When Abraham Rozenberg was preparing to emigrate from England to Israel, he received a message in 1948 that changed everything: his father, from whom he had not heard from for three years, survived the Holocaust.

Rozenberg had been separated from his family in 1943, first came as a Jew to a satellite camp of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia and was deported from there to Buchenwald, where he happened to see his weakened father again in 1945.

It was a short reunion.

Rozenberg was sent on.

On a death march to Theresienstadt, where the Soviet army liberated him.

He came to England via Prague, where he began an apprenticeship as a mechanic and had the wish that so many Jews had in the post-war years: out of Europe.

Emigrate to Palestine, later Israel.

The main thing is away.

David Lindenfeld

Volunteer.

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But with the news that reaches him in England, his plans change too.

Rozenberg now wants to go to the place where almost no one wants to be anymore: He wants to go to the destroyed land of those who have caused so much suffering to him, his family and millions of other Jews.

Because there, in Friedberg near Frankfurt, is supposed to be his father.

Different situation

Rozenberg's story is one of many moving individual fates documented in the exhibition “Our Courage: Jews in Europe 1945 to 48” at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. The show, organized in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow, with pieces from all over the world, is the first exhibition to be devoted to the life of Jews during this period from a transnational perspective by examining the events of the immediate post-war years on seven different Places. These include two German cities, East Berlin and Frankfurt, but also lesser-known places such as the Lower Silesian community Dzierżoniów, which became a place of hope for Jews in Poland after the Second World War.

It is the bird's eye view of a topic that has long received little attention in public discourse, through which the individual elements can historically be combined to form a large picture of this time.

Personal fates like that of Rozenberg, documented through films, audio interviews, photos and private objects, create closeness and the possibility of empathy.

They show that after mass murder, persecution and years of fear, the Jews shared the same fate, but their situation was completely different everywhere.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons

In Białystok, Poland, where more than half of the population was Jewish before the Holocaust, only a thousand of the 100,000 Jews living before the war had survived. It is also called the “dead city” in the exhibition. In Budapest, on the other hand, the “city of survivors”, a large part of the already planned deportations were prevented because the Red Army captured the Hungarian capital in time. It was true everywhere: with the Holocaust, Jewish life was largely wiped out in all of Europe, and very few Jews wanted to stay. Most of them were on the run, partly because of new anti-Semitic attacks such as the pogrom in Kielce, Poland in 1946. Photographs by photographer Julia Pirotte show beaten people in sick beds and dozens of coffins for the more than 40 dead. Hundreds of thousands were considered Displaced Persons (DP),they lived in camps like the one in Frankfurt-Zeilsheim.