Why Jews Returned Home

Except for the Holocaust deniers, every rational person is aware of the horrors that occurred under the Nazi regime. But that is the extent of our knowledge. Schools typically don’t educate students on what happened afterward. Americans tend to assume that Jews, once freed, returned home and lived their happily ever after. We, Americans, love our happy endings, but the experience of the Jews post-Holocaust was anything but happy.

The feeling of joy upon seeing Allied troops enter the concentration camps would be short-lived. Almost 6 million Jews were executed by the Nazis, that is almost 60% of the Jewish population. That is 6 out of 10 people. Even for the “luckiest” Jew who was able to return to his home in his country of origin, he would still have to live with the burden of the nightmare he experienced and constantly grieve the loss of so many friends and family.

But for most Jews, post-Holocaust, it was worse than that. The homes they grew up in no longer existed. The communities they had lived in, were plagued by antisemitic sentiments or were now part of the Soviet bloc. Others found themselves living in displaced person camps longing for a place to call home.

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