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And here I must again apply that old armor of mine: simply, not to tell those things that you don't need to know. If, God forbid, you were going to repatriate yourself, becoming a refugee like us, I would certainly share with you my hard-earned knowledge; I would tell you what one must do and what one must not do. But, of course, you do not have to repatriate yourself, so why should I bore you with all the details about traveling in great danger over strange and uncertain roads? Similarly, you don't need to know about lying around in passage points and refugee camps, about never having enough to eat or enough sleep, or knocking on dosed doors and, in general, living as a homeless person. And you absolutely would not want an account of the seven divisions of hell that a “displaced person” is required to go through.

No, I shall not bore you with any of it. For what purpose? You don't need it.

We were now on the dark Polish ground, which was no worse than Lithuanian ground, soaked with Jewish blood. Here, too, one could find the wildest savagery and thievery and, in addition, old-new anti–Semites and bandits.

How worn out, how neglected and gloomy the partially intact city of Byalistok looked now! We stayed for a few days in a Jewish community building, and in the market, we bought whatever we needed and sold whatever we no longer needed. We also supplied ourselves with Polish currency. Without it, we could not go anywhere. And for good money, after long seeking and negotiating, we obtained large freight autos that would carry us to Warsaw and Lodz.

People told us that bandits and robbers were attacking people on the roads, that just a few days ago, they had stopped and stripped naked some Jews who had been traveling through. We learned, too, that such

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outlaws still shot and killed Jews in today's “free” Poland. We were frightened, but there could be no turning back!

This part of our journey turned out to be uneventful, however. No one bothered us, no one detained us, and suddenly, there we were in Warsaw. I had seen a lot of ruins, but to the fearful devastation ofWarsaw there was no comparison. You could walk on the streets and plazas for hours, and wherever you happened to look, from left to right, from front to back, you would face a sea of battered, burned-out, semi-collapsed, and entirely smashed-up giant buildings, among which a part of a wall had remained intact. Occasionally, you would notice a corner of a brick wall with newly taped-up windows and doors, a sign that people were settling in again. Even more appalling were the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. That was where the historic battle of the ghetto heroes against the German armies took place. The god of destruction and atrocities seemed to preside there in solitary glory.

After the destruction in Warsaw, Lodz looked to us as though it had not been touched  by the war. Only isolated destruction, like that of the temple, the historic old synagogue, and the former ghetto in Balut, reminded us of the Nazi rule. The city was alive and bustling, and amid the noise and rush, we met hundreds of Lithuanians who were repatriating themselves-among them, dozens of old and new acquaintances who had not returned to Lithuania after they were freed in Germany or Poland.

Here we found the first Jewish “help station.” For our first three days, it supplied us with herring and with some kind of American food in tin cans provided by “Joint” (the Joint Distribution Committee, an American organization created to help refugees). Our Kovno friends Reuben and Esther Siegel helped us to find a room, and here we made new documents for ourselves. Then we continued on our way.

Now we were riding on the train to Shtettin. According to our new Polish documents, we were going to settle in the part of Poland that had been split off from Germany. We had been warned that as we drew closer to the regional border, we would enter a territory of disorder and “legal” theft, an area where there was practically no difference between the role of Polish policemen and that of bandits. That disorder we did, in fact, immediately experience.

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At night, in the crowded, cold, and windy wagon car with its smashed-out windows, we sat, stiff and frozen, on our backpacks. I listened all night long to the pounding of the train's wheels on the tracks, noting how the wheels rolled and swallowed the distances in a steady, systematic manner. It seemed to me that that was also the way the wheels of human history turned. We were pursued, pushed from place to place; we wandered and wandered for thousands of years without a home, without a land of our own. In every corner of the earth, our blood and our tears had been spilled, and they smeared the wheels of humanity's eternal movement.

We had scarcely entered the train station of Shtettin with all our packages and backpacks when a group of Polish police officers led us into a separate room and began going through our belongings. Although they couldn't find anything much to make a fuss about, they were obviously eager to take whatever came into their hands. We energetically protested that we would not remain silent about such bad conduct. We pointed out that we had just been admitted to Polish citizenship, and we threatened to take our case to the “very highest authorities.” That attitude-and a couple of bottles of whiskey-helped us keep our baggage intact for a while.

