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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.”
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Haaretz Claim That IDF Was Ordered to Fire on Unarmed Gazans Refuted by Translation Discrepancies, Contradictions, and Eyewitness Accounts
Gazans receiving humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. Photo: Col. Richard Kemp
A recent Haaretz exposé accusing the Israeli military of ordering troops to fire at unarmed civilians near food aid sites in Gaza relied on mistranslation, selective quotes, factual omissions, and contradictions to construct a narrative of unprovoked Israeli violence, according to independent observers interviewed by The Algemeiner.
Debunking the claim of indiscriminate fire by the IDF, the experts instead described widespread fear of Hamas, not the Israeli military.
The Haaretz report quickly gained traction in international media. Titled “’It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid,” it was cited by outlets such as NPR, CNN, and Reuters, .
British military analyst Andrew Fox criticized the article for its framing and language. One of the discrepancies he pointed to was the shift in the English version of the story from soldiers firing “towards” civilians, as stated in the Hebrew original, to “at” them. The original Hebrew subheader also specified that soldiers were told to fire “towards” crowds “to distance them” from the aid sites, suggesting the shooting took place as a means of crowd control.
“It’s a matter of intent,” Fox told The Algemeiner. The phrase “‘at civilians’ means they are trying to kill them. It’s misleading because they’re firing warnings to avoid harm rather than shooting to cause harm.”
“Warning shots are something all armies do — we did in Afghanistan — but when you pull the trigger there’s always a risk of harm, and that’s not great,” explained Fox, a think tank researcher and former British Army officer. “Still, there’s a huge difference between that and deliberately targeting civilians.”
Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that “shooting towards,” as in the original Hebrew, was “quite reasonable as a means to exercise crowd control in a war zone.”
“It is highly unlikely the IDF would be ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians unless they directly endangered them,” Kemp told The Algemeiner, citing Israel’s interest in the success of US-backed humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza. “The IDF rigidly follows laws of war. It makes no sense for the IDF to want to damage aid efforts. They cooperate with and facilitate [the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] and want it to succeed. The ones who want it to fail are Hamas because it deprives them of control and funds. If anyone has been doing this shooting, it would be Hamas. They have the motive the IDF do not.”
There were other discrepancies in the original headline and its translation. Whereas the Hebrew version reads “Soldiers testify: IDF deliberately shoots towards Gazans near aid collection points,” the English version not only omitted any reference to mediating testimony or attribution, but also framed the event as an empirical fact: “IDF soldiers ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid.” Further, the phrase “waiting for humanitarian aid” may carry specific legal implications under international law, suggesting heightened vulnerability, whereas the Hebrew version referred more vaguely to crowds “near aid collection points.”
The subheader — which claimed soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed civilians “even when no threat was present” — conflicted with the body of the text, which acknowledged that Israeli soldiers were wounded near the aid distribution zones. One sentence, appearing for the first time in the 21st paragraph, stood out: “There were also fatalities and injuries among IDF soldiers in these incidents.” The piece offered no explanation for how such casualties could occur if, as the article claims, no one else present was armed.
Elsewhere in the article, a soldier is quoted describing the IDF creating a “killing field,” supposedly involving heavy machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers. But if such weapons were used with lethal intent, as Fox pointed out in a Substack post, the casualty rate would be far higher than the one to five reported per day. “That’s not a massacre,” he wrote, going on to quip that the only massacre to take place was one of “journalistic standards by Haaretz.”
“Could some soldiers accidentally miss and hit someone?” Fox wrote. “Yes. That is tragic and warrants investigation. However, the article itself acknowledges that the IDF is already examining those incidents. To jump from that to ‘deliberate killing fields’ is not responsible reporting. It is narrative laundering.”
The lack of video footage of the alleged mass shootings near GHF sites raises questions, given the large volume of media typically produced from Gaza, according to Fox, who noted that Hamas has repeatedly circulated images and clips for propaganda purposes.
