Safe Among the Germans

by Ruth Gay

"This book tells the story of why a quarter-million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labor, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground where some 1,500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany.". "Bottled up for the next three years in displaced persons camps, they created the most poignant - and the last - episode of Yiddish-speaking culture: a final incandescent moment that played itself out on German soil. When the camps emptied in 1948 after the establishment of Israel and with special legislation in the United States, the Jews dispersed. But the loss of their center meant the end of a thousand years of Eastern European Jewish culture.". "By 195