Memory and Renewal

In the past seven decades, a plethora of museums and memorials, educational programs, books, films, and oral histories, eventually…and all too slowly…awakened people across the globe to intimate portraits of Jewish martyrs and survivors during the barbaric period known as the Nazi Holocaust. Yet, little attention had been paid to the unprecedented saga of reconstitution and regeneration of the Jewish survivors driven from Nazi death camps to Allied internment camps housing the remnants of histories’ unique genocide of the Jews. My own parents, born in different countries, met in a DP camp, married, and forged a purposeful life together. When my father was liberated from Buchenwald as a teenager, his hair had fallen out from malnutrition, he was over six feet tall and weighed only 80lbs. American soldiers who liberated the death camp showed him as an example of a “Muselmann,” a walking skeleton; skin and bones. His older brother, Kalman, had been murdered in Buchenwald a day before the liberation. Their parents had been executed by the Nazis outside of Częstochowa and thrown into a mass grave. Their oldest sister, Eve, was murdered in Treblinka. Notwithstanding these traumas, my father described the aftermath of liberation in energetic terms, as follows: Before the American troops withdrew from Buchenwald, we were moved out. First, we wound up in Foehrenwald---we were there a short while---then we came to another displaced persons camp in Landsberg-am-Lech, about July of 1945. It was a former SS headquarters. Big blocks, big buildings. I started working in the camp as the supervisor on a few blocks. In other words, each block had a few hundred people. In the whole camp there were six and a half thousand Jews . And it was like an autonomous republic, with our own administration, our own police, our own workforce. I used to give accommodations to people who used to come in, go on inspections for cleanliness, etc. Every day in the beginning, I’d give out provisions and clothing….Then from my hometown people got to know that I was in Landsberg, so they came and I gave them accommodations. Pretty soon, we had a dozen or so survivors from my hometown. I hired a German professor to prepare me in physics and chemistry for medical school. Then I met my wife, who was from Lithuania. Very fine lady, intelligent, bright, educated. Indeed, my mother was exceedingly capable and spoke seven languages fluently. She bravely saved her mother’s life by escaping the Nazi death march from the Stutthof death camp, hiding out in the German forests. Her father, a Zionist leader and scholar with smicha from the Telze Yeshiva, was liberated from Dachau. Their son, Abrasha, was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 13. Determined to rebuild a life in the Jewish homeland, my mother prepared youths in the Landsberg DP camp to make Aliyah. She became the primary assistant to the director of the Jewish Agency for Palestine for all of Germany. Under the auspices of the Jewish Agency, her efforts contributed to finding homes in Israel for over 150,000 displaced persons. In addition, she worked with Keren Kayemet, the Jewish National fund. She went on to become a translator for Golda Meir and eventually took over the Israeli Newspaper and Advertising Agency which her father founded. From Landsberg, my mother wrote the following to relatives in America in 1945: Of course, the hope of all of us homeless Jews is to get our state settled at last; so that we can say we can create now a future and a real home for us and perhaps we shall be once all happy there. Now they talk so much about the mobilization of all the youth from boys to girls. I was called too, and I feel it is my duty to go if my country needs me. So I enlisted myself already and when they call, I must go. Mother is quite upset about it, but I comfort her that by the time they need girls, everything will be so far that we all can go together and settle down there. In any case, I very much hope and pray to god that I haven’t to go through such hard times as I already had to. These vignettes of life in the Displaced Persons camps are but a sliver of the history that this documentary uncovers in the search to better understand the foundational beliefs, the heritage and the social welfare systems that enabled the resiliency of the Jewish survivors.