“Have you ever wondered what happened to all the Jewish people that survived World War II? What happened when they were finally liberated? Where did they go? What did they do?
I have only heard of what occurred during the war. I have heard of the concentration camps and the Holocaust. I have heard of the cruelty that the Nazis inflicted upon the Jews. I know that when World War II finally came to an end, those who survived were liberated. What else is there to know, right? Wrong.
Eager to find the answers to my questions, I went in search of the truth. As luck would have it I found what I was looking for during the telecast of the Academy Awards, when the film titled “The Long Way Home” won the Oscar for best documentary.
Director Mark Jonathan Harris takes us into the aftermath of the war from the time of liberation of survivors in 1945 to the founding of the Jewish homeland of Israel in 1948.
Throughout the film, letters and personal accounts are read by actors such as Edward Asner, Martin Landau and others. The narrator of the film is Morgan Freeman. With their help you are able to almost connect the letters read with the faces you see.
Though liberated, the Jews still underwent many hardships. One survivor described in a letter how shocking it was for Allied soldiers who found the concentration camps survivors. They were so thin and dirty, so close to death, that one soldier actually fell to his knees and started throwing up. Some survivors died because they ate too much food and their stomachs ruptured—their bodies had become adjusted to starvation conditions.
After the liberation, some of the Jews were transferred to so-called “Displaced Persons Camps.” There they slept in the same crowded, dirty barracks, stood in line for meager rations and lived in camps surrounded by barbed wire. One survivor wrote in a letter that the conditions weren’t much better than when he lived in a concentration camp.
In certain parts of Europe Jews were still hated. In Poland, several Jews were murdered after returning. Their killers left notes in their pockets stating this would be the fate of all Jews who return to Poland. Such acts of inhumanity made it very difficult for many Jews to return to the areas where they had lived before the war.
With so many problems in Europe, Jewish people yearned for their own country, a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Even before it was official thousands of Jews fled Europe to Palestine. Most of them entered the country illegally through the Mediterranean Sea, where many were caught by the British and sent back to refugee camps. In Israel, they faced the difficult question of how to deal with hostility from neighboring Arab countries.
“The Long Way Home” concludes with the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. In the process the film explained so much that was left unspoken in the past. Before seeing this film, I had only been aware of the Jews’ suffering during the war. I now know that for many of them, being liberated was only the beginning of a long and treacherous road to freedom.”
