Video Vignettes
As we interviewed survivors and their children about their experiences in the DP camps, we were surprised to learn that many had never before been asked to speak in detail about this period in their lives. Having dug into the wellspring of memory, our film's characters revealed deep emotions about this transformative period and its impact on their lives and identity. A few selections follow here.
The displaced persons camps are the origin story for many members of the Second Generation. From 1946-1948, the Jewish DP camps experienced the world's largest
birth rates. Some children stayed in the camps long enough to build powerful memories.
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Helen Martin Block was born in DP Camp Foehrenwald in January 1946. She and her parents left the camp for the United States in May 1951.
Eva Bender was born in Romania in 1927 and met her husband-to-be on a train heading west from Poland. They arrived in DP Camp Foehrenwald in December
1945, where they married and where their daughter was born in 1947.
As Allied troops moved across Europe in battle against Nazi Germany, they found and liberated concentration camp prisoners and survivors of death marches. The first inhabitants of the hastily improvised “assembly centers” in the area around Munich were the survivors of Dachau and its satellite camps.
The Allies, in creating the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1943, had formulated plans to repatriate millions in the aftermath of the war but were ill-prepared to deal with those who were unable or unwilling to return to their native lands. Aside from the estimated 60,000 Jews who survived liberation in Germany, there were a close to a million others who were unrepatriable, a sizeable number of whom had been Nazi collaborators and agents.
Seymour Kaplan was one of the U.S soldiers who liberated Dachau at the end of April 1945. He remained in Germany – now the American zone of occupation – into 1946.
Evelyn Ripp was born in 1930 in eastern Poland, She escaped the Lachwa Ghetto and survived in the forest with her father and sister. With the help of the "Brichah," they arrived in Foehrenwald in August 1945.
As soon as they were able after liberation, Holocaust survivors began searching for
family members. Some returned to their former towns in Poland only to encounter new acts of antisemitic violence. With the help of the “Brichah” – the clandestine organization to help Jews flee Eastern Europe – about 300,000 Jews were smuggled
into occupied Germany and Austria. Survivors pretended to be Greek citizens
in order to cross the borders “legally.” With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the “Brichah” was dissolved.
Sara Abraham Seidman, born in 1922 in Romania, met the Rebbe near Munich shortly before the High Holidays of 1945, and was persuaded to return with him to DP Camp Feldafing to become a teacher for orphaned Orthodox girls from Hungary. They later followed the Rebbe to Foehrenwald.
On September 17, 1945, the first Yom Kippur since liberation, General Eisenhower visited DP Camp Feldafing, where he was greeted by the Klausenberger Rebbe Yehezkiel Yehuda Halberstam, a major Hasidic leader. Halberstam had been liberated in Dachau, having lost his wife and their 11 children. Following the establishment of Foehrenwald as a Jewish camp in October 1945, the Rebbe was persuaded to leave the overcrowded Feldafing with 100 of his followers, with the promise of a kosher kitchen and a mikvah. Soon, religious schools were established there for boys and girls. Foehrenwald became the center for the revival of the Hasidic way of life in the U.S. zone of occupation.
With the help of aid agencies, notably the JDC and ORT, Jewish survivors assumed agency over their lives. They established synagogues, schools, newspapers, theater
and sports groups, police and political parties and more. They elected committees
and formed the institutions of governance within their new, if temporary, communities. Soon they had created all the institutions of a pre-war shtetl in the very heart of Bavaria, which just short years earlier had been “Judenfrei.”
Oscar Littman was born in eastern Poland in 1924. When the Nazis invaded in 1941,
his family encouraged him to escape into the USSR. He came to DP Camp Foehrenwald in October 1945.
When they arrived in the displaced persons camps, children and young people, who for years had been deprived of schooling, were most eager students. Jacob Biber, who founded the “Tarbut” school, wrote in his memoir, “Every subject seemed to excite them. Everything was new to them, like daylight to a blind person who suddenly started to see – poetry, politics, art and life in general and of course the history of the Jewish people….I had to win their confidence in me. They were suspicious of every human being, including me….after a while they never wanted our sessions to end.”
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Sam Marder was born in Romania in 1930. In 1939 he won a scholarship to study violin at the Moscow Conservatory, but the war intervened. He survived imprisonment in a
labor camp in Transnistria with his mother and sister. They made their way to DP Camp Foehrenwald in December 1945. Sam went on to become a concert violinist.
Many young people who were orphaned in the Holocaust arrived from Eastern Europe to the DP camps as part of organized “kibbutzim.” They were given separate quarters, and were educated and trained together for life in a future Jewish state. These groups were then taken out under cover of night to make their way across the Alps into Italy by foot
and, from there, on to “Eretz Yisrael.”
Lusia Milch, born in Eastern Poland in 1930, was the sole survivor of her family. She was moved with a group of other orphans to Foehrenwald in late 1945.
As the Jewish camps began to close, one after the other, their remaining inhabitants eventually moved to Foehrenwald. In the meanwhile, in 1951, authority for the
camps was transferred from the International Refugee Organization (IRO) to the Federal Republic of Germany. Some 900 Jews were accommodated in German cities after Foehrenwald closed in 1957.
Robi Wachs was born in 1947 in DP camp Ziegenhain. His parents left Poland after the Kielce pogrom in July 1946, seeking safety in the U.S. occupation zone. They moved
from camp to camp until they arrived in DP Camp Foehrenwald in 1951.The family
moved to Dusseldorf after the camp closed. Robi emigrated to Israel in 1967,
where he currently lives.
After Foehrenwald closed, the Catholic church resettled large German families from the
East in the now renamed town of Waldram. For years and years, neither the Nazi nor the Jewish past of the settlement had been taught in schools. Then, in 2012, a German historian who moved to the area began a movement to create a volunteer-led museum in what had been the DP camp's central bathhouse. The opening of the museum
in October 2018 (https://erinnerungsort-badehaus.de/en/) was an occasion for survivors
and their children born in the camp to return, some for the first time in 70 years.
Leah Levine was born in Poland in 1933 and survived the war with her family in the USSR.
She decided to return to Germany in 2018 after seven decades.
Memory and remembrance, though distinct, run as dual themes throughout the documentary film and in this website, as children born in the displaced persons camps honor their parents' legacies while also being able to call forward events from their own early childhood. The present moment is the lens through which we reach into the core
of what the past has to offer.
In 2017, Shoshana Bellen hosted a Chanukah gathering in her home in Israel with others who, like her, were born after the war in the DP camps, for the visiting historian and founder of the museum, Dr. Sybille Krafft.
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