“All of a Sudden, It Was English, English, English”: Marriage and Immigration Strategies in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

For Jewish Displaced Person Risa A. a 1945 encounter with American soldier Harry F. changed her life irrevoquably.  “We fell in love…And all of a sudden, it was English, English, English.” Risa and two women with whom she had survived the death march had planned on making aliyah.  While the others continued to attend Hachshara meetings and Hebrew classes, Risa did not.  She spent time with the fiancees of American soldiers and eventually moved to a warbride home, where she stayed until she received her paperwork to depart to the United States.

This paper provides unique insight into the transnational and gendered character of DP politics in the aftermath of the Holocaust. To understand this post war history, it focuses on an understudied population, namely the Jewish female survivors in postwar Europe who married American, British, and Canadian military personnel. Some of these women were part of the surviving remnant of European Jewry. Other war brides had spent the Nazi years in Soviet occupied territories, fleeing to Germany or Austria when the war ended and meeting their husbands there.

In the wake of the Holocaust, these women moved from liberated concentration camps and places of hiding to cities with other survivors or displaced person camps and then to war bride homes or barracks.  This paper examines the ways in which their marriages served as immigration strategies and influenced DP communities and politics.  Because many of these women had envisioned that they would immigrate to Palestine after the war, their decisions to marry American, British, and Canadian soldiers had unexpected influences on DP Zionist politics.  This was complicated further by the fact that several of the Jewish DPs met their future husbands at Zionist youth meetings.