Latvian and Jewish DPs
Did the Latvians who fled to the West in 1944 and 1945 do the right thing? In my opinion, yes. If I had been in their place, I would have done the same. And many, many Jews took the opportunity, when it arose in the chaotic spring and summer of 1945, to leave the Eastern European lands of their birth and cross the Elbe River.
Reasons for fleeing to the West varied. Future prospects were decisive. When the war ended in Europe, millions of DPs -- displaced persons -- flooded into the British, American, and French occupation zones of Germany and Austria. In this great mass, among Ukrainians and Croats, Russians and Poles, were also Latvians and Jews. Most Latvians, it seems, were in Germany's British zone; most Jews were in the American zone. Living conditions for both in these DP times, 1945-1949/50, were much the same. They were cared for at first by UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, later by IRO, the International Refugee Organization. They lived in barracks, published their own newspapers and journals, organized courses and concerts, heatedly discussed current political events, argued among themselves about what to do next, and tried to fathom what the future held for them.
The DPs were half-starved, worried, hoping for a better future. In this motley, truly international crowd were all sorts of characters: former Nazi henchmen, who hid their identity; adventurers, racketeers, crooks; KGB agents and other spies; visionaries, lunatics, and freaks, preaching all sorts of eccentric gospels. But the great majority were simply tired people, who had been through so much and just wanted peace and a safe haven.
One year after the war ended there were more than a million DPs in the occupation zones of Germany and Austria, including almost 200,000 Latvians and other Balts, and about the same number of Jews. Latvians and Jews lived in separate DP camps, not knowing anything about each other and, understandably, not wanting to know. The Latvians lamented their lost homeland, prayed that war would break out between the Western Allies and the USSR, and at first did not even want to move on to distant lands overseas, for they hoped that their exile would soon be over. Only after the USA, Canada, and Australia opened their doors a little wider, and all hopes for the definitive "War of Liberation" faded, did they pack their meager belongings, their beloved books, national flags, and national costumes, and go into distant exile.
The Jews lamented their millions of lost relatives, wasted no regret on the ruins of the Nazi concentration camps and the rubble of the Eastern European shtetl, and prayed that the British would soon leave Palestine. Waiting for this moment, they did not sit with their hands folded in their laps, but tried by various roundabout ways to reach the Promised Land, Eretz Israel, the only country in the whole world that they could with full historical justification call their national home. They knew that Arabs too lived in Palestine, but they also knew that there, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, the Jews had their roots, that only there could they defend their place in the sun.
The paths of the Latvians and Jews diverged in the DP camps. They crossed again in the Latvian exile and Jewish Diaspora, creating misunderstandings skillfully exploited by the Kremlin to further its own interests. But more on that later.