The Necessity of Zionism | Opinion

Exactly 78 years ago on April 15, when British troops entered the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen not far from the German city of Hanover, they came face-to-face with human misery for which they were totally unprepared. Upward of 10,000 emaciated corpses lay scattered about the camp and more than 55,000 prisoners, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, were suffering from a combination of typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, extreme malnutrition, and countless other virulent diseases.

In addition to their dire physical condition, the survivors, both my parents among them, were forced to confront a sense of utter isolation and abandonment. "For the greater part of the liberated Jews of Bergen-Belsen," my mother recalled many years later, "there was no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes. We had no place to go, nobody to hug. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere. We had been liberated from the fear of death, but we were not free from the fear of life."

This fear of life was in large part due to the realization by many of the survivors that they indeed had nowhere to go after the end of the war. While the liberated Jews from western Europe and Czechoslovakia were repatriated in a matter of months, most of the survivors from eastern Europe—especially those from Poland—were unwilling to return to their countries of origin. Their homes there, their communities, had been destroyed. Most if not all of their families had been murdered. With only a very few exceptions, their Christian neighbors had, at best, been indifferent to their suffering. What they wanted now was a new beginning in a place that was not filled with ghosts, that did not evoke nightmares.

To their dismay, they discovered that they were stranded. The British only allowed a miniscule number of them to enter Palestine, and restrictive immigration laws kept the gates of the United States, Canada, Australia and other Western countries closed to them.

Yet the Jewish survivors in Displaced Persons camps throughout Germany, Austria, and Italy did not give in to despair. They had been freed from the persecution and oppression they had endured under the Nazis and their accomplices, and now they were determined to claim and affirm their own separate Jewish national identity in the form of a politically and spiritually redemptive Zionism. The creation of a Jewish state in what was then still British-Mandate Palestine was far more than a practical goal. It was the one ideal that had not been torn from them and that allowed them to retain the hope that an affirmative future, beyond gas chambers, mass-graves and ashes, was still possible.

In the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, where I was born in 1948, a popularly elected Jewish leadership headed by my father, Josef Rosensaft, made Zionism the order of the day. At the first Congress of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany, convened in September 1945 in Belsen by my father and his colleagues without permission from the British military authorities, the survivors formally adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Two months later, my father denounced the British government's stifling of "Jewish nationalists and Zionist activities" at Belsen in the pages of The New York Times. He further charged "that the British exerted censorship over the inmates' news sheets in that the Jews are not allowed to proclaim in print their desire to emigrate to Palestine."

In December 1945, my father told representatives of American Jewry assembled at the first post-war conference of the United Jewish Appeal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that the survivors' sole hope was immigration to Palestine, the only place in the world "willing, able and ready to open its doors to the broken and shattered Jews of war-ravaged Europe." The following week, he declared at an emergency conference on Palestine in New York City: "We know that the English are prepared to stop us with machine guns. But machine guns cannot stop us."

In early 1946, he told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine that if the survivors would not be allowed to go to Palestine, "We shall go back to Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and you will bear the moral responsibility for it."

Small wonder, then, that the British authorities considered my father to be an "extreme Zionist" and a "dangerous troublemaker."

My father, who taught me that love of the Jewish people and love of the State of Israel are the most important elements of Jewish leadership, understood that the goal of a Jewish state was a spiritual lifeline that gave the survivors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and all the other centers of horror a sense of purpose and a basis for hope.

Today, the State of Israel remains a refuge for imperiled Jews across the globe, whether from Ukraine, Russia, Ethiopia, or elsewhere. It is not perfect. No state is. But disagreement with the policies of any nation's government cannot be a reason for calling that nation's fundamental legitimacy into question. And the massive peaceful demonstrations of the past four months throughout Israel have demonstrated beyond any doubt that it is indeed the only democracy in the Middle East.

At a time when Israel's right to exist is challenged in many parts of the world on an almost daily basis, we must remember that just as the road to the establishment of Israel 75 years ago led through and past the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen, the defiant Zionist spirit of the Jewish DPs of Belsen is and must always be an integral part of Israel's own national identity.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was born May 1, 1948, in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen. He is the associate executive vice president and general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and the chairperson of the Advisory Council of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation. He teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.