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Landmark exhibits shed light on life in German displaced person camps after the Holocaust

BERLIN (JTA) — Rachel Salamander was born in an in-between time and place: The time was just after the end of the Holocaust, when no one knew what the future would bring for the remnants of European Jewry.

The in-between place was a displaced persons camp at Deggendorf, Germany. Her parents Samuel and Riva — survivors from Poland — were among the flood of refugees arriving from the east.

The refugees and other local DPs, as they were nicknamed, were “survivors of concentration camps or gulags, or just people who had everything taken away from them, totally at the end of their rope physically and mentally,” says Salamander.

Her family moved from Deggendorf to another DP camp, in Föhrenwald, and eventually settled in the Munich area. “They gave all their love and attention to us children, because we were their future, their hope.”

Life in the DP camps is the subject of a collaborative exhibition between Munich’s Jewish Museum and its City Museum, situated across the square from each other in the city’s center. Called “Munich Displaced: The Surviving Remnant,” and “Munich Displaced: After 1945 and without a Homeland,” the twin exhibits, which run through January 2024, tell the stories of tens of thousands of displaced persons — Jewish and non-Jewish — in post-war German limbo.

The exhibition project is, say its organizers, the first to focus on the lives and fates of all those people who fled, were displaced or deported during World War II and then found themselves in or near Munich after 1945.

After Germany capitulated in May 1945, there were more than eight million so-called displaced persons in Germany, Austria and Italy. For some 250,000 Jews, including about 75,000 in Germany, the DP camps — administered by the Allied authorities and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) — were places where they could regain their strength and perhaps find lost family, or create a new one.

The DP camp “was the beginning of the beginning,” said Ruth Melcer, 88, who was liberated from Auschwitz and later reunited with her parents in their home country, Poland. After the Kielce pogroms, the family fled to Berlin, and eventually were housed in the Föhrenwald DP camp in Munich.

But while they offered DPs a new start, the camps — many of them set up in former Nazi camps — were bleak. In some cases, Jewish DPs found themselves in the same camp with their erstwhile persecutors.

President Harry Truman tasked Earl Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the American envoy to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, with producing a report on the conditions — which he found shockingly unsanitary.

“As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them,” Harrison wrote in 1945. “They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops.”

In response to the report, General Dwight Eisenhower, in command of U.S. forces in Europe, helped separate Jewish DPs from non-Jews and improve their overall conditions, sometimes in local housing.

“Jewish people have really a will to survive,” said Melcer’s friend Lydia Barenholz, 85, whose family spent a few months in the same Föhrenwald DP camp. They survived the end of the war in hiding near their home city of Lviv, which was then Poland, now Ukraine.

“We are hanging together with the strength of knowing that everyone could be my family,” said Barenholz, who lives with her husband Jacques in Holland.

Despite the hardships of DP camp life, many were just happy to be free of the Nazis.

“My parents’ life began again” at the Landsberg DP camp about 40 miles west of Munich, said Abraham Peck, who was born there in May 1946. After moving to the United States, they “talked about the life in Landsberg, not about the death that they observed in Lodz and in concentration camps.”

Of her childhood in the DP camp, Salamander recalled having “a clear, religious orientation. We spoke Yiddish and we kept all the Jewish holidays. I never had an identity problem, because there were clear coordinates.”

In Munich, there were approximately 100,000 DPs immediately after the end of the war. Of these, about 5,000 were Jewish.

A British official meets with a family in a displaced persons camp in Berlin in 1945. (Zola/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

After the camps were dissolved, most DPs emigrated by 1950 to the United States and Israel, and only about 20,000 remained in Germany overall. That group, together with a tiny number of German Jews who had survived in hiding, made up Germany’s post-war Jewish community.

“The Jewish DPs were not only survivors or victims,” said Jewish Museum curator Jutta Fleckenstein. “They very quickly developed a Jewish self-awareness. And in this short ‘in-between time,’ after 1945, they could also be seen in the German landscape.”

“It all happened in this brief time,” added Fleckenstein, a historian who has focused on issues of identity and migration. “And then they were forgotten.”