“Every Gazan has a mobile phone, and numerous videos of other events have been released,” he wrote. “Why is there a total absence of any credible footage of these supposed IDF combined arms assaults on queuing civilians?”
Kemp, who visited two of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s distribution sites in the days following the report’s publication, described hearing distant gunfire but reported that the aid operation proceeded mostly without disruption.
Col. Richard Kemp at humanitarian aid site with Gazans. Photo: Provided
“None of the Gazans there showed any concerns [about the IDF] whatsoever,” he said. Many of the civilians identified Hamas, not the IDF, as the main threat to the aid effort — a dynamic not acknowledged in the Haaretz report — telling Kemp they could not return home for fear of being recognized and targeted by Hamas.
“I must have spoken to at least 50 Gazans at each site,” he said. “Many told me they feared Hamas and Hamas threatened them if they used the sites.”
Kemp added that the atmosphere was chaotic but manageable, with GHF workers — most of them local Gazans — interfacing directly with the crowds. He described people smiling, holding up food packages, and expressing gratitude for the aid.
“The overwhelming impression was how grateful they were to be getting free aid for once, as opposed to buying aid looted by Hamas and sold at a premium,” he told The Algemeiner.
Many Gazans at the GHF sites who spoke to Kemp voiced hatred for Hamas and praised the US-backed aid effort, with some chanting “kill Hamas” while others said “I love America” or expressed admiration for President Donald Trump. The alignment between Hamas and UN criticism of the food program was “shocking,” Kemp added, particularly given the visible gratitude expressed by many recipients.
“They associate this aid program with the US,” he said. “They seem to like it, whereas Hamas and the UN seem to be its greatest enemies.”
The post Haaretz Claim That IDF Was Ordered to Fire on Unarmed Gazans Refuted by Translation Discrepancies, Contradictions, and Eyewitness Accounts first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Former Australian Nurses Charged Over Threatening Viral Video Banned from NDIS
Illustrative: Supporters of Hamas gather for a rally in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Reuters/Joel Carrett
Two former Australian nurses who were charged over a viral video in which they allegedly threatened to kill Israeli patients have been banned from working under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), four months after being suspended from their jobs at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney.
Earlier this year, Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, both 27, gained international attention after they were seen in an online video posing as doctors and making inflammatory statements during a night shift conversation with Israeli influencer Max Veifer.
The widely circulated footage, which sparked international outrage and condemnation, showed Abu Lebdeh declaring she would refuse to treat Israeli patients and instead kill them, while Nadir made a throat-slitting gesture and claimed he had already killed many.
Following the incident, New South Wales authorities suspended their nursing registrations and banned them from working as nurses nationwide. They are now also prohibited from working with or providing any services — paid or unpaid — to NDIS participants for two years.
This latest ban, which took effect on May 9, applies nationwide and prohibits Nadir and Abu Lebdeh from working with NDIS participants or performing any role for or on behalf of NDIS providers in any Australian state or territory.
Abu Lebdeh was charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass. If convicted, she faces up to 22 years in prison.
Nadir was charged with federal offenses, including using a carriage service to menace, harass, or cause offense, as well as possession of a prohibited drug.
Currently, both of them remain free on bail and have not yet entered any pleas, with a court appearance scheduled for July 29. They’ve been prohibited from leaving Australia or using social media while their cases proceed.
According to Nadir’s lawyer, the video was captured “without the consent and knowledge” of his client, and he intends to argue for its exclusion from court.
“We will be challenging the admissibility of the video recording because it was a private conversation which was recorded by the person overseas without my client’s consent and without his knowledge,” Nadir’s lawyer said. “That video recording was made secretly overseas and was unlawfully obtained.”
This incident, which drew international attention, occurred amid a surge of antisemitic acts across Australia since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began in October 2023, with Jewish institutions targeted in arson attacks and businesses defaced.
Antisemitism spiked to record levels in Australia — especially in Sydney and Melbourne, which are home to some 85 percent of the country’s Jewish population — following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, with the escalation continuing amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran.
