midwesterner- I don’t know about your family, but my family prewar ran businesses. After the war, although they didn’t have any money, they knew how to run a business. Also, they grew up with a certain level of comfort, and couldn’t be comfortable with less than that. It wasn’t just a nice dream for them to have their own apartment and nice furniture- it was normality. Yes, throughout the holocaust they didn’t have that, but that was not their normality. The slaves that were let free did not have the intelligence, business skills, or standards of the general population. They have less to strive for. My grandparents found it worthwhile to go without furniture and use all their factory earnings to invest in building their own business because they knew they could. They had already done it successfully in Europe before everything was taken away from them. They actually never made it to the wealth they had prewar, but they did earn enough to survive on. It’s much harder to move to a higher economic bracket than to go back to your own…
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