During the week we spent in Shtettin, getting oriented and making contact with various “powerful officials” and border supervisors, we had to live in a hotel of dubious reputation, in constant danger of police raids and searches. We were prepared for more attempted “legal” robberies by the police and their criminal associates, and even by their Jewish partners and stool pigeons. But our group, which now consisted of twelve men and women, had the good fortune to get away untouched.

I looked around at the city, and at the entire huge territory that Poland had taken away from Germany, and I saw that a major historic process was going on. The German population was being removed and tossed across the border to Germany. The scenes I saw in the city, and especially at the border points, were familiar, but the roles were reversed. Now hundreds and thousands of Germans, with children and wives, and sacks and packages and baggage, were being driven to the exit points. The Poles were determining which few belongings they would be allowed to take. If something pleased them, they confiscated it, especially if it

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belonged to a German or a Jew, even a Polish Jew. While the Germans in the Nazi era had done such work in a “disciplined” way, according to orders or permission from the high command, the Poles were doing it in a chaotic way, according to their own initiative and covetousness.

The remaining Germans were beaten down and frightened that they would be expelled. They were driven to forced labor; they were often apprehended on the streets or taken from their homes, just as the Jews had been not so very long before. But the Jews also lived in uncertainty. They feared Polish anti-Semitism and the murders and robberies that were still commonplace in the region. I met dozens of Jewish families, in Shtettin and other places, who spoke only Polish and lived “disguised” as Poles. They had pure Polish first names and family names.

“If they knew we were Jews, we would not have been able to live here for even one day,” many of them declared to me. “They would have killed us, robbed us of our business or livelihood, or, in the best case, shunned us and caused us all kinds of trouble. What can we do? We must suffer for a while. It might get better....”

Finally, we got through to an “honest influential person,” a “fixer.” Woe betide us, he looked like a crook; nevertheless, we paid him a good bit of money, and he got us through the legal problems and reserved places for us on a transport of Russian military freight autos. At a happy moment, the freight autos drove right up to our hotel. Mter still more negotiations between our fixer and the Russian drivers, we finally began to move away from Shtettin at nightfall, in the tension and confusion of heavy traffic. We were traveling directly to Berlin, but we knew that there we would be facing that most dangerous place: another closed border, and this time between Poland and the Russian zone in Germany.

We looked around to see into whose hands we had fallen this time, and it turned out that our journey to Berlin was to be a particularly jolly and “spirited” one. We were in the company ofJewish and Russian whiskey smugglers! The dozens of cans in our auto were filled not with gasoline but with genuine liquor. Using side roads, we stole across the border, and there, with a few Russian border guards, we had a festive drink “to our health.”

The guards didn't even look at our baggage or our papers, which clearly stated in two languages that we were traveling to Berlin to look

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up relatives. While we were in the Russian zone, drinks to our health were taken every half hour. We stood around more than we traveled, and we spent two nights sleeping wherever we could, in the stalls and barns of Germans. On the third night, we arrived, finally, in Berlin.

“Well, my good friend, did you have any reason to feel uneasy?” one of the whiskey smugglers said to us in a brotherly fashion. “I did tell you right away that the Shtettin fixer, as you call him, is a good Jew. As you see, I got you across the border and brought you safely to the place where he told me to take you. Not even a thread did they touch of yours. Yes, he does take a little money, maybe a little bit too much, but that is his business, my dear sir, and he also has to make a living. Now, listen to me. If you need to exchange or cash in any currency, or even a few precious stones or jewelry, I'll be here tomorrow evening. You can get anything you need from me, and at a lower price than from others.”

“Are you not going to stay here with us?” we asked him.

“Oh, no. In a few days, I am going back over to the other side. I still have to go there and back a few more times, and then, when we have finished all our business, we will come back to you here.” And in truth, a few weeks later, I encountered the Shtettin fixer and that whole crew in one of my first refugee camps, in Schlachtensee, Berlin. They had become DPs (displaced persons) like us.

