Liberation and Landsberg
ELI TOLD THE next story often, from the time Burt and I were quite young, and in my mind I titled it “Escape from the Train”:
I saw there is no choice, I had to go and we went by train, some type, we didn’t know which direction. And there, the next morning, the train was attacked by English planes, or American planes. And they killed the engineer of the locomotive and each time there was an attack the Germans told us to go out, and when the attack subsided they told us to go back. A lot of people were killed at that time and one of these running away for shelter. I and another guy, Baikovich,1 I saw him, I says, look, there is no sense, let us go back, and the Germans said to [us, go] back. We couldn’t go to the left because the railroad station was burning; other places, I heard, with those people who went there, the native Germans shot at them, probably they shot at them, they were afraid, and there was shooting and fire—I suspected, [but] I didn’t know the war was over.
But then we went under [the] train elevation, through a, like a sewer pipe, . . . we went on the other side of the elevation, and there we felt entirely different atmosphere. It was quiet, and peaceful, and we start to walk through the forest—then we went with another few other refugees, I know Dr. Lichtenstein, he lives in the Bronx, and some other people—and we all went together and we slept overnight in the woods. Baikovich was very hungry and he says, I want to go to a German house and get some food. I says, You are crazy, you will be killed and reported; don’t do that. And I remember when we are going already to this place we heard a truck coming. And we went down the elevation into a ravine, with boxes, cans, and something to hide, and we saw that there are German soldiers and higher, there were [unintelligible] driving. I get out at night and then we were hiding somewhere and there are two houses, and we saw a German soldier came and his wife came out and she was crying, and crying, and she says don’t go, he says, I have to go, and he left and then we saw it is dangerous. So what we did, we went . . . —That was the first day, I think. It started to get a little light, and we went, we saw a chapel, we saw a chapel in the road, and we tried to hide in the chapel.
And, sure enough, we came up and there was, you know, there, religious artifacts, and pictures and everything, a little tiny room for prayer, what they have it all over Europe. And I went up on the shoulders of another and tried to open the boards to go up and hide. We couldn’t, we couldn’t open the boards. Then we left to the woods, and the forest, and we slept all night and the rain was raining. We heard shooting all over, from all places, and we knew that the Russians already or Americans are near, and we were sleeping there. Then, middle of the night I saw—. . . . I heard voices, and I give a look, and then I see, the sun didn’t come up yet, the two shadows coming out covered with protecting colors [camouflage], canvas, what they have. Usually the military, the German pilots had it, airplanes. And sure enough we heard them talking in a foreign language.
And we got up—We were frightened, and, after, we saw the insignia[?]. And one guy took out cigarettes, the other took out bread, and he said, Here you have it. It was the biggest feast we had for a long time. Then as the day came on more people came in, more refugees came in, and then on the third day, I think, like, twenty-ninth of April, a guy, a Polish guy . . . came out and said, the Americans are down the field, in the forest. I said, you are a dirty liar. And he said, you, doctor, are stupid. I am telling you that these are the Americans. And then he says, I will prove it to you. And he comes an hour later with a lot of food. And I said to the other guys, you know, this fellow there, he didn’t get it [from the Americans?]. He says, You know what? You want to stay there, stay.
To make sure enough, another guy went and we found out the Americans are [there], and he saw the American soldiers, motorcycles—and American motorcycles, and soldiers, we kissed them, and so on. And he went into a German place, and he says, Give us place for these people. And the German, you know, he still didn’t want. He put us [in] the attic. And then [in] the attic this doctor—Mr.Koton, came, and he started to choke me. He was a Lithuanian [Jew], I knew him—his father, his son—he got crazy, you know. And I took and I was fighting, till others separated us, and then we went down and they gave us food. He got out of his mind, just like that. Suddenly he’s free, and you know he didn’t know what to do. Loss of senses, I don’t know. After, he was embarrassed. They separated [us]—He just choked me. Then we went down and they had us meat and pea soup and eggs, of course, and other people got sick, got diarrhea, but I was able.
In Tape 1, Eli elaborated a bit: “We went to the attic . . . there were quite a number of prisoners, about ten people. We went to the attic and the hay; it was good. At least we had a place to warm up. . . . I ate like a horse and I couldn’t finish, one plate after another.”
Although Eli told us little about Dachau or the Kovno ghetto when we were growing up, Burt and I knew well the story of the escape. It was happy and heroic, so we thought of our father as someone who had gone through horrible things but who was not essentially a victim. It was difficult learning more, hearing of lashings and humiliations, hard-earned supplies of food obtained at great risk, then taken away at the ghetto gate—stories that I remember as unbearable when I heard my father tell them, the frustration returning in his voice, but which appear in the recordings in a matter-of-fact way. The escape from the train, however, was a story of heroism and personal victory over the Nazis. Eli wrote it up for the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung, the newspaper of the Landsberg displaced persons camp, in a “humoristic” way, as he described in the NYPL interview (Rochelson 73).2 He was wise to make that the first detailed story of the Holocaust that he shared with his children.
