Genocide survivors pushed to adapt; Plight of Holocaust victims is recounted.

Byline: Mark Melady

They were the most displaced of the World War II DPs, the survivors of the Nazi death camps who came to America in the late 1940s aboard the USS Ernie Pyle, bearing pledges that they would not go on the dole. They were hustled through the immigrant assimilation process, given a year to get a job, get an apartment, get with it, case closed by the social agencies created to help these displaced persons, and off they went sailing into modern America, heralded as just another hard-working, assimilating ethnic group, DPs no more.

But the Jews who survived the most efficient genocide ever mounted were unlike any refugees in history and when they got to the land of liberty they had only each other to tell their stories to.

"Americans were not ready to hear about life in the camps, about the atrocities," said Beth B. Cohen, a former doctoral student at Clark University and author of "Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America." "The survivors wanted desperately to talk about their experiences, but no one asked, especially the American Jews who helped get them here. They could not understand how the Americans could not ask about their relatives who died."

"Case Closed" chronicles the survivors' abrupt corralling into the post-war landscape.

"There was a glaring lack of awareness on the part of the social agencies that survivors had very special needs and those needs went largely unmet," Ms. Cohen said. "The prevailing survivor narratives were `triumph-of-spirit stories,' she noted, "but all survivors were scarred in some way. Some truly damaged people never able to function."

While American Jews were very willing to help survivors get to the United States, Ms. Cohen said, once here, relationships with their American relatives were often strained.

"Getting people here was one thing; it was quite another thing to put up with and support and deal with very needy people every day. The lack of emotional support was devastating."

To be fair, she said, many American Jews were themselves coming home from World War II and wanted to put distance between themselves and anything to do with the war. American Jews also worried that the influx of Jewish refugees would provoke anti-Semitism here, "which it did," Ms. Cohen said.

"Conventional wisdom holds that the survivors themselves wanted to move on, forget their past, live normal lives after the chaos they had recently experienced and that their memories were too raw, too painful, to confront," the book points out. "They repressed them, the accepted account insists, and forged ahead, becoming successful survivors. Yes, many survivors did go forward, but it was hardly a seamless progression. There were those whose energy was depleted. There were those whose grief prevailed."

Ms. Cohen grew up in Lexington, did her undergraduate work at Adelphi University and received a master's from Harvard University. She spent a year in Israel before settling in Providence. One day while dropping her child off at a Providence school, she noticed a sign for the Rhode Island Holocaust Museum. She discovered it was closed because the director had left. She had some museum experience in her background, applied for the job and so began her career in holocaust studies.

During her 10 years at the museum, Ms. Cohen was responsible for survivor presentations and grew close to the survivor community in Providence. From their stories she realized survivor assimilation into post-war America was hardly the walk in the park depicted by the media at the time.

She cited this New York Times 1950 headline: "DPs Quick to Catch Tempo of America, Survey Shows: New Immigrants Become Self-Sustaining in Short Time and Offer Few Problems."

"That wasn't what I was hearing," Ms. Cohen said.

Her preliminary research found the literature on the subject dominated by survivor memoirs with a paucity of objective history. Then came the stroke of luck that eventually led her to write "Case Closed"- her discovery of a cache of social worker case files of survivors in Denver.

"It was obvious from the files that the survivors had been profoundly affected by their experiences," Ms. Cohen said.

Equally obvious was the stance taken not only by the Denver social agency but by their counterparts in New York City and other cities where survivors settled.

There was much discussion in social work journals of the period and at conferences about the differences between immigrants who had lost their country and immigrants who had lost their country and their entire family, Ms. Cohen said. She found, however, that reality overwhelmed theory.

"In practice, social workers didn't treat the survivors any differently. They took the conventional approach to immigrant care," Ms. Cohen said. "Find them jobs right away."

Before being allowed to enter the United States, refugees needed affidavits from Americans promising they would not allow the immigrants to become public charges.

"It was the only way they could get out of Europe," Ms. Cohen said

About 50 percent of the survivors settled in New York City and of those, 90 percent sought help from the agency created to deal with displaced persons, the New York Association for New Americans. Initially the agency offered help for five years but that was quickly changed to one year.

"That saved the agencies a lot of money," Ms. Cohen said. "After a year no one knew what happened to them."

While post traumatic stress disorder would not be an official diagnosis until the Vietnam War, survivors suffered some of the worst trauma known to man and that was reflected in their poor health - emotional and physical.

"Survivors suffered a tremendous amount of illness," Ms. Cohen said, "all kinds of physical manifestations that doctors could not find an organic basis for: headaches, insomnia, skin rashes, nervous heart, choking, aches and pains. Suicide was a problem and attempted suicide. But you didn't hear about those stories."

She was admitted into Clark's first doctoral class in holocaust history, completing the program in 2003. After leaving Clark, Ms. Cohen was awarded a Life Reborn fellowship by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She now lives in Los Angeles and teaches holocaust courses at California State University at Northridge. She's beginning work on a book about orphan survivors.

Contact Mark Melady by e-mail at [e-mail].

ART: PHOTO

CUTLINE: Ms. Cohen