Jewish Displaced Persons in Camp Bergen-Belsen 1945-1950

Jewish Displaced Persons in Camp Bergen-Belsen 1945-1950 PDF Author: Erik Somers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Belsen (Bergen, Celle, Germany)
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Jewish Displaced Persons in Camp Bergen-Belsen 1945-1950

Jewish Displaced Persons in Camp Bergen-Belsen 1945-1950 PDF Author: Erik Somers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Belsen (Bergen, Celle, Germany)
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description


Life Reborn

Life Reborn PDF Author: Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Belsen

Belsen PDF Author: Joanne Reilly
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415138277
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The military and medical liberation and British government and British population response to the disclosure of what occurred at Belsen.

After Daybreak

After Daybreak PDF Author: Ben Shephard
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307424634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
“I find it hard even now to get into focus all these horrors, my mind is really quite incapable of taking in everything I saw because it was all so completely foreign to everything I had previously believed or thought possible.” British Major Ben Barnett’s words echoed the sentiments shared by medical students, Allied soldiers, members of the clergy, ambulance drivers, and relief workers who found themselves utterly unprepared to comprehend, much less tend to, the indescribable trauma of those who survived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British in April 1945 was a defining point in history: the moment the world finally became inescapably aware of the Holocaust. But what happened after Belsen was liberated is still a matter of dispute. Was it an epic of medical heroism or the culmination of thirteen years of indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews? This startling investigation by acclaimed documentary filmmaker and historian Ben Shephard draws on an extraordinary range of materials–contemporary diaries, military documents, and survivors’ testimonies–to reconstruct six weeks at Belsen beginning on April 15, 1945, and reveals what actually caused the post-liberation deaths of nearly 14,000 concentration camp inmates who might otherwise have lived. Why did it take almost two weeks to organize a proper medical response? Why were the medical teams sent to Belsen so poorly equipped? Why, when specialists did arrive, did they get so much of the medicine plain wrong? For the first time, Shephard explores the humanitarian and medical issues surrounding the liberation of the camp and provides a detailed, illuminating account that is far more complex than had been previously revealed. This gripping book confronts the terrifying aftermath of war with questions that still haunt us today.

Waiting for Hope

Waiting for Hope PDF Author: Angelika Königseder
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810114777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
After the defeat of Germany in World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were transported to camps maintained by the Allies for displaced persons (DPs). In Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany, historians Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel offer a social and cultural history of the DP camps. Starting with the discovery of Nazi death camps by Allied forces, Königseder and Wetzel describe the inadequate preparations that had been made for the starving and sick camp survivors. News of having to live in camps again was devastating to these survivors, and many Jewish survivors were forced to live side by side with non-Jewish anti-Semitic DPs. The Allied soldiers were ill equipped to deal with the physical wreckage and mental anguish of their charges, but American rabbis soon arrived to perform invaluable work helping the survivors cope with grief and frustration. Königseder and Wetzel devote attention to autonomous Jewish life in the DP camps. Theater groups and orchestras prospered in and around the camps; Jewish newspapers began to publish; kindergartens and schools were founded; and a tuberculosis hospital and clinic for DPs was established in Bergen-Belsen. Underground organizations coalesced to handle illegal immigration to Israel and the training of soldiers to fight in Palestine. In many places there was even a last flowering of shtetl life before the DPs began to scatter to Israel, Germany, and other countries. Drawing on original documents and the work of other historians, Waiting for Hope sheds light on a largely unknown period in postwar Jewish history and shows that the suffering of the survivors did not end with the war.

New Beginnings

New Beginnings PDF Author: Hagit Lavsky
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814330098
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A sociohistorical analysis of the construction of Jewish life and national identity in post-Holocaust Germany.

Witness to Evil

Witness to Evil PDF Author: Isaac Levy
Publisher: Halban Publishers
ISBN: 1905559887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
In April 1945 Rev. Isaac Levy, Senior Jewish Chaplain to the British Liberation Army, accompanied the Forces into Germany. Only days after Passover celebrations, he entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The prisoners, seeing the Star of David in the cap of this army officer, were exultant. In spite of the enormity of their suffering, they had survived. But further into the camp, within a wire-enclosed area, Isaac Levy found the hell that was Belsen, the barely-living with the dead. Overcome with a sense of utter helplessness, he participated in the deeply disturbing task of burying some 20,000 dead. Medical supplies, food and clean clothing were grossly inadequate. Urgent requests for aid and assistance from organisations in London were sometimes met with great compassion but all too often were inadequate. Isaac Levy was frequently in trouble with the military authorities — they showed a profound lack of understanding of the fact that the Jews could not return to their native lands where they had been persecuted and seen their families sent off to the gas chambers. Now would the authorities countenance a Jewish homeland in Israel.

The Liberation of the Camps

The Liberation of the Camps PDF Author: Dan Stone
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300216033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
A moving, deeply researched account of survivors’ experiences of liberation from Nazi death camps and the long, difficult years that followed When tortured inmates of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps were liberated in 1944 and 1945, the horror of the atrocities came fully to light. It was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners, yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives. Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors—their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors’ immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead.

Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen PDF Author: Marlis Buchholz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783835307940
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Belsen 1945

Belsen 1945 PDF Author: Suzanne Bardgett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Recent years have brought a more intimate understanding of how survivors experienced the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, of the challenge faced by the army and medical relief teams who buried the dead and tried to save lives, how this effort was recorded at the time, and how its memory has been passed on. This volume brings together essays from international experts based on the 60th anniversary seminar held at the Imperial War Museum in 2005. It also includes testimony from survivors, eyewitness accounts from liberators and relief workers, and the scripts of two BBC radio broadcasts. With the benefits of new documentation and a rigorous scholarly approach, this book offers an original and at times controversial reassessment of the camp, its liberation, and the way Belsen is remembered in Britain and Germany.