In my time as a refugee, I passed through most of the DP camps in the American, English, and French zones of Berlin and the rest of Germany. My experience began at the “exit point,” the former Jewish Community Center, on Oranienburger Street, where a few hundred Jews were waiting to be sent into the American or English zone. At first, people moved along according to a specific order, with appropriate visas to the Berlin United Nations Refugee Agency [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Adminstration] camp in Zehlendorf, but suddenly, there was a stampede at the exit point because of Russian searches. In fright, we ran away and crowded into the refugee camp in the French sector of Berlin. After that, we went to the very large UNRA camp in Schlachtensee, in the American sector. Between one and two thousand Jews from various countries were in that camp at the time.

Then we went on to the extremely large refugee camp in Bergen-

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Belsen, in the English zone. Eight, ten, up to twelve thousand Jews were wandering around there, from Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Balkan states.

Then came theJewish refugee camp Landsberg, not far from Munich, in the American zone, and then a glimpse of a dozen other larger and smaller refugee camps: Zeilsheim, St. Ottilien, Foehrenwald, Arolsen, Feldafing, Dachau, Leipheim, and other such places on the cursed soil of Germany, where a quarter of a million uprooted Jews sat “as though on hot coals.” It was already a year, two years, three years after the liberation, and they still had not found a new home-not in the Land of Israel and not anywhere else. An embodiment of exile and the “diaspora of Israel” stood before my eyes as I sat in the refugee camps. I saw the worst of what Jewish refugees had to face: landlessness, homelessness, oppression, shame, underestimation by one's neighbors, and, upon all of those, the shadows of a bloody past.

But at the same time, I saw a powerful, lively portrait of the Jewish community spirit at its very best. It consisted of brotherly help from Jews scattered across the world. Sometimes the help came from Joint or the ORT. Other times, it came from the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, a uniformed Israeli soldier, or a member of Haganah (the Jewish military forces) in civilian garb. Still other times, it came from a Jewish committee, a rabbi, or a prominent personage. Or an American Jewish soldier might offer encouragement and comfort. Destiny had thrown down on the road towers oflight and hope. It had prepared Jewish “stations of first aid.” How could it be otherwise?

I remember, with joy and reverence, the Jewish consul, as we used to call him, in the Berlin refugee camps. This was the Boston rabbi Joseph Shubow, a chaplain in the American army in Berlin. He did not have any official or direct connection to refugees or refugee camps, but wherever there was a problem or an injustice, Rabbi Shubow was already present and providing whatever was needed, whether it was a food package, or clothing, or a way to connect with relatives in America. He would wage battles for our rights and interests in the camps, run to the camp leaders with demands to improve our conditions.

A man with inexhaustible energy, a hot-blooded Jew, a Zionist, and an outstanding speaker, our Jewish consul used to do the best he could

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to lift our spirits and reawaken our hope and sense of self-worth. His hearty talk and the Friday night prayer services he conducted-along with his concrete actions to help everyone together and each one individually-engraved his image in the hearts of us all.

Every refugee camp was a state unto itself, with a Jewish management committee, a police force, a common court, an appeals court, a kosher kitchen, a children's kitchen, an infirmary, laundry, bathhouse, tailor and shoemaker, and managerial officers of all kinds. Cultural lifewithout which no Jew can really live-was also well developed. There would be a school or schools for children, a kindergarten, a library, sports clubs, and a radio center. The larger camps would have a folk university, a newspaper, a cinema, and a theater. There would be a mostly Zionist education for the youth, and kibbutzim and organizations of all kinds intended as preparation for the Land of Israel. Nor were there lacking yeshivas, religious schools, synagogues, or religious kibbutzim.

Vocational schools were founded as well: courses for mechanics, chauffeurs, electricians, carpenters, plasterers, millers, smiths, radio and telegraph operators, and many others. “Without a vocation, there can be no emigration” – that was the warning so often given to the young among the refugee remnants. After all, if we were to build a future life in the Land of Israel, we had to prepare ourselves.

A “state” was being run, a world unto itself, separated from its surroundings, without any land under its feet, with only a burning, seeking look to the future.

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