38 | MAY 13 • 2021 

ARTS&LIFE
BOOKS

A

beat-up, 75-year-old 
black-and-white pho-
tograph hangs over my 
desk at home. It shows a thin 
young man in a misshapen suit 
and a pretty young woman in a 
Bavarian dirndl outfit holding 
hands and gazing at each other.
It was taken in 1946 in the 
Landsberg Displaced Persons 
camp in Germany. 
The couple are my parents, 
Berek Fiszlinski and Hanka 
Monczyk, newly freed from Hell. 
Berek survived several con-
centration camps and was 
finally liberated at Auschwitz, a 
70-pound shell of a man. Hanka 
worked for years in a slave labor 
factory with hundreds of other 
Jewish women, making uniforms 
for the Nazis.
Like thousands of survivors, 
they met and married at camps 
like Landsberg; and children, like 
me, followed quickly. In 1949 
we came to the U.S. on a Liberty 
ship, eventually ending up in 
Detroit, where my parents built a 
life, changed their names to Ben 
and Ann Fisk, and had two more 
children. 
My family is a tiny piece of the 
diaspora of displaced persons. 
Growing up, I thought I knew 
much of the dramatic story.
But a compelling, compre-
hensive new book, The Last 
Million: Europe’s Displaced 
Persons from World War to Cold 
War (Penguin Press, 653 pages, 
$35) by historian David Nasaw, 
opened my eyes to a world my 
parents shielded from me.
Much of the saga of the DPs 
has been written about before by 

historians, novelists, Jewish orga-
nizations and survivors.
But for Jews of my Baby Boom 
generation, comfortably assim-
ilated in Western nations and 
Israel, Nasaw’s story of antisemi-
tism, suffering and often-mirac-
ulous survival and renewal may 
open many eyes. 

AFTER THE NAZIS
Last Million starts by exploring 
the human disaster that greeted 
the Allied armies with the defeat 
of Nazi Germany. 
Millions whose lives had been 
upended — concentration and 
death camp survivors, prisoners 
of war, civilians enslaved to work 
in Hitler’s factories and foreign-
ers who fought for the Nazis — 
went back to their homelands.
But, Nasaw writes, the Jews 
from Poland and other Eastern 
European countries who 
returned home found that their 
families had been slaughtered 
and their property often con-
fiscated. Many were greeted by 
antisemitic pogroms.
The survivors longed to leave 
the horrors of Europe behind. 
Yet many of the horrors followed 
them to the DP camps set up in 
Germany, Austria and Italy by 
the Allied powers and United 
Nations agencies, Nasaw writes. 
Initially, many of the camps 
were crowded and chaotic. The 
housing and food were poor 
with little health care for the 
often desperately ill survivors. 
Jews and non-Jews were thrown 
together in many camps — 
shockingly including former 
Nazis fleeing arrest by military 

authorities. 
After protests by Jewish orga-
nizations, the camps were reor-
ganized and non-Jews separated 
out, Nasaw writes. Living condi-
tions improved. The Jews set up 
their own governing councils, 
schools, orchestras, synagogues, 
theaters, sports programs, hospi-
tals, newspapers.
But life was hardly perfect, 
Nasaw makes clear. The black 
market and crime were rampant, 
and many Jews who suffered 
unspeakable trauma could not 
get adequate care in the new 
camps. They were still in lands 
that didn’t want them. 

STARTING OVER
My Polish-born uncle, Irving 
Monczyk, told of encountering 
German children near his DP 
camp. They asked to see his 
head. “We heard Jews are all 
devils,
” explained one child. “We 
want to see your horns.
”
As they waited to start life 
elsewhere, especially in Palestine, 
the Jews desperately searched 
Red Cross survivor lists for fam-
ily members. Many married and 
had children in the camps. 
My only surviving aunt, Rose 
Fiszlinski, married a French 
POW she met while escaping 
from a Nazi death march. 
Fred Ferber, now a Detroit 
businessman with many grand-
children, was in the Krakow 
ghetto in Poland when he was 
sent to a concentration camp at 
age 13. 
 Liberated in 1945, he 
searched fruitlessly for relatives 
who survived the Holocaust. In 

1947, alone, he was sent to a San 
Francisco orphanage. In 1949 he 
was once again reunited with his 
mother, in Detroit, though 86 
family members had perished.
Nasaw tells many heartbreak-
ing personal stories, though 
much of his book is focused on 
the world political, social and 
legal issues that swirled around 
the DPs.
Survivors who sought to leave 
Europe quickly became political 
footballs, Nasaw writes.
The British, who controlled 
Palestine, severely restricted 
Jewish immigration to placate 
the Arab world. In the U.S., 
antisemitism at the highest levels 
of the government and Congress, 
spurred by the canard that Jews 
were communists, led to harsh 
laws excluding many survivors. 
Despite the hurdles, some 
140,000 Holocaust survivors 
left Europe for the U.S. between 
1945 and the early 1950s. As 
many as 4,000 are believed to 
have settled in the Detroit area. 
There is a second photo of my 
parents hanging above my desk. 
They are with a dozen friends at 
a dinner dance in Detroit in the 
1960s. The partiers, all former 
DPs, are members of the social 
welfare group Shaarit Haplaytah, 
the “Remnant of 1945.
”
The men are in fine suits, the 
women in fancy dresses. They 
are laughing, schmoozing — in 
a new land. Displaced, as Nasaw 
might say, no longer. 

Alan Fisk is a novelist, journalist and for-
mer professor of journalism. He lives in 
St. Clair Shores. 

Survivors faced many struggles in 
displaced persons camps.

ALAN FISK SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS 

After the Holocaust

Ben and 
Ann Fisk

