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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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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

The United States has imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the US Treasury Department confirmed on Thursday.

Khan was sanctioned by the US after spearheading the ICC’s issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over their role in the ongoing war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

The White House announced on Monday that Khan would be the first member of the ICC to be issued personal sanctions, and both the White House and Treasury Department noted on Thursday that he has been added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.

Khan’s assets in the United States are now frozen, and he is banned from entering the country. The announcement came on the heels of Trump’s executive order last week to punish members of the ICC for targeting Israel.

Trump’s order lambasted the ICC for its “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Trump stated that the ICC “abused its power” to pursue an unsubstantiated and politically motivated criminal case against Israeli leaders. 

The ICC responded to Trump with a forceful condemnation, stressing that the court produces “independent and impartial” work. 

“The court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world,” the ICC said.

Trump signed the executive order after Senate Democrats blocked legislation to sanction the ICC in January. The bill ultimately failed by a vote of 54-45, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) being the sole Democrat to vote in favor of punishing the ICC. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) criticized the bill as “poorly drafted and deeply problematic.” The House had passed the legislation.

In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.

US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.

The post ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer

Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

A Boston Municipal Court judge has dismissed hate crime charges against two Harvard University graduate students who allegedly assaulted a Jewish student at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday.

As previously reported, an anti-Israel demonstration escalated to apparent harassment when Ibrahim Bharmal, former editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo were filmed encircling a Jewish student with a mob that screamed “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at him while he desperately attempted to free himself from the mass of bodies.

Antisemitism on Harvard’s campus skyrocketed after the Oct. 7 atrocities. Harvard stood out as a hub of pro-Hamas support for the terrorist group’s massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. While Hamas’s brutal treatment of civilians — which included rape, torture, and beheading of children — shocked the world and led to international condemnation, it emboldened pro-Hamas Harvard students, and later, Harvard faculty to target Jewish and pro-Israel members of the campus community with harassment and intimidation.

Following the Oct. 2023 mobbing of a Jewish student, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged by the local district attorney with assault, battery, and violations of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Acts, a hate crime statute that forbids the obstruction of “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” — to which they pleaded not guilty.

The hate crime charge was dismissed on Monday by Judge Stephen McClenon. The students will still face one misdemeanor count of assault and battery each.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, Bharmal has been continuously rewarded with new and better opportunities since allegedly assaulting the Jewish student. Harvard neither disciplined him nor removed him from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, a coveted post once held by former US President Barack Obama. As of last year, he was awarded a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.”

Antisemitism in the US surged to catastrophic and unprecedented levels in 2023 — the year in which Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo’s alleged crimes took place — rising a harrowing 140 percent, according to a 2024 audit conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The ADL recorded 8,873 incidents in 2023 — an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.

The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Hamas terroistr group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.

Such incidents occurred throughout the US. In California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. In a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, a group of vandals desecrated graves at a Jewish cemetery. At Harvard, America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious university, a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David dangling two men of color from a noose.

Other outrages were expressive but subtle. In November, large numbers of people traveling to attend the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC either could not show up or were forced to scramble last second and final alternative transportation because numerous bus drivers allegedly refused to transport them there. Hundreds of American Jews from Detroit, for example, were left stranded at Dulles Airport, according to multiple reports.

In another case at Yale University, a campus newspaper came under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas raping Israeli women, marking a rare occasion in which the publication openly doubted reports of sexual assault.

Harvard University recently agreed, on paper, to be part of the solution for eradicating antisemitism from its own campus.

Last month, it settled two antisemitism lawsuits, which were merged by a federal judge in November 2024, that accused school officials of refusing to discipline perpetrators of antisemitic conduct. Legal counsel for the university initially discredited the students who brought the legal actions, attempting to have their allegations thrown out of court on the grounds that they “lacked standing” and “legally cognizable claim” even as it proclaimed “the importance of the need to address antisemitism at the university,” according to court documents.

With the settlement, which came one day after the inauguration of President US Donald Trump — who has vowed to tax the endowments of universities where antisemitism is rampant — Harvard avoided a lengthy legal fight that could have been interpreted by the Jewish community as a willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination to which Jewish students are subjected.

“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” Harvard said in a press release. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research, and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”

Per the agreement, the university will apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies (NDAB), recognize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, and explicitly state that targeting and individual on the basis of their Zionism constitutes a violation of school rules.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll

Voters line up for the US Senate run-off election, at a polling location in Marietta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar.

Democrats in the US widely sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, according to a new poll.

The Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9-11, found that 35 percent of Democrats indicate their sympathies “are more with” Palestinians, and only 9 percent say they are more sympathetic toward Israelis. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Democrats responded that their sympathies are “about equal” between both Palestinians and Israelis, and another 24 percent were not sure.

Notably, Democratic “sympathies” toward Israelis have dramatically declined in the past two months, coinciding with the transition of the Trump administration into the White House. On Dec. 21, according to the poll, 21 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israelis and 25 percent sympathized more with Palestinians. On Jan. 18, two days before US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Democratic sympathy for Palestinians climbed to 27 percent. During that same timeframe, sympathies for Israelis plunged to 18 percent among Democrats. 

Republicans are far more sympathetic toward Israel than Democrats are, the poll found. Sixty percent of Republicans expressed sympathy with Israelis this month, while 6 percent expressed more sympathy toward Palestinians.

In October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, 73 percent of Republicans indicated more sympathy for Israelis and 3 percent indicated more sympathy for Palestinians. As for Democrats, 34 percent had more sympathy for Israelis immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, and 16 percent had more sympathy for the Palestinians.

Overall, although a plurality of Americans still supports Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians seems to be gaining steam. American sympathy for Israelis remained virtually unchanged from Jan. 18 to Feb. 8, dropping slightly from 32 percent to 31 percent. However, sympathy for Palestinians spiked from 15 percent to 21 percent within the same three-week span. According to the poll, American support for Palestinians has climbed to its highest level since 2017. 

Trump’s recent proposal to vacate Palestinians from Gaza and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” is unpopular with the American public, according to the poll. Only 19 percent of Americans support the plan, the poll found. The policy proposal suffers from weak support among American liberals, with only 6 percent of Democrats supporting it and 74 percent opposing it. In contrast, Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestinians into neighboring Arab states enjoys substantially greater support among Republicans, with 39 percent agreeing with Trump’s proposal and 33 percent disagreeing with it. 

The growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a major flashpoint in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Democratic lawmakers have become increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to the Gaza war, potentially reflecting shifting opinions of the Democratic electorate regarding the Jewish state. Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on former US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians. In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, sparking outrage among supporters of the Jewish state.

The post US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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