Most historians are now aware that hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors and wartime refugees passed through Germany in the years 1945–1948. Unwilling or unable to return to their homes in Eastern Europe, they made their way to the relative safety of Allied-occupied Germany, hoping to continue on to Palestine, America, or elsewhere. Most of them lived in displaced persons (DP) camps administered by the Allied armies and the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (later the International Refugee Organization), with assistance from Jewish institutions. As scholars such as Zeev W. Mankowitz, Margarete Myers Feinstein, Atina Grossmann, and Avinoam Patt have previously demonstrated, Jewish microsocieties flourished inside the camps, which had political organizations, schools, workshops, newspapers, and theaters that reflected prewar Yiddish culture and postwar Hebrew and Zionist aspirations. The camps served as a cultural and political airlock that helped the Jewish DPs transition to new lives.
It is curious that a small number of the DPs chose to live outside of the official DP camps. A few hundred enrolled in German universities and lived as students in German cities. These students form the focus of Jeremy Varon's study. He notes that the scholarship on Jewish DPs has largely ignored these students—an understandable omission, since they never numbered more than eight hundred. But beyond the basic curiosity of their story, they were significant because they provided a chance for Jewish refugees to reestablish not only the Jewish intelligentsia, but also a future technical and professional elite. Their story also demonstrates another way in which Jews and (non-Jewish) Germans interacted in everyday life after the Holocaust.
As the core of his investigation, Varon chose to examine the Jewish student associations that existed in many towns and to focus primarily on the largest of these groups, namely the one in Munich. Varon's research makes use of archival documentation, but relies primarily on surveys and dozens of interviews with veterans of this Jewish student cohort. It is a methodological challenge to weave together a comprehensive narrative from the threads of so many disparate experiences. Although his mosaic does not always form a cohesive picture, Varon has nevertheless done a superb job with the sources available to him. He also provides a tremendous amount of background on the DPs, including their prewar social origins and their wartime fates. The vast majority of the students originally came from Poland, but their experiences during the war varied greatly. Some had survived the camps, a few had served with partisan units, and many others had lived as refugees inside the Soviet Union.
Like their non-student coreligionists in the DP camps, Jewish students in Munich quickly organized for the purpose of political representation, founding the Vereinigung Jüdischer Studenten (Jewish Students’ Union), which lobbied for educational opportunities, stipends, school supplies, housing, food, and even clothing for its members. Jewish students soon formed similar groups in Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Marburg, and other university towns in the American zone of occupation, uniting in an umbrella organization based in Munich. These associations served as a social venue for their members, while lobbying to secure the students a recognized place in the DP world. This last goal was not accomplished easily, because many DP leaders saw the students’ decision to study at German universities as a betrayal of the Jews and as a waste of time that should have been spent instead on the Zionist struggle.
Most students in Munich began their postwar studies at an institution called UNRRA University, established by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and based in the famed Deutsches Museum. This school expressly served the multinational DP community, but the level of instruction was low and the choice of subjects limited. Many of the Jewish students soon tried to transfer to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität or to the Technische Hochschule. It was here that the Vereinigung stepped in and administered examinations to give academic credentials to Jews who had lost theirs during the war or who had not had the opportunity to earn them. The exams also served to ensure that only applicants who were truly qualified gained university admission. Meanwhile, most students preferred to live in the present, not wishing to dwell on their Holocaust-era experiences or to construct an identity based on them; at the same time, they kept their distance from their non-Jewish German fellow students.
Varon follows his subjects past the end of their time at German universities. Roughly 58 percent of all Jewish DPs in Germany emigrated to Israel, and nearly 33 percent went to the United States, but this ratio was nearly reversed for the students whom Varon examines. The reasons for immigration decisions varied, but Varon posits that many Jewish students did not finish their degrees until the 1950s—by which time the United States had relaxed its immigration policies, allowing DPs, who were few in number at this point, to immigrate. Moreover, when compared to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the US offered more opportunities for seekers or holders of advanced degrees. In the end, then, these former students drifted apart socially and ideologically after emigration to Israel and the US.
Surveying a niche topic, Varon has written a lively, interesting collective biography and institutional history. It adds depth to the growing field of Jewish Holocaust survivor studies and, as the author and his interviewees intended, serves as a monument to these young Jews who had lost everything—but who nonetheless managed to embark on university study and construct successful professional lives.