Eli and many others who were liberated at Dachau and in the surrounding forests ended up in the Landsberg-am-Lech displaced persons camp in the American Zone, the part of Germany controlled by the US Army after the war. Landsberg had been the site of a subcamp of Dachau, and in the town was the prison where Hitler, in the 1920s, had written Mein Kampf. After the war, Eli recalled, the lagerführer of Dachau 1, who had given the prisoners the big speech upon arrival, was hanged at Landsberg after his trial. The camp was the second largest DP camp in the American Zone, and, after October 1945, it housed only Jews.
In the DP camp Eli worked as a doctor, setting up the outpatient clinic. He worked closely with Dr. Solomon (Shlomo) Nabriski, also a Holocaust survivor from Kovno, who established and directed the Landsberg hospital, and with Dr. Jacob Oleiski, an agronomist from Kovno who had served as director of ORT in Lithuania from 1927 until the Nazi invasion (see “History of ORT”). Dr. Oleiski survived Dachau and became a leader in establishing ORT schools in the displaced persons camps, and he had a significant role in Landsberg as chief of the Culture Section. Both Dr. Nabriski and Dr. Oleiski appear with Eli in a photograph of the Landsberg hospital staff, as well as Dr. Berman and others mentioned in this narrative; Eli also saved less formal photos (figures 40, 41a, 41b, and 41c).3
Figure 40. Doctors, nurses, and others on the staff of the hospital at the Landsberg-am-Lech displaced persons camp. In the center row, seated from left to right, are Drs. Rochelson, Orlinskaya, Goldstein, Berman, Nabriski, Oleiski, and Poretsky (later Perry). The photograph is from the family collection, but it also appears in the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung, December 31, 1945, which provides the identifications. See “Fun Unzer Bilder-Galerje.”
Figures 41a and b. Less formal photographs of Eli at the Landsberg hospital. Family collection.
Figure 41c. Eli at Landsberg or in New York soon after arrival. This photo was taken at the same time and place as another photo in which he is with Jacob Oleiski, and thus it might have been taken in either place, since Dr. Oleiski spent time in New York. Family collection.
How do people set up a hospital in a former concentration camp right after they, themselves, have just been liberated? As Eli explained, they took beds, medications, and equipment from the Germans, who at that point could deny them nothing: “we went to the Germans . . . we took it. We didn’t ask any questions. . . . They had to give us” (Rochelson, NYPL interview 31). He went on to explain that “over 25,000 people went through our dispensary [the outpatient department] in about 9 months” (31), a number that would have included repeat visits, since the population of the camp was around five thousand. Many of the patients had lice, typhus, and typhoid fever, as well as dysentery and diarrhea. Many of them died, but many were brought back to life.
Many years later, Burt and I got to know one of our father’s Landsberg patients. In late October 2010 I went to the annual meeting of Assistance to Lithuanian Jews, in New York, at which my mother’s recent passing was commemorated. Josef Griliches leads this organization, the annual meetings of which are held on the weekend closest to the anniversary of the Kovno Great Action; that catastrophic event is remembered along with members of the organization who have died since the last meeting. At the door I saw and greeted Thelma Silber, widow of my father’s friend from medical school, Dr. Joseph Silber. Thelma didn’t recognize me at first, so I told her who I was. Just then an elderly gentleman entered. We had never met before, but when he heard my name he came up to me and greeted me with both enthusiasm and disbelief. “You are Rochelson?” he exclaimed. “Your father saved my life.” Nissan Krakinowski had been seventeen years old and liberated from a subcamp of Dachau, when he became sick from overeating. Then he developed pleurisy. Both his parents had been murdered, his father at the very start of the German occupation of Kaunas. He went to the infirmary at Landsberg extremely frightened. Sixty-five years later he remembered my father’s kindness and reassuring words, which helped him as much as his medical care. He told me that after talking with my father, those many years ago, he knew that he would be all right. When Nissan and I spoke in 2017, after I had listened to the audio of his Shoah Foundation interview, he confirmed what he had mentioned then, that he had been in the DP camp hospital for a year and a half. He also confirmed what he had told me before, that my father had saved his life both physically and emotionally.
