After Survival: Who would care for aging Holocaust survivors?

When Chaya and Chaim Kleinhandler arrived at the Ansbach displaced persons camp in Germany, they had already survived years apart. German authorities had taken them from the Chmielnik ghetto in occupied Poland to a munitions factory, then sent them to different camps. Chaya was deported to Auschwitz. In January 1945, she escaped a death march by hiding inside the camp. Chaim and their sons were deported to Buchenwald and forced onto a death march.

After the war, Chaya and Chaim reunited with three of their five children in their hometown. Both were well over 50 in 1945. Few Jewish couples their age had survived together and had children beside them. By 1949, the Kleinhandlers were rebuilding their lives in Israel.

Many older survivors faced the years after liberation without spouses or children. Some lived far from anyone they knew. They needed housing, medical care and help with daily tasks, but they also needed company, familiar places and a say in how they lived. The end of the war brought a new question: Who would care for them in the years ahead?

In 1955, Saul Kagan, executive director of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, made that challenge a priority. “The care of aged victims of Nazi persecution is the subject of special attention in the Conference allocations program,” he told its board. The Claims Conference was established in 1951 to seek reparations from West Germany for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Now it was using those funds to help survivors meet their everyday needs.

The Claims Conference worked closely with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), whose staff assessed proposals, distributed grants and examined conditions in the communities seeking support. By 1954, Claims Conference funds distributed through the JDC reached 1,561 older survivors. Over the next two years, a quarter of its grants for construction and renovation projects went toward building, repairing or equipping homes for older people. But a better building did not necessarily mean a better life. That became clear as staff looked closely at conditions across Europe.

In Brussels, social worker Gerda Jacobson was troubled by the low morale of residents in a Jewish nursing home. Many had come from other countries as refugees or displaced persons. She wanted to hire a trained social worker who could support their emotional well-being and organize activities. The plan did not go forward. Elsewhere in the city, a Jewish welfare agency helped older people improve their poor housing and considered opening a club for those living on their own. Some people needed a place in a home; others needed support to stay out of one.

In Amsterdam, demand for places became urgent. By late 1958, one Jewish home had 107 residents and 123 people waiting to enter. Its leaders asked the Claims Conference to help fund an expansion. They also explained what residents wanted: to remain near the city center, where they could visit friends and use public transportation. They wanted to be “in the middle of life.”

Should funding add rooms to that home? Could better health service and practical help allow some people to remain in their own homes? JDC specialists urged communities to consider those possibilities. Meanwhile, the Claims Conference faced requests it could not fully fund. When a home in The Hague sought help amid a growing waiting list, it received only a third of the amount requested. Behind the figures were people waiting for a safe place to live.

In Zagreb, Claims Conference support joined contributions from the JDC, local donors, Jewish emigrants and the Yugoslav government to build a new Jewish nursing home. It opened in 1958. Yet even this modern home faced a challenge that money alone could not solve. Residents of different ages and backgrounds needed ways to connect and take part in decisions about their days.

These stories reveal a side of Holocaust history that did not end with liberation. They also raise questions that remain familiar: What makes a place feel like home? How do we care for older survivors without taking away their independence? And whose needs are overlooked when resources are scarce?

Join the author at her Baxt Lecture, “The Holocaust from the Perspective of Jewish Children and Older Adults,” on Dec. 9 at 6 p.m. at the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center. She will look at the experiences of two groups whose perspectives can change how we understand survival — and the years that followed.

DR. JOANNA SLIWA is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) and a former staff member at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She is a historian of the Holocaust and Polish Jewish history. Joanna is the author of the award-winning “Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust” and co-editor of “Older Jews and the Holocaust: Persecution, Displacement, and Survival.”