Captives of Circumstance

War has forever been a matchmaker. If “you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife,” Deuteronomy 21:10 says, you must allow her to mourn her parents for a month before marrying her.

The biblical law of the captive woman would seem at first to have little connection to the Jewish survivors of the Nazis who married British, Canadian, and American soldiers during and immediately after World War II. But their paths are, if not the same, surely parallel and proximate. Consider Gena Goldfinger. She had endured six years of suffering, starting in the Kraków Ghetto, passing through a series of camps, and ending at Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated in 1945. Her beautiful blonde hair and relative health in a camp, where, author Robin Judd tells us, “one-sixth of its liberated population died within a few weeks of being freed,” drew Norman Turgel’s attention both as a man and an intelligence officer charged with finding Nazis. At the first meal they shared, Norman “welcomed her to their engagement party”:

Gena thought he was teasing or wondered whether she had misunderstood him. But she had not. While she balked at the notion of marriage, Norman was undeterred, insisting that he had known of their fate from the moment he had learned she [like him] was Jewish. He also revealed a practical consideration for becoming engaged. The war in Europe was ending but had not yet concluded, and Norman and his troops would soon be transferring to another site. He wanted to guarantee Gena military protection. If she were his fiancée, he explained, the British forces would help keep her safe.

Although there is a great deal of scholarship about both war brides and Holocaust survivors, the area where the two overlap had been unstudied before the publication of Judd’s Between Two Worlds, which was published two years ago and is newly available in paperback.

Judd has cast a wide net to show the full spectrum of Jewish war brides (which also included a handful of war grooms). There are Ashkenazim and Sephardim, secular and religious Jews, people who survived camps and those who survived in hiding, Jews who were liberated early in the war and those still in the camps or on the notorious death marches of spring 1945.

The couples met in many places: displaced persons (DP) camps, Red Cross clubs, prayer services in synagogues the soldiers had helped restore, and Zionist clubs. What these women had in common, in addition to the obvious, were “military policies and regulations concerning marriage that were baffling and difficult to decipher” and the constrained choices available to Jewish survivors of the Nazis’ death machine.

In Judd’s striking first chapter, “I Thought Liberation Would Be a Happy Story,” she underlines again and again the way liberated Jews were still captives. Take, for example, Sala Solarcz, who survived the Warsaw and Lublin ghettos, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and a 100-mile death march that ended “about 35 miles from Dresden and approximately 450 miles away from the village of her childhood”:

Sala experienced the news of her freedom with confusion. She only comprehended a few words of German, so it was difficult for her to follow the conversations around her. Moreover, after years of imprisonment, she could not fully fathom that she could move freely. She continued to fear German repercussions if she moved on her own without permission.

When she encountered Canadian Royal Air Force mechanic Abe Bonder at Rosh Hashanah services, she was imprisoned in a Hanover DP camp while the victorious forces decided what was to be done with her and the roughly 250,000 Jewish displaced persons who had no desire to return to the places where their friends and family had been murdered. Denied the opportunity to migrate to Palestine and forcibly returned to the camp after trying to make aliyah illegally, Sala had previously avoided the Jewish soldiers who came to offer help to the refugees. She wanted no rachmones, but Abe, who, unlike some of the others, did not treat the DPs “as if they were ‘monkeys to be observed in a cage,’” won her over with his earnestness and good Yiddish.

The survivors were indeed in cages. Many DP camps were former concentration and army camps, and although typhus had been controlled and the violence of the Nazi camps had ended, they were still places of privation, ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by guards. For much of 1945, Jewish chaplains and soldiers had to work in secret to help Jewish inmates, their actions barred by military antifraternization regulations and more; Judd cites a case from June 1945 when “American soldiers physically prevented German Jewish civilians from attending a synagogue service led by an American Jewish chaplain.”

The survivors’ straitened circumstances were a constant factor in their relationships. Judd is explicit, for example, about how central the service members’ access to food and accommodations were in the romances between Jewish survivors and Allied service members. “Courtship narratives described soldiers and officers wooing Jewish civilians with white bread, oranges, salmon, cheese, canned goods, and coffee,” she writes, describing the gifts as “transformative, even lifesaving.”

Morris Fishman, the director of the Hasenhecke camp where Polish survivor Lala Weintraub was interned, showered his sweetheart with “gifts of fresh vegetables and other difficult-to-obtain food items,” a bounty that provoked anger and jealousy on the part of other DPs. Fishman, like other well-placed soldiers, was also able to find his intended bride a place to live outside the camp’s barbed wire and a job.