Aiming to wrest this chapter from oblivion, the two museums are offering a program of events and have highlighted some 40 locations throughout the city where refugees once studied or gathered for social or religious events, where Jewish newspapers were printed and where Jewish aid organizations offered assistance. Objects on display came from the museums’ collections or were loaned by former DPs themselves.

“I kept all my high school certificates, pictures and books, so they installed a special corner for me” in the exhibition, said Barenholz, who had attended a Hebrew high school in Munich with her friend Melcer. Barenholz’s homework book is opened to a page that shows “I wrote a very nice Hebrew,” she said. “There were also some with corrections, but they didn’t open the book to that page.”

Lydia Barenholz and Ruth Melcer, who attended Munich’s post-war Hebrew high school together, are shown with some of the objects they contributed to the new exhibit, “Munich Displaced. The Surviving Remnant.” (Daniel Schvarcz)

“My hope is that visitors will learn what happened so that it will never happen again,” said Melcer, who contributed photos from her school days. “But the times are very bad for these hopes.”

Melcer, who married her husband Jossie in 1959, has stayed in touch with numerous former classmates around the world. She frequently speaks with pupils in German schools about her family’s story. In 2015, Melcer co-authored a cookbook-memoir, “Ruths Kochbuch,” with Ellen Presser.

Salamander, who founded a chain of Jewish bookstores in Germany, has loaned artifacts to an exhibit at the Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue, which was built in 1931 and reopened in 1947. For many decades, it was the main synagogue for Munich’s post-war Jewish community. Ten years ago, Salamander and Ron Jakubowicz started a foundation to press for the building’s reconstruction, which is under way.

“This idea of the spirit of Judaism, of welcoming the stranger, all the liberal things that define a good part of American Jewish life, were defined in the DP camps,” said Peck, professor of history at the University of Southern Maine and former administrative director of the American Jewish Archives at HUC in Cincinnati.

It seems to be a story whose time has come: Germany’s public broadcasting company Deutsche Welle has also produced a film about the DPs in post-war Landsberg.

Peck recently organized a week-long program marking 75 years since Leonard Bernstein conducted an orchestra of Holocaust survivors in Landsberg. Peck also co-organized with the Landsberg City Museum the first in a dialogue series, this one focusing on the history of the DP camp. It featured a discussion between Peck and Katrin Himmler, grandniece of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS.

The idea behind the dialogue “was to talk with people who had ancestors who were in the concentration camps in Landsberg or in the DP camp, and to ask questions that are important nowadays about racism and antisemitism,” said museum director Sonia Schaetz. The museum will include the DP camp history in its new permanent exhibit, due to open in late 2025.

Also in Landsberg, local grassroots historians Manfred and Helga Deiler are planning an exhibition and visitor center at the site where traces of a World War II slave labor camp can still be seen. Some of its survivors became residents of the local Jewish DP camp, they said.

Growing up in Landsberg, the Deilers never heard about the DP camp. Today, they occasionally bring visitors to the site, part of which today houses refugees from Afghanistan and Syria.

It was typical for post-war Germans to forget about the DP camps, says Fleckenstein of the Jewish Museum in Munich. As German-born American philosopher Hannah Arendt noted in her 1950 report from Germany, Germans in general were feeling sorry for themselves and reacted, if at all, with apathy “to the fate of the refugees in their midst.”

For survivors, too, this chapter fell into a kind of “twilight zone,” said Fleckenstein. “In many biographies this time doesn’t even come up at all. This time of waiting, this transitional time, often was not discussed.”

“The people with whom we lived in the DP camp were special,” recalls Salamander. “They all had a piece of destruction in them, they all had come directly from mass murder, they were all completely traumatized people who cried a lot, a lot.”

“And the whole time, they said the names of people whom they had lost. They were people really who had nothing, who had never been in Germany and did not want to be here. But the war had swept them here. They were uprooted, they had no political power. And they were always waiting for things to get better.”


The post Landmark exhibits shed light on life in German displaced person camps after the Holocaust appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials

FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

i24 NewsIranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.

“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.

The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.

The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.

According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”

The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.

Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.

Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.

The post Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.

Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.

Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.

Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.

There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.

The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.

Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.

US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS

The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.

Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.

The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.

The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.

The post Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say

Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo

The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.

The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.

The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.

The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.

The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.

The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.

While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.

The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.

USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.

One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.

The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.

The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.

Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.

The post US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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