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Eko

(9,426 posts)
8. Naw, not really.
Sat May 18, 2024, 03:50 AM
May 2024
For the Jewish survivors, America’s refusal to open its gates was particularly cruel. Barred by the British from immigrating to Palestine and denied resettlement by IRO nations whose governments considered them too damaged, too clannish, too dangerous, and either incapable or unwilling to do the hard work required of them, America remained the Jewish survivors’ best and last hope of escaping quasi-captivity in German DP camps.

For three full years, the U.S. Congress ignored the plight of the Last Million. Only in June of 1948 did Congress pass a bill authorizing the admission of 200,000 DPs, but barring the immigration of the 90% of Jewish survivors who, having spent the war years in the Soviet Union and/or the first months of the postwar period in Poland, were accused of being Communist sympathizers or operatives. No such “security” measures were written into the law to guard against the entry of the thousands of Nazi collaborators and war criminals who had lied their way into the displaced persons camps. The outcry against the discriminatory nature of the first Displaced Persons Act was such that it was amended, two years later, to remove the restrictions on Jewish immigration, but, by this time, after three to five years in camps in Germany, the vast majority of survivors, unwilling to spend a day more in Germany, had immigrated to Israel, illegally before May, 1948 and then legally after Israel declared, and President Truman recognized, its independence.

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