Chapter 11: Any Baby that Cries, Dies.

When the war ended, my grandpa Ben and his sister Anna went to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp. He met my grandma Rita, who traveled with her sister, Frida. (I wrote about them in Chapter 7).

More of the DP camps were former concentration camps where refugees had been tortured. The world still smelled of death, and the Jews still lived behind barbed wire, sharing quarters with antisemites. They were not allowed to search for family and had nothing to do. Illness and malnutrition were rampant.

My grandma’s sister Frieda wrote about the condition she faced post-war:

Courtesy of Yvonne Hiller

Frieda Blezowska Schwarzblatt — Letter to Yvonne

The four of us — Papa, Gerardo, and I — lived in Block 41, in one room together with 2 single men. (UNRRA camp Schlachtensee, Berlin.) Rita and Bronek [My grandpa Ben] lived in the same block, in a different room…

I had no little pot to cook for Gerardo. Hanka [Ben’s sister Anna] had a small pot. Twice I asked Hanka to lend me her little pot. One time Rita said to me: "If you have any pride at all, don't ask for the pot anymore." I had to cook for him in 2 condensed-milk tins, or cook milk with semolina very slowly because the milk would boil over. I had a tiny little electric cooker.

Gerardo was born weighing 1,800 grams (3.9 lbs), after the pogrom in Kielce.

Rita and Bronek were already in Berlin in the American sector. They sent us 100 dollars. We had to get ourselves out of Poland to Berlin and then figure out where to go from there. There was an organization that helped — it had its own routes for crossing the border. We had to reach Szczecin Stettin by train.

There were many people in our situation. I couldn't get onto the train with the baby in my arms — everyone was pushing. Papa managed to pass Gerardo through the window to me, and luckily he managed to get on the train too. From Stettin they took us on a large truck, everyone standing, to go to a boat. We were warned to make sure the children don't cry. A child who cries — they will kill…

…because they would discover all of us. I had my son in my arms. He was crying, fussing — I had my breast out at his mouth. The boat — we had bad luck. It got stuck in the middle of the sea on a sandbar (mielizna — that's Polish) — the maritime border police came on board and said pay up, or get off and be arrested. I had the 100 dollars Rita had sent me hidden in a tin of baby talcum powder and I gave it to them — I had nothing else. They took us all off anyway. They brought us to a prison — 70 people in one room — we lay down on the floor, Gerardo on top of me, I watched over him. They took us to court and gave us 4 years in prison if they caught us again — and Gerardo, 16.

When we came out of Russia and arrived in Poland, the Poles threw stones at us.

We traveled in freight trains with no bathrooms — me in my eighth month of pregnancy, imagine. Better I don't tell you more.

Frida and Gerardo in the DP Camp

At the UNRRA camp, Papa worked in the editorial office of the camp newspaper. He translated from Hebrew and from German into Yiddish. Every month he received a package from UNRRA for his work. It had condensed milk, coffee it seems — I don't remember — a chocolate — no — we never tasted a single piece of chocolate. He sold everything to a shop that a woman in our block ran, and bought Gerardo bananas.

Summing up the conditions faced by Jewish DPs, Earl Harrison wrote in his report to U.S. President Truman, 1945:

“. . . we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”

And so separate camps were created just for Jewish refugees.

My father was a little child in a Jewish DP Camp. He remembers eating food dropped from airplanes, being terribly hungry, and consuming meat from a dead horse on the road.

Holocaust survivor and author Aharon Appelfeld wrote:

The first entertainment troupes made their appearance: a mixture of old and young people, among them former actors… and all manner of skinny people who found this distraction cathartic. These troupes evolved spontaneously, and went from one camp to another.  They sang, recited, told jokes… the subconscious will to exist propelled us back into the circle of life.

People created theaters, orchestras, literary magazines, newspapers, and sporting events.

Life began again.