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