In addition to the physical attraction and mutual interests that drive all pairings, Judd’s couples had a war in common. It was not only the women who had experienced death and violence; most of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen they married had fought and defeated fascists and had seen the deaths of fellow servicemen and civilians before they met the Jewish survivors of Nazism. Trauma was a core component of their lives, making soldiers and survivors feel a kinship they wouldn’t have had with those who had experienced the war from a distance.

Despite these commonalities, the survivors made their choices of whether to entertain the advances of a service member within a much more limited set of options. Take Bella Lewkowicz, a French Jew who had lost her immediate family and her home during the war and observed that “she crossed paths with Raymond ‘Ray’ Ostroff, the American GI she later married, just as she came to the realization that she had ‘nothing to go to and nowhere to go.’” She was not Ostroff’s captive, but she was captive to her circumstances.

Evidence that the couples were, on some level, aware of this underlying dynamic and pushed back on it in retelling their stories can be found throughout Judd’s book. In the book’s introduction, she writes: “In telling stories about how they met, survivors and the servicemen they later married inverted visions of a world in which Jewish historical actors lacked agency and control.” Elsewhere, she notes that “they crafted encounter narratives that told stories of active—and defiant—attempts to create postwar Jewish lives against the backdrop of death and destruction.”

The Jewish war brides’ arrival in America, Canada, and Britain gave them new cause to lament for the mothers and fathers they had lost. Most of them moved into their in-laws’ homes. Their new families often lacked any comprehension of what they had gone through during the war and expected them to act like happy brides. One woman had to leave the house to be able to cry in peace at a nearby park. For those who married in their husbands’ home countries or celebrated the weddings a second time there, the gulf that stood between them and their husbands loomed large at those ceremonies:

War brides offered little input in their own weddings, knew few people in attendance, and likely missed their parents, family members, and friends. Their mothers-in-law arranged the wedding ceremonies and celebrations.

The wedding of Sala Garncarz, who married Sidney Kirschner, is particularly wrenching. Sidney’s controlling mother, who had approved of the marriage only after Sidney threatened to reenlist and marry Sala in Germany, wanted to schedule her son and daughter-in-law’s wedding to take place shortly after Sala’s arrival. Finding a banquet hall that was free, she planned everything, even picking the wedding dress. “My mother-in-law, that’s how she was, she put me in that dress the next week and took me to the wedding. It didn’t fit me, believe me, I would have never worn it. And it was very sad.”

Whereas typical marriages between immigrant Jews gave spouses at least one place where their native language was spoken, these women usually lacked that comfort. Some could fall back on a smattering of shared Yiddish; the Sephardi brides had not even that. In England, Gena Turgel “spent her days working tirelessly on learning the English language and avoiding her mother-in-law.”

Judd writes that she is often asked about whether the couples she researched were successful. The majority stayed married, but that tells us little. Divorce was rare in the decades after their weddings, hovering around 2.5 divorces per 1,000 couples well into the 1960s. Women had fewer opportunities to support themselves then, and few survivors had family members who could support them. Of her own grandparents, whose war-bride marriage ignited Judd’s interest in the phenomenon, she writes:

My grandparents remained married for almost forty years, until my grandfather’s death. They were tremendously fond of one another: my grandfather [Joe] never took for granted my grandmother’s and father’s survival, and my grandmother was steadfast in her appreciation for Joe and for the life in the United States that he made possible by marrying her.

Some thirty of the approximately 1,200 survivor-soldier couples—a figure unknown before Judd began her work—appear in this slim historical study, with eight receiving sustained attention. Readers of Holocaust literature may recognize a few of the names:Gena Turgel and Lala Weintraub Fishman both wrote well-known memoirs, and survivor Flory Kabilio, who married American Master Sergeant Harry Jagoda, wrote The Flory Jagoda Songbook: Memories of Sarajevo, recorded five albums of Bosnian music, and is best known for her Ladino Hanukkah song “Ocho Kandelikas.” Flory and Harry appear on the cover of Between Two Worlds, cutting their wedding cake.

For many others in the book, it is the first place where their stories have appeared in print. Judd has done them—and us—a great service by exploring their lives. The biblical captive was given a month to mourn before she became a wife, a short pause to move from tremendous loss to something like renewal. Similarly, the lives of Judd’s war brides moved forward under conditions that demanded speed, adaptation, and compromise even as they grieved.