According to a report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the country’s Jewish community experienced over 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, more than quadrupling from 495 in the prior 12 months.
The number of antisemitic physical assaults in Australia rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. The level of antisemitism for the past year was six times the average of the preceding 10 years.
The post Former Australian Nurses Charged Over Threatening Viral Video Banned from NDIS first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Boulder Firebomber Charged With Murder Following Death of Victim
Boulder attack suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman poses for a jail booking photograph after his arrest in Boulder, Colorado, June 2, 2025. Photo: Boulder Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
A victim of the antisemitic Boulder, Colorado firebombing died on Monday, prompting local law enforcement to charge suspect Mohamed Soliman with murder in the first degree.
“Severe injuries” caused the death of Karen Diamond, 82, the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office (BCDA) said on Monday in a statement. She was one of 13 people injured when Soliman hurled Molotov cocktails into a crowd of Jewish people who were participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the hostages who remain imprisoned by Hamas in Gaza. Her death adds five new charges to the over 200 federal and state criminal charges which could lock Soliman away for over 600 years.
“These additional charges, including the counts of First Degree Murder, are being filed after consultation with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Boulder Police Department,” said the DA’s office, adding that it “continues to work closely with federal, state, and local partners in the strong response to this attack. We stand united against acts of antisemitism and hate.”
“This horrific attack has now claimed the life of an innocent person who was beloved by her family and friends,” said Michal Dougherty, district attorney of Boulder County. “Our hearts are with the Diamond family during this incredibly difficult time. Our office will fight for justice for the victims, their loved ones, and the community. Part of what makes Colorado special is that people come together in response to a tragedy; I know that the community will continue to unite in supporting the Diamond family and all the victims of this attack.”
Prosecutors said in May that Soliman yelled “Free Palestine” during the attack, and, according to court documents, told investigators that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”
That incident came less than two weeks after a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, also yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
In Garret Park, Maryland, a middle-aged man, Clift A. Seferlis, was recently arrested by federal authorities for sending a series of threatening messages to Jewish organizations in Philadelphia. Seferlis referenced the war in Gaza in his communications.
“The Victim Jewish Institution 1 received numerous additional messages since April 1, 2024, which contained a threat to physically destroy the institution,” the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said in a statement. “Prior to the receipt of the May 7, 2025, mailing, Victim Jewish Institution 1 and its employees had received very similar-looking letters, believed to have been sent by Seferlis, which referenced Victim Jewish Institution 1’s ‘many big open windows,’ ‘Kristallnacht,’ ‘anger and rage,’ and a future need to ‘rebuild’ the institution following its destruction.”
Another antisemitic incident motivated by anti-Zionism occurred in San Francisco, where Juan Diaz-Rivas, Alejandro Flores-Lamas, and others law enforcement is working to identify, allegedly beat up a Jewish victim in the middle of the night. Diaz-Rivas and Flores-Lamas, along with their associates, approached the victim while shouting “F—ck the Jews, Free Palestine,” according to the office of the San Francis district attorney.
“[O]ne of them punched the victim, who fell to the ground, hit his head and lost consciousness,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement. “Allegedly, Mr. Diaz-Rivas and others in the group continued to punch and kick the victim while he was down. A worker at a nearby business heard the altercation and antisemitic language and attempted to intervene. While trying to help the victim, he was kicked and punched.”
According to data released by the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) latest Audit of Antisemitic Incidents in April, antisemitism in the US is surging to break “all previous annual records.”
In 2024 alone, the ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, an eruption of hatred not recorded in the nearly thirty years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Algemeiner parsed the ADL data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
“In 2024, hatred toward Israel was a driving force behind antisemitism across the US, with more than half of all antisemitic incidents referencing Israel or Zionism,” Oren Segal, ADL senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence, said when the report was released. “These incidents, along with all those documented in the audit, serve as a clear reminder that silence is not an option. Good people must stand up, push back, and confront antisemitism wherever it appears. And that starts with understanding what fuels it and learning to recognize it in all its forms.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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