Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
While the neediest children of the concentration camps were being cared for in situ, thousands more, of all varieties, had been arriving at the DP transit camps. Some came with families, relatives, or adults with
whom they had formed bonds; others were alone. The often huge camps, some with more than 10,000 inhabitants, were not ideal environments for children. Groups came and went unceasingly. Much depended on the organizing abilities of the DPs themselves, and conditions varied wildly. The best camps had strong DP committees that directed work programs, organized cooking, and created a disciplined social structure. In some, all nationalities got along well; others were completely polarized. Much depended as well on the Army or UNRRA officials who were technically in charge. They too varied enormously. Communication was not always easy, given the range of nationalities both of the DPs and of the UNRRA workers, who often could not understand either their charges or the Allied officers, who were reassigned with dizzying frequency. Corruption and human weaknesses in the administrators and the DPs caused problems, as did the general lack of experience in social work and the baffling complexities of Army organization. UNRRA ran a short training course for its workers, which all agreed was not useful. In addition, UNRRA appointees were transferred to hot spots with glacial bureaucratic slowness, and such details as pay were not well organized.
But no one could really have been trained for the situation in immediate postwar Germany, where the provision of first aid was soon skewed by the ancient hatreds and new political problems of the displaced and by the essentially uncontrolled movements of nearly twelve million people. A letter from Richard Winslow, director of an UNRRA team that was sent in to run a group of camps of very mixed nationalities, shows this all too clearly:
Our immediate superior authorities are a Displaced Persons Detachment … they all seem to have been part of fighting units … and were not trained or in any other way previously experienced in any comparable work. They were merely “detached” from their usual duties in order to perform this “necessary evil” function. All nice … most terribly weary and fed up with war, “furriners” and chaos. DPs are more often viewed as a terrible nuisance and constant mass irritant rather than as ex-slaves, PWs and political prisoners. They are most often handled as crudely as their erstwhile masters; e.g., they are kept within a compound almost as if in a concentration camp. It is said (probably, truly, often) that if allowed out they will loot, forage and even kill.
The personnel of the camp he describes as a combination of “hangers-on, intruders, intermediaries, and mostly women from a French military liaison team,” noting that “anyone who can find what the spheres of authority,
responsibility and sources of information etc. between all the parties operating here are will surely deserve a special medal.”
The living conditions of his UNRRA Team 143 were not much better than those of the DPs. One had to build a wood fire to get a hot bath, and on many days there was no water at all. Days were spent trying to find medical supplies, DDT, space for latrines and garbage disposal, soap, mops, toilet paper, clothes, needles and thread. The food supply, “our hardest daily problem … is a maze of red tape, endless waiting and moving from office to office.” These procurements were made more difficult by an early UNRRA policy that cars would not really be necessary, and by the lack of good telephone service. Winslow’s description of a few days’ activity paints a scene seemingly beyond solution and a direct result of Hitler’s mad demographics:
Tues AM huge thefts are discovered on the part of a certain DP doctor and nurse … scandal and chaos. In the midst of this mess in comes a Capt. from another Corps area where he has for 3 days been holding about 1500 DPs of many nationalities in barns and fields far from any inhabited centers. He wants to dump them on our already overcrowded camp of 2500. No one knows who to phone for other solutions … but I win and block the dump on us. At mid-afternoon 1000 French DPs and PWs come thru town on train … and drop off 350 strongly nationalistic Slovakian ex-student revolutionaries … who are not too crazy about USSR, but the only place with space to feed and house them is our Russian Camp.… Next afternoon suddenly appear 5 truckloads of people, all good Soviets except one truckload which is solid with émigrés of intelligentsia in Revolution and who weep and quake at prospect of even one night in USSR camp, but there’s no other place.… As expected half of them … slip out and cross 2 rivers past MPs somehow and are at our other camp in the morning.… Next AM, after sending convoy of 800 Russians home, we find that during the night the Russian Camp also took in 65 men, women and babies who were dumped there by two weary GIs who said they had orders to drop Russian speaking peoples there. But … we find them to be Ukrainians, to be sure, but of German descent a couple of centuries back and still feel German, speak German and want to live in Germany. They were evacuated from Ukraine by Nazis … we were so relieved not to find any lynched … stopped at Burgomeister’s and told him to cart ’em away fast.… On top of this we found 30 Poles from the Ukraine dumped by ignorance in the Russian camp too; so we haul them away.… Today suddenly at 11 AM come orders to move all the Yugoslavs and all of the Italians
(500
each) from Maierhof camp to the Russian camp on hopes
Reds can be sent home tomorrow … and Yugos and Itals will have new camps of their own. In meantime we hear several hundred more Russians are expected so I force a postponement of moving the Italians for 24 hours. (Imagine mixing those two anyhow; battle of Trieste may be settled in our backyard.) Meanwhile we press to ship most or all of remaining Reds home; tonight we get 30 trucks to do it with tomorrow AM, plus Slovaks, and at that moment in come 5 more new loads of Russians! Oh well! It’s mad, it’s disorganized, it’s crude, cruel … and much else, but people
are
moving from dawn to dusk every day.
