I have read many – too many – books, articles, scholarly papers, etc., about the anti-Semitism faced by Holocaust survivors faced returning home, especially in Eastern Europe. By a large margin, Eastern Europe Jews were impacted in far larger numbers than in Western Europe – often due to their assimilation in Western Europe society – and the built-in cultural anti-Semitism goes back centuries, especially in Russia and Poland.
It appears, unfortunately, that Western Europe not be as innocent as I once thought.
During the war, the Dutch Government in Exile regularly broadcasted from London. On March 28, 1944, Dutch citizens were urged to preserve their personal journals and other intimate correspondence that conveyed their private struggles and personal wartime ordeals — materials that the Nazi overlord did not even want them to have. Not until we succeed in bringing together vast quantities of this simple, everyday material will the picture of our struggle for freedom be painted in its full depth and glory, said Gerritt Bolenstein, Dutch minister of education, arts and sciences.
Three days following liberation, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies opened in Amsterdam. I just finished book The Diary Keepers: World War II Written By The People Who Lived Through It, written about the Dutch wartime existence using the diaries from the institute. The post-war chapter An Archaeology of Silence shows a side of the Dutch that perhaps isn’t as well understood, that the government was perhaps as complicit as others in their treatment of Jews upon the conclusion of the war..
Returning survivors faced cruelty from neighbors and former friends who no longer wanted associated with them. The Dutch government took the position that Jews should not receive extra help” because this would replicate part of Nazi ideology that Jews were “different” from others — a new form of passive anti-Semitism, as Gans has convincingly outlined. This distortion of logic morphed into Kafkaesque bureaucratic policies in the post-war period. For example, in Amsterdam and The Hague, survivors were billed for delinquent property taxes accrued while they were in concentration camps, making it complicated, and sometimes impossible, to reclaim their homes.
Siegal, Nina, The Diary Keepers: World War II Written By The People Who Lived Through It, p424
