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Without a language in common, the women bared their arms to show their camp tattoos. The men, literally at a loss for words, grabbed the women’s arms hoping for a dance. The women, terrified, started hitting the men, while the Hungarians played faster and faster. 23
    This, however, was an unusual mishap. There was another dance party held around the same time on a square between the barracks, with a Royal Air Force band providing the music. In the account of a British soldier, it was a huge success, even though some of the girls “could hardly walk,” while others “looked as though they’d break in two.” One very tall Canadian officer held a tiny girl, whose head only came up to his waist. They waltzed together. “She looked so happy, it was hard for those who saw her not to smile or cry.” 24
    This was perhaps a more typical story than Wollheim’s, for many people who worked in the camps, from American rabbis to United Nations relief workers, remarked with various degrees of approval or disapproval on the speedy recovery of sexuality among the survivors. Like the lipstick, sexual desire restored a sense of humanity to people, who had been left with none.
    If the birthrate in Holland was high in 1946, the birthrate in the displaced persons camps was higher. In the American occupation zone alone 750 babies were born every month in the DP camps. Nearly one-third of the Jewish women in the zone between the ages of eighteen and forty-five had already given birth or were expecting babies. 25 Former concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, where so many thousands had diedunder the worst possible conditions, had become sites of feverish sexual activity, as though the survivors couldn’t wait to show to themselves and the world that they were still alive, and not just that, but capable of producing life.
    Relief workers were sometimes shocked and spoke of DPs, often Jewish, giving “themselves up to debauch without restraint.” Some put it down to boredom. What was there to do but drink and have sex? Some were more moralistic. A French doctor working for a charity organization wrote with evident disapproval, “The moral standings of many of these survivors from the concentration camps is very low . . . sexual irregularity has reached appalling proportions.” But he concede;d that there were mitigating circumstances. One could not really blame the young girls who had passed through hell, and “are now seized by an irresistible desire for affection and forgetfulness, which they seek to satisfy with the means at their disposal.” 26
    Other observers had more elaborate explanations. A Polish relief worker named Marta Korwin believed that concentration camp victims had dreamed that an end to their torment would lead to the dawn of a perfect world: “All their past difficulties would be forgotten, freedom would take them back to a world where nothing had ever gone wrong . . .” When instead they found themselves living in the misery of DP camps, having lost their loved ones, with no hope, they escaped into drink or sex. 27
    All these explanations are perfectly plausible. But there was also a biological dimension. A people in severe crisis had to reproduce itself to survive. Many Jews in the DP camps were not death camp survivors, of whom there were few. Many came from parts of the Soviet Union, where they had found refuge from the Nazis. But most Jews had lost children, parents, siblings, or other relatives. Older people had little choice but to live with ghosts. But young people craved new family ties, others to live for. And biological regeneration was officially promoted by Zionists and other Jewish organizers. Marriages happened within weeks, even days after first encounters. Contraceptives were frowned upon in the Jewish DP camps.People felt duty-bound to produce as many children as they could. Sex was not just a pleasure; it was an act of