After the War

Summer 1945–Summer 1946

With the liberation of Europe on May 8, 1945, before the borders of Central Europe were redrawn and sealed and as millions of DP persons returned to their homes, the activists of the Bricha took advantage of the migration of millions to slip across borders and exfiltrate large groups aboard refugee trains that rumbled across Europe, mainly toward Austria and Italy. Concurrently, groups of survivors crossed the Alps on foot even when the range was covered in snow, accompanied by Bricha activists and helped along by bribing those in charge of the area.

In July 1945, the Bricha activists encountered Jewish Brigade soldiers who were stationed in northern Italy and began to cooperate with them. From August 1945 onward, the Bricha redirected most of its groups to displaced-persons camps in Austria and Germany, where they would wait before moving on. Initially, the routes led to the American occupation zones in Austria and Bavaria (Germany). From the autumn of 1945 onward, however, an alternative route operated as well, from northern Poland (Sczeczin) to the British zone in northern Germany and to the American zone in southern Germany. In the autumn and winter of 1945, the first three emissaries from Eretz Israel reached Poland, fit into the Bricha organization, and gave the movement a more organized complexion. The Bricha was run by Holocaust survivors affiliated with the Zionist youth movements; their representatives in Poland constituted the Bricha’s “central committee.” Groups of escapees known as “kibbutzim” took shape and were steered to border towns, where they received passwords and were sent on to border points where teams of Bricha activists who had been stationed there awaited them. Until 1946, the escapees were equipped with forged Red Cross documents and were identified mainly as Greek refugees who were ostensibly returning to their homeland.

Between August 1945 and the end of June 1946, more than 100,000 people set out from Poland on the trails of the Bricha.