A newly uncovered journal from “Kibbutz Buchenwald” provides an unusually intimate portrait of young Holocaust survivors rebuilding their lives in the months immediately following liberation. The collective was founded in 1945 by former Buchenwald prisoners who chose, remarkably, to establish a kibbutz on German soil while preparing for immigration to Palestine.
The journal captures a community in emotional turmoil. In June 1945, 21-year-old Meir Skorczky wrote that “the question of sex is a very painful one for us,” reflecting the group’s struggle to reconcile personal desires with the trauma inflicted by Germans only weeks earlier. Members debated whether relationships with local Germans were morally possible and what intimacy meant after such devastation.
The writings also portray the everyday texture of life in the kibbutz: arguments, chores, friendships, small romances, jokes, and bursts of optimism. The entries reveal both psychological fragility and a powerful drive toward renewal. For young people who had lost families and homes, collective work and Zionist ideals offered a path forward and a sense of shared purpose.
The rediscovered materials show how the survivors negotiated their identities in a space shaped simultaneously by trauma and hope. Rather than appearing solely as victims, they emerge as complex individuals trying to rebuild meaning, morality, and community in the immediate aftermath of genocide.
The journal, preserved for decades in archives, is now giving historians rare insight into the inner world of survivors during one of the least documented periods: the first months of freedom, when the foundations of a new life were only beginning to take shape.