Judaism in the Post-War Era: Of Dead Cities and New Courage

Rosa Orlean had done it.

She had survived the ghettos and camps.

She survived Auschwitz.

But after liberation from the extermination camp, she did not return to a quiet life in 1945, as she had had in her middle-class family in Krakow before 1933.

There was a difficult path ahead of her.

Theresa White

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Rosa Orlean, born in Kraków in 1927, made her way to her hometown.

She wanted to gain a foothold there again.

After her dormitory in the Polish city was attacked, she could no longer imagine living there.

She moved on.

The young woman became a DP.

DPs, Displaced Persons, were people who no longer had a home.

Others lived in their homes, often hundreds of kilometers away.

After the Second World War, after twelve years of terror, persecution and the murder of six million Jews in Europe by the National Socialists, there were hundreds of thousands of DPs.

How did the Jews feel after the war?

The continent was a different one. His flourishing Jewish life was brutally cut off. Those freed from the extermination camps, the people who were able to leave their hiding places and those who were rescued in time on a death march usually only wanted one thing: get away.

For a long time little has been researched about how the Jewish people fared after the Allies' victory over the Nazis. The show “Our Courage. Jews in Europe 1945–48 ”, the second temporary exhibition at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, is dedicated to these experiences. Building on a multi-year research project by the museum in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow, the curators Kata Bohus and Erik Riedel, under the direction of Werner Hanak, have compiled personal stories that make history tangible. The team received scientific advice from researchers Atina Grossmann and Elisabeth Gallas.

With the help of interviews, photos and objects, the life paths tell of self-assurance and the rebuilding of the Jewish community, but also of flight, expulsion and life in the camp, which determined the lives of many survivors even after 1945.

Frankfurt as the “hub” of emigration

Rosa Orlean also ended up in a camp again, in Zeilsheim. She wanted to go from Krakow via Frankfurt to America. On her way there she found a suitcase with hundreds of cigarettes in it. It was her ticket out. Cigarettes were hard currency, she exchanged them for clothes and food. At night she slept on the suitcase. In an interview at the exhibition, she says that everyone just called her “the girl with the suitcase”. When she arrived in Frankfurt, she was banned from entering the United States because of a lung disease. This is how the city on the Main became her new home.

The exhibition “Our Courage” takes visitors to a total of seven European cities and tells of the very different experiences that Jews had after the Shoah. In addition to Frankfurt, as the center of the American occupation zone, strongly marked as the “hub” of emigration, the route through the varied show leads to Budapest, the “city of survivors”, where the Jewish population was still pushing the reconstruction of the destroyed synagogue in 1945 . But failed attempts to reestablish Jewish life are also shown: In Bialystok, Poland, where more than 100,000 Jews lived before the Holocaust, the community gave up trying to gain a foothold again in the 1950s - it is called the “dead city” Place in the museum. And also in Dzierzoniow in Lower Silesia,Initially called the “Polish Jerusalem”, the 100,000 Jewish migrants who had returned from Central Asia withdrew after pogroms in the 1950s.

A symbol of self-assertion

The show shows that the Jewish post-war period from 1945 to 1948 was “more than an epilogue to the Shoah,” as David Dilmaghani, the head of the city's cultural department, puts it.

It is more than a waiting period: many survivors were sitting on packed suitcases.

In Bari in Italy, another station in the exhibition, they waited for passage across the Mediterranean, in Zeilsheim they waited for visas to enter the British mandate of Palestine.

But the survivors actively organized after the traumatic experiences of the Shoah.

The name of the show is derived from a newspaper that was published in Zeilsheim in Yiddish.

In Amsterdam, Jewish communities fought to have Jewish orphans returned to their care.

Many marriages and children were born in the DP camps.

A simple wedding dress, which was worn by many residents and passed on in the camp, reminds in the exhibition of this self-assertion, this will to live.

The turning point for the Jewish community

The turning point, the end point of the post-war period, did not form for the Jewish community in 1949, when the Federal Republic and the GDR came into being.

But the reorganization of the world in the previous year, as the museum director Mirjam Wenzel says.

In 1948 the United Nations passed human rights and the punishment of genocide.

The partition plan for the British Mandate Palestine is drawn up, the State of Israel is created.

It becomes a new home for many stranded people and the beginning of a new chapter.

In its last section, the exhibition embeds the stories of the individuals, stories of cigarettes and wedding dresses, into the bigger picture with a look at these historical moments.

The temporary exhibition “Our Courage” can be seen from August 31 to January 18 in the Jewish Museum at Bertha-Pappenheim-Platz 1.