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" U.N. EXHIBIT REMEMBERS "
When the World Turned
Its Back on Stateless
Jewish Refugees
Andrew Silow-Carroll | New York Jewish Week via JTA
I n 2017, Deborah Veach went back to
Germany, looking for the site of the
displaced persons camp where she and her
parents had been housed after World War II. They
were in suspension between the lives her parents led
in Belarus before they were shattered by the Nazis
and the unknown fate awaiting them as refugees
without a country.

To her dismay, and despite the fact that
Foehrenwald was one of the largest Jewish DP
centers in the American-controlled zone of Germany,
she found barely a trace. A complex that once
included a yeshiva, a police force, a fi re brigade, a
youth home, a theater, a post offi ce and a hospital
was remembered by almost no one except a local
woman who ran a museum in a former bath house.

“It was sort of an accident of history that we
were there in that particular camp in Germany,
of all places, with no ties, no extended family, no
place to call home,” said Veach, who was born at
Foehrenwald in 1949 and lives in New Jersey. Now,
“they renamed it. They changed the names of all the
streets. There is nothing recognizable about the fact
that it had been a DP camp.”
Veach is part of a now-aging cohort of children
born or raised in the DP camps, the last with a
fi rsthand connection to the experience of some
250,000 Jewish survivors who passed through them
at the end of the war. To make sure memories of the
camps survive them, the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research and the United Nations Department of
Global Communications have staged a short-term
exhibit, “After the End of the World: Displaced
Persons and Displaced Persons Camps.”
On display at U.N. headquarters in New York City
since last week and through Feb. 23, it is intended
to illuminate “how the impact of the Holocaust
continued to be felt after the Second World War
ended, and the courage and resilience of those that
survived in their eff orts to rebuild their lives despite
having lost everything,” according to a press release.

Among the artifacts on display are dolls created by
Jewish children and copies of some of the 70-odd
16 JANUARY 19, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
A group of children from the Jaeger Kaserne DP camp in Germany read a Yiddish newspaper in an
undated photo.

newspapers published by residents, as well as
photographs of weddings, theatrical performances,
sporting events and classroom lessons.

‘The task of rebuilding their lives’
The exhibit is “about the displaced persons
themselves, about their lives and their hopes and
their dreams, their ambitions, their initiatives,” said
Debó rah Dwork, who directs the Center for the
Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes
Against Humanity at the Graduate Center-CUNY,
who served as the scholar adviser for the exhibition.

“There’s no point where the residents of these
DP camps were just sitting around waiting for other
people to do things for them,” she told the New York
Jewish Week. “They took initiative and developed a
whole range of cultural and educational programs.”
As early as 1943, as the war displaced millions
of people, dozens of nations came to Washington
and signed onto the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Authority. (Despite its name, it preceded
the founding of the United Nations.) After the war, the
British and U.S. military were in charge of supplying
food, protection and medical care in hundreds of
camps throughout Germany and Austria, and UNRRA
administered the camps on a day-to-day basis.

Early on, Jewish Holocaust survivors — some who
suff ered in concentration camps and others who had
escaped to the Soviet Union — were put in DP camps
alongside their former tormentors, until the United
States agreed to place them in separate compounds.

Unable or unwilling to return to the countries where
they had lost relatives, property and any semblance
of a normal life, they began a waiting game as few
countries, including the United States, were willing
to take them in, and Palestine was being blockaded
by the British.

Abiding antisemitism was not the only reason they
remained stateless. “Jews were [accused of being]
subversives, Communists, rebels, troublemakers and
the world war quickly gave way to Cold War, and with it,
the notion that Hitler had been defeated and what we