Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Stack of clothing, primarily prison uniforms, in an unidentified German concentration camp.

Jews serving in the army in Europe experienced the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp as a turning point. There their Jewish and American identities intersected; as American soldiers, they recognized the horror of anti-Semitism and their need to be Jews. "I came out of World War II with such a feeling of guilt that I felt I had to do something," Marty Peppercorn admitted. Growing up in the Bronx, "I had been a typical Jewish boy raised in a Jewish home, accustomed to Jewish values, and certainly my friends were all Jewish. Then, during World War II, after going into the ... camps and observing what went on, I became ardently Jewish." "Something happened to me in the Army of Occupation," Gotbaum mused. "The war was over, and soon after we entered a little town in Germany I went to all possible religious services.... I had to go to a synagogue and be with other Jews."

Even professional Jewish soldiers recognized how powerfully the revelations of the camps influenced their own behavior. Irving Heymont of the Third US Army was placed in charge of the Landsberg displaced persons camp in September 1945. In his first speech before the inmates, the 27-year-old major articulated his identification with the Jews forced to live there. "As I speak to you tonight, I can also be called a sort of DP," he told his audience. "We know what you suffered in the Nazi concentration camps--and not just through newspaper reports. My Regiment liberated a concentration camp. Many years later Heymont concluded that "the few months I spent at Landsberg had a greater impact on my outlook on life than any other experience in my career, including infantry combat in both World War II and the Korean War." Though he was unaware of it at the time, Heymont subsequently reflected that "Landsberg made me a conscious Jew again--not a religious Jew, seeking the ways of the Lord--but an affirmed member of the Jewish people."

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Work Projects Administration Poster Collection

Poster encouraging purchase of war stamps and bonds to support the war effort, showing faces of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Thomas A Byrne, artist.

For those who stayed at home, distance muted the horror of the extermination of European Jewry. Accounts appeared in the press, especially Jewish newspapers, surrounded by descriptions of battles and the destruction of war. American Jews responded by contributing generously to the war effort. They purchased millions of dollars of war bonds; the working class Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville bought 15 million dollars worth. Civilian defense volunteers wrote letters to servicemen and ran canteens for soldiers home on furlough. Jews participated in blood drives and scrap metal drives; they collected old clothing and books and magazines. In addition, Jews contributed to specifically Jewish organizations to rescue refugees, support the Yishuv, or save Jewish scholars and their students. They also raised substantial monies for Russian War Relief; in Philadelphia, thousands gave through Iandsmanshaftn, B'nai B'rith lodges, women's auxiliaries and sisterhoods. Even such insular Jewish communities as the six thousand Syrian Jews in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, enthusiastically supported the home front.

In the spring of 1945, American Jews watched in shock and disbelief as the sweet fruits of allied victory turned bitter under the staggering revelations of the death camps. The Allies won the war against Hitler too late to rescue most European Jews. Not until General Dwight Eisenhower invited the press corps and politicians and moviemakers to tour Ohrdruf did the horror strike home. Shepard Broad found it hard to believe the catastrophe until the Allies "actually physically entered the concentration camps and saw the disaster." Like Broad, Peppercorn knew what had happened but it did not really register. "[M]y indignation was there but I never could visualize just how physical and malignant this whole thing had been.... And some of the things I'll never forget as long as I live. I guess I can still smell them." Only when they saw the photographs and films of living human skeletons in striped uniforms, the mountains of dead bodies, the bulldozers pushing corpses into mass graves, the piles of human hair, baby clothes and eyeglasses, did American Jews realize, most for the first time, what had happened. Susan Sontag calls it "a negative epiphany." She came across photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau "by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen--in photographs or in real life--ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously." "Indeed," she writes, "it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after."

The voice of Zionism
Aghast at the ravages of anti-Semitism, Zionists demanded free Jewish immigration to Palestine and the establishment there of a Jewish commonwealth. Jews were losing patience with the politics of gestures. The Jews alone "are told to wait; to stand outside; to watch the remnants of their people ground to death in Europe ... while the gates of Palestine, where they would be welcome as nowhere else in the world, are forcibly shut upon them," yelled the American Zionist Emergency Council. Frustrated at the continued unwillingness of the victorious United Nations to pay attention to the Jewish plight, American Zionists escalated their campaign to win converts to their cause among Americans of good will and among the rank and file of American Jewry. "The ghosts of 5,000,000 dead already haunt the forthcoming Conference in San Francisco" that would establish a permanent international world organization. "We ask the world how great must this ghastly company grow before the voice of those still living will be heard?"

Letter from President Truman to Eddie Jacobson, February 27, 1948.	Memo from President Truman recognizing Israel's government, May 14, 1948.
The Harry S. Truman Library
Two notes from President Harry S. Truman describing the situation regarding the establishment of the new Israeli state.

	Discussion
	Considering Susan Sontag's "negative epiphany" on seeing photographs of the atrocities at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, what responsibility do photographers, cinematographers, journalists and other media producers have to present vivid depictions of war to the public?

If the Allies, especially Great Britain, which controlled immigration to Palestine, were reluctant to listen, American Jews were ready to act. Convinced by the war of the virulence of anti-Semitism and the need to fight it vigorously, convinced too of the impossibility of securing American Jewish life without providing a firm future for world Jewry, they swelled the membership rolls of American Zionist organizations and began to politick in earnest. "I became a Zionist after World War II, thinking that Jews, with their lives in jeopardy, must have a haven somewhere on this planet," union leader Gus Tyler recalled. Others went further in their conversion to Zionism. Even when in recent years it became fashionable to attack Israel for its shortcomings, many of these Zionists demurred. Talking at a casual gathering of fellow labor leaders with the Israeli consul many years after the establishment of the state, Gotbaum refused to join in the friendly criticism. "I guess I'm an emotional party-liner in this case," he told his colleagues. "Since I helped to liberate Buchenwald, I feel Zionism as a faith. I can never be critical of Israel." In the war's aftermath, American Jews transformed faith into politics.