Tenement Talks: Displaced Persons

Courtesy of HarperCollins.com

Join us tonight at Tenement Talks for a discussion of Ghita Schwarz’s book Displaced Persons, a tale of people displaced by World War II and how they rebuilt their lives. Joining her is Sara Ivry, a writer and editor who primarily covers Jewish issues and conducts a weekly podcast.

You’ll be intrigued by the stories of the main characters Pavel, Fela, and Chaim, strangers who band together in the wake of World War II. Years after living as refugees, they fulfill their dreams of coming to the U.S. and settle in Queens. Pavel and Fela are married with two young children, and Chaim and his wife Sima acclimate to America. Even though life goes on, they struggle with painful memories.

In the trailer for the book, Schwarz discusses the difficulties displaced persons (DPs) faced, especially after the war when they tried to return to a state of normalcy in a foreign land. “They’re no longer heroes in a war-time drama of escape,” commented Schwarz. “They’re just trying to get through the ordinary tasks of life. But their history really does follow them, and emerges in sort of surprising ways for them.”



Schwarz also acknowledges the similarities of the situations the protagonists in her novel and immigrants today face. “What they want for their sons and daughters is a total break with the terrible experiences they’ve gone through. But at the same time there’s a lot of anxiety about their children losing a sense of contact with their heritage and their past and their parents’ culture.”


Jewish refugees in Poland, circa 1939
Courtesy of NYPl Digital GalleryThe DPs in this novel were only a few of nearly two million who could not return to their home countries in Europe due to fear of persecution and many other reasons. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 (amended 1950) was “an act to authorize for a limited period of time the admission into the United States of certain European displaced persons for permanent residence, and for other purposes,” according to U.S. immigration legislation online. Read our previous blog post about the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 for more information.

Tenement Talks are free and open to the public. Please join us at 108 Orchard at Delancey for this event! You can RSVP to events(at)tenement.org.

-posted by Devin

The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 (Amended 1950)

When my colleagues at the Tenement Museum asked if I would be willing to provide a perspective on the American Displaced Persons Act of 1948, I jumped at the chance. This act, which granted admission and permanent residency to European displaced persons, was a notable shift from the restrictive quotas adopted in 1924 under the National Origins Act. It was passed in the context of destruction in postwar Europe, the Holocaust, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern and Central Europe.

In 1945, when Allied troops entered the concentration camps, they discovered piles of corpses, bones, and human ashes, as well as thousands of survivors -- Jews and non-Jews -- suffering from starvation and disease.

Within months of Germany's surrender in May 1945, more than six million displaced persons (DPs) had returned to their home countries. However, between 1.5 million and two million DPs, mostly from countries under Soviet occupation, refused repatriation. Among them were more than 250,000 Jews.

Sinaida Grussman holds a name card to help any of her surviving family members locate her at the Kloster Indersdorf DP camp.

Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Museum of Jewish Heritage/Center For Holocaust Studies, courtesy of Lilo Plaschkes Robert Marx

Most Jewish survivors were unable or unwilling to return home because of persistent anti-Semitism and the destruction of their communities during the Holocaust. Many of those who did return feared for their lives. In postwar Poland, for example, there were a number of pogroms (violent riots) that claimed scores of Jewish lives.

In December of that year, President Truman issued a directive that loosened quota restrictions on persons displaced by the Nazi regime, giving preference to DPs, especially widows and orphans. Under this directive, more than 41,000 displaced persons immigrated to the United States from Europe; approximately 28,000 of these were Jews. Still, opportunities for legal immigration to the United States remained extremely limited.

Great Britain continued to strictly limit the number of Jews allowed in Palestine. Jews already living in British-controlled Palestine organized "illegal" immigration by ship (also known as Aliyah Bet). In 1947 the British forced the ship Exodus 1947, which was carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors headed for Palestine, to return to Germany where the passengers were again imprisoned in camps. The Exodus 1947 attracted worldwide publicity and strengthened support for the DPs' struggle to emigrate from war-devastated Europe. It was not until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 that Jewish DPs began freely immigrating to the new sovereign state.

In this context, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 authorizing 200,000 DPs to enter the United States. On June 25, 1948, President Truman signed the law with “great reluctance,” protesting that the bill used date restrictions designed to limit the number of Jewish refugees eligible for entry. Truman chose to sign what he saw as a deeply flawed bill, rather than further postpone action on the DP crisis. Congress later passed amendments that extended the total allotment of U.S. immigration visas for DPs to approximately 400,000 persons. By 1952, over 80,000 Jewish DPs had immigrated to the United States under the terms of the two Displaced Persons Acts and with the aid of American Jewish charitable groups.

With the majority of Jewish DPs eventually finding refuge in the United States and Israel, as well as other nations, the DP emigration crisis slowly came to an end. Almost all of the European DP camps were closed by 1952, as Jewish survivors of the Holocaust began life anew in their adopted homelands.

-Special thanks to David Klevan, the Education Manager for Technology and Distance Learning at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for writing this post.