynical world. No one was such a friend…

I know countless souls, sanctified by fire, will soon greet you there … souls from Będzin and Belsen, Majdanek and Warsaw, the souls from thousands of destroyed Jewish communities in Europe. And they will embrace you as one of their own and bring you to the Heavenly Tribunal and, still higher, to the Celestial Throne, and they will say, “Look, he did not forget us.”

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Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. He chairs the Advisory Board of the Foundation for Memorial Sites in Lower Saxony, Germany. His most recent book is Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.

Top image: Josef Rosensaft addresses a demonstration at Bergen-Belsen in 1947 opposing the return to Germany of Jewish refugees seeking to enter Palestine on the Exodus. Courtesy of Menachem Rosensaft.