“To work with Jews, not for Jews”: a Christian relief worker in the aftermath of the Holocaust

On 15 April 1945 Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated.In the following weeks, remaining sites in the Nazi concentration camp system were uncovered, and, on 8 May, the Second World War finally came to an end in Europe (VE Day).As recent histories contend, however, the Holocaust did not end when the concentration camps were liberated and victory was declared by the Allied liberators. 1 Although the West had known of the Nazi mass murder of Jews since at least 1942, 2 encountering survivors in the immediate aftermath enabled some non-Jews to gain awareness, to an extent, of the realities of Nazi persecution.They also began to consider the implications of this knowledge for Jewish/non-Jewish relations.One such person was Alison Wood, a Quaker and member of the Jewish Relief Unit (JRU) who, in 1946, arrived at Belsen as Personnel Officer for the Unit's operations in the British Occupation Zone of Germany.As a relief worker, and as a Christian in a Jewish organization, Alison Wood's life history evidences some of the first interactions between Jews who survived the Holocaust and those who approached them after liberation.Close study of her experiences illustrates a detailed picture of how one ordinary relief worker engaged with survivors in the aftermath of 1