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But Winslow also thought it “thrilling” to see “35 trucks loaded with ragged but gay people, 700 of ’em, pull out singing and cheering, a flag on each truck and a huge picture of Stalin on some” to begin what everyone, at that early stage, assumed would be a happy homecoming.
Not all the camps were as transient as this one. In some that had been set up early in the spring of 1945, where the inhabitants now awaited processing, things had gotten quite homey. DPs had established rudimentary day-care centers and schools, and families had made some effort to wall off tiny areas for themselves in the barracks. Cottage industries, especially sewing and shoemaking, were common. And as time had gone on the DPs had begun to sort themselves into national and political groups, a process of necessity condoned by the Army. Some of the larger camps were in fact small towns. One of the largest was at Wildflecken (“Wild Place”), a huge and heavily camouflaged former SS base set in an isolated region about fifty miles north of Würzburg.
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Indeed, it was so secret that it did not appear on any map, and the polyglot team of eighteen UNRRA workers sent to run it had a great deal of trouble finding it. They had expected a camp of 2,000. Clerical error had misinformed them: its population was actually 20,000 Poles and more were expected. The camp had twelve kitchens, which baked nine tons of bread a day, and five hospitals where babies were being born in impressive numbers. Before he left, the Army major who was handing over the camp informed the horrified new director that all the rations and the wood for heating would have to be trucked in “before the snows fell” and the roads iced over, which would cut the camp off from the outer world.
To headquarters personnel and planning staffs, DPs were essentially objects requiring specialized handling for quick repatriation, known only as numbers and statistics. A large body of rules was promulgated to deal with them. To the aid workers in the camps, the DPs soon became human beings with an infinite variety of problems and desires for which there
were no generic solutions, and they constantly found themselves questioning the regulations. For example, the DPs were not allowed to leave their camps without permission. What to do when a small Polish Boy Scout, who had followed leads from camp to camp all over Germany to find his mother and sister, whom he had managed to have transferred to Wildflecken, now wanted permission to go forth again to get his father, who had been seen in the ruins of Munich?
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It was even harder to deal with demanding DPs who wandered and lived outside the camps, but who were eligible for the same rations and services as the rest. Black market dealings were rampant, and gangs of inmates took everything not well secured. There were frequent forays into the hated German communities for livestock, which was slaughtered and hidden in remarkably clever ways, and the crime rate was high. In Bremen, 23 murders, 677 robberies, 319 burglaries, and 753 thefts were attributed in the first year of occupation to DPs “over fourteen years of age,” some of whom operated in armed gangs.
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In response, the Army carried out frequent raids in the camps, sometimes unwisely with the help of the German police, to search for contraband and thieves, operations that did nothing to improve community relations.
