Correspondence by and about a Jewish U.S. Army chaplain working in Dachau reveals a hero battling bureaucracy to help his fellow Jews

Germany’s surrender to the Allied forces in May 1945 marked the official end of World War II. Soldiers returned home, and Europe set about rebuilding itself. Germany was divided into zones controlled by various Allied countries until a new government could be elected. Although the concentration camps had been liberated, U.S. Army chaplain Captain Abraham Judah Klausner (1915–2007) discovered there were still many complications for the surviving Jews. Arriving at Dachau three weeks after its liberation, the Reform rabbi quickly became an island of stability in a sea of postwar administrative chaos. Distressed Jews wrote to Klausner inquiring after lost family members, or asking him to forward correspondence and supplies to relatives they couldn’t contact because of postal irregularities or lack of permanent address. In a letter dated July 9, 1945, an anxious mother begged: “Our child is torn away from us six years already.… I hope we will hear good news from our son through you.” A note to her son and twenty-five dollars were enclosed.

Klausner came to symbolize hope as well as steadfastness for those who had no one to turn to. He compiled lists of survivors in Dachau and its Bavarian surroundings, dubbed She’erit Ha-pleita (a biblical term meaning “surviving remnant”), and eventually published six volumes’ worth, which he distributed worldwide. Yet Klausner remains controversial. Passionate about helping Jews, he had little patience for bureaucracy. He could be abrasive and accusatory, openly criticizing people and organizations he felt weren’t doing enough. As a result he made not only friends but enemies, some of whom actively hindered his later efforts to return to Germany and continue his work. A little over a year after the liberation, he left the country, weary and drained.

 

No Distinctions

Klausner’s correspondence from 1945 to 1950, including reports and farewell tributes sent to him, is on file at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. He made many of his appeals on behalf of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria, which he founded together with Dachau survivor Dr. Zalman Grinberg, to give them official standing as representatives of the displaced Jews in Germany’s American zone. Klausner corresponded extensively with American and British Jewish organizations, with growing frustration at the terrible conditions in the camps. His requests to these bodies, the U.S. military, and other chaplains for aid for the Jews living in the Dachau concentration camp and Greater Bavaria were met with promises and excuses.

Losing patience, Klausner sent out a slew of letters denouncing the lack of international and American support for the unfortunate Jews stuck in the camps. He exposed the flaws of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the very organizations charged with helping these victims. Tired of bureaucratic distinctions that complicated Jewish aid unnecessarily, he wrote bitterly to a Mrs. Ferman on February 7, 1946:

We care for all our people. We make no distinction between the hungry bellies of Lithuanian Jews and Polish Jews, Orthodox Jews and Jews who are not Orthodox.
We have heard the cry of a child and seen the blood of dying men, and we have never known the quality of the cry or the composition of the blood. We knew only that it was a Jewish cry and Jewish blood.
I know a Jew. He is a wretched figure, he is alone. No family, no love, only memories. […] Must he attach himself to a geographical or religious prejudice before concern will lift him up out of his despair and inspire him with a faith in a new life?

One wonders how Mrs. Ferman viewed this response to her offer to include the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria in a program to assist Lithuanian Jewry. Klausner wasn’t always polite when demanding proper treatment of Jewish displaced persons.