A sort ofWhen Abraham Rosenberg was preparing to immigrate to Israel from England, he received news that changed everything in 1948: his father had survived the Holocaust for three years, and he had been out of contact for three years. Rozenberg was separated from his family in 1943. He first came to a satellite camp of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia as a Jew, and was then deported from there to Buchenwald, where he happened to see his weakened again in 1945. Father. This is a short reunion. Rosenberg was sent. On the death march to Theresienstadt, the Soviet army liberated him there. He came to England via Prague, where he began to be an apprentice as a mechanic, and had the desire of many Jews after the war: to leave Europe. Moved to Palestine and later moved to Israel. The main thing is to leave.
But with the news of his in England, his plan has also changed. Rosenberg now wants to go to a place almost no one wants to go again: he wants to go to the destroyed land that has caused so much suffering for him, his family and millions of other Jews. Because there, Friedberg, near Frankfurt, should be his father.
Different situations
Rozenberg’s story is one of many touching personal destinies recorded in the exhibition “Our Courage: Jews in Europe from 1945 to 48” at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute of Jewish History and Culture-Simon Dubnow. Works come from all over the world. It is the first exhibition dedicated to Jewish life in this period from a transnational perspective through censorship events. The later years are in seven different places.These include two German cities, East Berlin and Frankfurt, but there are also some lesser-known places, such as the Lower Silesian community Dzierżoniów, in Second World War Become a place of hope for Polish Jews.
It is a bird’s-eye view of a topic that has received little attention in public discourse for a long time. Through it, various elements of history can be combined to form a big picture of the era. Personal fate like Rozenberg, recorded through movies, audio interviews, photos and personal items, creates the possibility of intimacy and empathy. They show that after the Holocaust, persecution, and years of fear, the Jews have the same fate, but their situation is completely different everywhere.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people
In Bialystok, Poland, before massacre More than half of the population is Jewish, and only 1,000 of the 100,000 Jews who lived there before the war survived. It is also called the “Dead City” in the exhibition. On the other hand, in Budapest, the “city of survivors”, due to the timely occupation of the Hungarian capital by the Red Army, a large part of the planned deportations were prevented. This is everywhere: with the Holocaust, Jewish life throughout Europe was basically wiped out, and few Jews wanted to stay. Most of them are at large, partly because of new anti-Semitic attacks, such as the 1946 massacre in Kielce, Poland. Photographer Julia Pirotte’s photo shows the assaulted person lying in a hospital bed, and dozens of coffins of more than 40 dead people. Thousands of people are considered Displaced People (DP) and they live in camps like Frankfurt-Zeilsheim.
