Descendants retrace Holocaust survivors’ treacherous, covert journey to pre-state Israel
Children of Jews who secretly traveled to the Jewish homeland with the ‘Bricha’ movement, some of whom were born along the way, revisit the long route and uncover buried histories

WROCLAW, Poland — Late one day in September, a group of 20 elderly Israelis, some in their 80s with walking canes, struggled down a hill toward the river that separates Poland from the Czech Republic.
The travelers were the children of Holocaust survivors who had been clandestinely led by Zionist emissaries between 1945 and 1948 across the sealed borders of Europe toward the emerging State of Israel.
This sporadic yet large-scale movement that came to be known as the Bricha, or Escape, brought more than 100,000 Jews to the Jewish homeland. Stealthily they made their way from Poland across Czechoslovakia, on to Austria, Germany and Italy, until they reached ships on the Mediterranean that tried to overcome the British blockade.
“You can’t take more than 10 kilos [22 lbs.] with you, and get rid of anything that shows that you are not Greeks. You may be proud of the medals you earned in the Soviet Army but you have to decide — aliyah or medalya,” said the elderly Israelis’ leader, Moshe Feldman, using the Hebrew words for immigration to Israel and medals.
Feldman was repeating the instructions given to their parents, some of whom had served in the Soviet Army. Those instructions often included the rhyming Bricha slogan, aliyah or medalya — immigrate to Israel or keep your medals.
The parents of the group members, Feldman pointed out, were told by Bricha leaders that if border guards stopped them, they were to pretend they were Greeks on their way back to Greece.
“It’s winter and they are traveling at night hoping to cross the border without being caught. Some have coats, others don’t. Suddenly they discover that the bridge has collapsed. The river current is torrential and the water is freezing cold. Now what do they do?” Feldman continued, as the group reached the riverbank and stood under a modern concrete bridge.

The second-generation Holocaust survivors pondered the situation. The journey in the footsteps of their parents had given them many occasions for reflection. Their parents seldom talked about the years between the end of World War II in 1945 and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Those years were overshadowed by the events of the Holocaust. A common regret expressed by group members is not knowing more about their parents’ experiences. Many had nodded when Feldman reminisced about his own survivor father’s reticence.
“‘You weren’t there. You won’t understand. No point asking,’ was what he would say, in a staccato way,” recalled Feldman.
In the course of the 12-day bus trip organized by the Bricha Legacy Association, the group reenacted the journey their parents took over the course of months or even years. Many of these participants were born along the Bricha route and they were trying to piece together scraps of stories their parents told them along with their own childhood memories.
‘I have a mother!’
One of those memories was sparked for Abraham Meir when the group visited the Polish town of Wroclaw. At the site of a former Jewish orphanage for children who could not find their parents after the war, Meir suddenly remembered an incident that occurred at the Ben Shemen boarding school he attended in Israel during the 1950s.

“One of my classmates suddenly came running to us and yelled, ‘I found my mother! I have a mother!'” said Meir.
Separated during the war, it sometimes took the survivors years to find family members. Participant Haim Shalev recalled a similar anecdote at the site of one of the former displaced persons camps in Germany.
“My parents were separated when the war broke out, as my father was in the Soviet Union with the Red Army. He was wounded in 1941 and spent the rest of the war recuperating in Moscow without being able to contact his family,” said Shalev.
“When he returned to his hometown in Volyn [today Volyhnia in Ukraine], there was no sign of anyone. He headed for Germany, where he went from camp to camp searching for his wife. Finally, in 1946 he reached the Goldkopf DP camp. There he found his wife and her two sisters, both of whom had recently married. His own wife was about to do the same,” said Shalev, pointing out that his mother had not heard from her husband for six years.

The happy ending to his parents’ reunion, he adds, was his birth at Goldkopf in 1947.
Revenge? Or immigration?
Fittingly, the trip’s leader, Feldman, a former high school history teacher, is the son of one of the early Bricha organizers.
“When my father returned to Lublin [in Poland] after spending the war in Tashkent [in the former Soviet Union], there was no trace of his parents or brother,” Feldman told the group.

When the then-22-year-old Rafael Feldman met with other survivors, Moshe Feldman said, not everyone thought that emigration to the Jewish homeland should be the first priority.
“There were those who wanted revenge against the Germans to come first,” Feldman said, referring to a plan by several dozen Holocaust survivors to poison the German water supply. “But in the end the plan was dismissed and they focused on getting the Jews to emigrate.”

Rafael Feldman sold his family’s home in Lublin and used the proceeds to pay for a building that became one of the initial Bricha headquarters. Together with emissaries from the kibbutzim, the Zionist youth movements, and the Jewish Agency, along with members of the Jewish Brigade (Jewish soldiers who had fought in the British Army) they focused on moving as many Jews as possible to pre-state Israel.
One factor in their favor was that the Polish government relocated many of the survivors to a single region, Lower Silesia, which had been part of Germany until 1945 and from where about 600,000 Germans were expelled.
“The new Polish government was eager to re-settle Lower Silesia with Poles, including Polish Jews,” explained historian Kamil Kijek, who teaches in the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Wroclaw.