In the first year of occupation 100,000 Poles would arrive at and be repatriated from Wildflecken alone, in back-to-back trainloads of 1,000 at a time. In one two-month period, 10,000 would come and go. The trains were made up of the same weary cattle cars used by the Nazis, with not many more amenities than they had ever had. On them dysentery was rife, people died, and babies were born. The trains were endlessly delayed and ran out of food and diapers. The American escort officers were frequently undone by the nightmarish scenes. But the DPs, ecstatic to be free, adorned the squalid cars with fresh branches and flowers to celebrate their liberation. The repatriation trains, still made up of cattle cars, but with a luxurious limit of twenty-five passengers per car and wood stoves and piles of food in each, were even more festively decorated with greenery and national flags, and were often sent off with music from DP bands. The camp officials were less festive. The pace of work was relentless. Every new load, which could arrive without warning day or night, brought new diseases and challenges to the very limited accommodation space. Food and fuel procurement here, as everywhere, was unbelievably difficult, and items requisitioned from the Army either never came or were inadequate.
At Wildflecken and many other camps, the food crisis was relieved for a time by the distribution of hundreds of thousands of Red Cross packages
intended for Allied POWs, who had not materialized. These packages, containing cigarettes, cocoa, Spam, and tuna fish, items not seen in Europe for six years, or even, under rationing, in the United States, were worth their weight in gold on the black market and posed an overwhelming temptation to all involved in their distribution. The Army was well aware of this, and the packages were accompanied by a directive from Eisenhower himself on their handling. The idea was to empty the boxes into the general food stores and use the contents gradually. The DPs, who had had nothing but gray soup for years, did not agree, and at Wildflecken began to demonstrate in favor of an immediate distribution of one box per person. It was clear that this excited group could not be trusted to open the packages and store their contents. Kathryn Hulme, the UNRRA worker in charge of the boxes, decided to give the job to the camp’s children, who, all felt, could be controlled. Hulme and her coworkers, forgetting that most of the children had not seen a shop for years, thought it would be a game “sort of like playing store” for them. In a huge warehouse, they set up a long table low enough for the children to work on:
We saw them marching up the hill toward us, fifty little boys and girls two abreast and in close formation, swinging their arms and singing lustily.… Once inside the cavernous warehouse we lined [them] up beside the long table that held twenty-five food items spaced at intervals on both sides … which had to be sorted out and put in the … stalls at the rear where horses used to be. When the chewing gum, the chocolate and the tins of jam were held up before those fifty pairs of child eyes, I thought for one wild moment that I was going to sob. The … eyes regarded unwaveringly, as in a trance, a raspberry jam label depicting a solid mass of red berries dripping with sugary highlights … a packaged bar wrapped in chocolate-colored paper scored off in small squares like the chocolate inside.… You knew that these things must have torn at the vitals of the children though not one of them gave any outward sign.
Once the processing began, the children worked “with furious concentration, not at all like shop keepers.” Silent at first, they soon began to talk and joke, calling one another by the name of whichever product they were sorting, such as “Miss Tea-Bags” or “Mr. Tuna.” Hulme was fascinated by the children’s efficiency, noting that even the littlest ones “knew what to do without asking questions.” Why this was so was soon revealed to her:
I stood beside the lad in charge of cigarettes … watching how he patted the packs in edgewise until he came to the end of the box. I waited
for the next cigarettes to come down the table to see what he would do. He took the next seven packages and laid them in flat for the final layer, bringing it exactly flush with the top of the box.
“Schön!”
I said, admiring his ingenuity.
He looked up and grinned with professional pride. The one tooth missing in front gave his face the classical look of the rugged small boy the world over.
“Wie in der Fabrik,”
he said, patting his perfect packing with one stubby hand.
As in the factory! For an instant I did not take it in. It was as if Huckleberry Finn had spoken out of character. He brushed back a shock of sun-bleached hair and held up his fingers fanned out to five.
“Fünf Jahre,”
he said, nodding like an old man.
That was the explanation for the children’s dexterity and knowingness with small objects. The Germans had used their fast fingers in factories and war plants, had trained them to handle small parts with speed and precision.
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