Kijek pointed out that the government assisted Polish Jews in moving to Lower Silesia, including many of the approximately 250,000 Polish Jews who were repatriated from the Soviet Union where they had spent the war years, as well as large numbers of the estimated 50,000 Polish Jews who survived the death camps or hid within Poland itself. In Lower Silesia, they were given homes abandoned by the Germans. They also were provided with ample job opportunities because factories were largely unharmed during the war.
The clustering may have made it easier for the Bricha leaders to contact the survivors, but at the same time, Kijek pointed out, the relatively good conditions may also have discouraged them from leaving.

“None of them knows then what is going to happen next. They don’t know what the new Poland will be like for the Jews or if they will be allowed to reach the Yishuv [pre-state Israel],” he explained, noting that many of the survivors began to put down new roots in Poland, founding Jewish schools, Yiddish theaters and synagogues.
“That all changes in July 1946 when an eight-year-old Polish boy goes missing. He later tells his parents that Jews kidnapped him in order to make matzah from his blood,” said Kijek. “The story spreads and a pogrom ensues. Forty-two Jews are massacred. That and other pogroms which resulted in the murder of more than 1,500 Jews in Poland after the war convinced many survivors that they had to leave Poland.”

The Bricha then expanded its efforts and in subsequent months more than 90,000 Jews left Poland. Some managed to reach pre-state Israel without being stopped, but most spent considerable time in the DP camps set up by the US Army in American-Occupied Germany and Austria.
A visit to ‘Camp Hope’
During their odyssey, the Israeli group visited several places where German and Austrian individuals have impressively enshrined locations where the Jewish survivors sojourned. Among the landmarks: The Bad Reichenhall German Army base near Munich, where a large sign hanging from the main gate says “TIKWAH,” Hebrew for “hope” and the root word of the title of Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah.”
That sign was commissioned by Lt. Col. Thomas Nockelmann as a reminder that the base was called Camp Tikwah (Camp Hope) while serving as a Jewish DP camp. At the St. Ottilien Monastery, Father Cyrill Shafer has lined the main walkway with photos depicting the monastery when it housed a hospital and camp for Jewish DPs.
In Austria, dramaturgy professor Christoph Lepschy has created a presentation about Camp Herzl, a DP camp that was situated on the campus of present-day Mozarteum University in Salzburg; and at the Austria-Italy border, hiking enthusiast Ernst Loeschner initiated the Alpine Peace Crossing, an annual hike commemorating the trail the Jewish survivors took across the Alps.
The Bricha was not able to bring all the Jews who wanted to leave out of Poland before the Iron Curtain came firmly down and Communist satellite countries firmly locked their borders. Among the approximately 100,000 Jews who remained in Poland in 1949 was the family of Galia Gavish.
“We didn’t manage to leave until 1952 when my family obtained a tourist visa to come to Israel,” recalled Gavish, who was eight years old at the time.
She said her decision to join the trip was triggered by flashback memories she experienced while watching “the horrific events on the news on October 7,” during the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel, which also saw 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.
“I suddenly recalled the voices of Poles hurling insults at us during my childhood,” said Gavish, who vividly described an incident when Polish youths locked her inside a coal cellar while berating her with antisemitic insults. “Somehow I hoped that returning to the location where these things happened would relieve the trauma that I re-experienced after all these years.”
For Bella Dax, the journey was a chance to visit the area near the Czech border where she was born.
“My mother described in a memoir her joy in giving birth while the family was getting ready to leave with the Bricha,” said Dax. “They set out only eight days later, putting me in an old carriage that they bought along with a bowl to bathe me in.”
Shalev, who was three months old when his parents carried him across the Austria-Italy border in 1947, expressed satisfaction at being able to see with his own eyes the snow-capped Krimmel Alpine mountain pass.
“My parents said that they had to put me to sleep, with wine I think, to keep me quiet so that they wouldn’t get caught,” he recalled, adding that until making the journey he didn’t realize how his family history was connected to the Bricha story.
One effort to increase awareness about the Bricha movement will be underway in the spring of 2025 when an exhibit at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews opens in Warsaw.
Titled “1945: Not the End, Not the Beginning,” the exhibit will present all aspects of Polish Jewish life in that era, said Kijek, who curated the project. Kijek hopes the exhibit will show what a complicated joint effort of all the different Jewish groups it was.
“There was no single mastermind. All the Zionist parties, the kibbutzim, the Revisionists, the Orthodox, Agudat Yisrael, the American JDC and the Jewish Brigade, they were all involved. Even Hasidic rabbis and Jewish communists shared a decisive sympathy for creating a Jewish state. There were rivalries and conflicts but they all pulled together,” he said.
In addition to the solidarity that Kijek described, something else characterized the Bricha ethos. Feldman described that quality as he stood with the Bricha descendants on the riverbank at the Polish-Czech border where a bridge had once collapsed.
“They were unstoppably determined. They had to cross that river that night or they would be caught. So they found a way to cut down trees. In a single night they built a new bridge,” he said.
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