Eli’s account of his time at Landsberg gains in detail both from files that he compiled and saved after the war and from archival and published sources. The documents that Eli used to reestablish his medical credentials contain a typewritten page, in English, documenting how he was invited by Dr. Nabriski to “assist in the establishment and operation of a hospital in the DP camp,” and that the hospital, when established in May 1945, included an outpatient department, which Eli led, two hundred beds for inpatient care, and a dental clinic.4 As the many printed hospital forms in YIVO Institute files make clear, DP Hospital 2014 was a highly professional institution from the outset, carefully tracking admissions and immunizations and issuing health certificates for patients examined.5 On February 9–11, 1946, Eli participated in a conference “of the delivered Jewish Doctors of the American Zone,” held at Landsberg.
A sense of the daily life at Landsberg can be found in the published letters of Major Irving Heymont, the Jewish American soldier who, assigned to run the camp for the US Army, became its chronicler. Heymont, in Landsberg from September to December 1945, published his detailed letters to his wife in Among the Survivors of the Holocaust nearly forty years later. He explains how he came to realize how much the effects of concentration camp experience influenced the lives and decisions of displaced persons, even making them reluctant to be transferred from the barracks of Landsberg to more amiable housing at Föhrenwald, another camp nearby: “To most of the people of the camp, the very mention of a ‘transport’ or move brings back bitter memories of when a transport or move to another camp meant that many were to die. . . . Now, they want to be secure in one place unless they know the move is a definite step along the path leading out of Europe” (75).6 Early on, by October 1945, Heymont succeeded in getting non-Jewish refugees moved to other camps. The goal of non-Jews was to be repatriated near their former homes, whereas for the Jews at Landsberg the goal was to leave Europe as soon as possible, and there had been friction between the two groups (17). Heymont was less draconian than other officials regarding black market activity in the camp, viewing arrests of small traders as unnecessary harassment when “all Germany is one black market” (60; see also 97). He recognized the paradox of trying to establish reasonable living conditions in a place that was, ideally, a very short-term way station, and yet intensive efforts were necessary.7 Although most displaced persons had emigrated by late 1949, the Landsberg camp did not close fully until October 1950 (108). Eli was there until late March 1946.
The camp was run jointly by the US Army and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Several observers castigated the military and UNRRA governors for inadequate food, clothing, cleaning equipment, and sanitary supplies. Dr. Lee Srole, a sociologist on leave from Hobart College who served as chief welfare officer at the camp, sent a letter of resignation in protest against conditions that he saw as resulting from official negligence. In the midst of an itemized list of concerns, Srole protested against both a weakened UNRRA and a US military government, which, “contrary to the letter and spirit of General Eisenhower’s Directives, on the one hand tends to protect and often coddle the Germans, and on the other callously neglects elementary human needs of those who were the first declared enemies of Nazism” (page 2 of report).8 Similarly, three months later, Judge Simon Rifkind prepared a report to the chief of staff in which he urged the American military to insist that Germany do its part: the Jewish displaced persons “object to American food given to them as an act of grace. They prefer German food delivered to them as of right” (Rifkind 6).
For all their sympathy for the concentration camp survivors, Major Heymont and others were appalled at sanitary conditions in the camp, in particular at the filthy conditions that persisted in camp kitchens as well as latrines (Heymont, 10–11 and frequently throughout; see also Smith).9 Apart from being disgusted aesthetically by overflowing toilets and excrement in corridors, observers feared the spread of disease and epidemics. In his account of the Landsberg DP camp, Major Heymont praised the hospital as one of “two bright spots” in terms of sanitation; the camp schools, including the ORT schools run by Oleiski, were the other (11).
Regarding sanitation specifically, Eli’s typewritten summary of his contributions confirms the hospital’s “strict enforcement” of policies promoting sanitation. No one was admitted without being first “deloused and bathed,” and after three violations of sanitary rules, “the violator might be evicted from the camp.” In March 1946, UNRRA staff conducted a “Sanitary Month,”10 at the end of which the Sanitation and Health Office held a “festive closing” at which both Dr. Nabriski and Dr. Rochelson presented lectures. A 4″ by 6″ card in Eli’s personal archive contains the program for this event; it is written in Yiddish but, like the newspaper and innumerable posters and flyers, printed in Latin type (figure 42).11 Dr. Nabriski spoke on “Abortion as a Social Problem” and Eli gave a lecture on “Sexual Diseases, Their Rise and Prevention.”12 Awards were given to contest winners in art and writing, presumably on subjects concerning sanitation, as well as for the cleanest rooms and corridors. The event was designed to appeal to all ages, and the program suggests a lighthearted and celebratory tone, even given the serious lecture topics.
The last item on the Landsberg hospital’s sanitary colloquium program is a performance by the orchestra of St. Ottilien, a musical group made up of survivors in the DP camp and hospital at a former monastery of that name. The orchestra is best known for having played at the Liberation Concert of May 27, 1945, an event held at St. Ottilien and led by Dr. Zalman Grinberg.13 It was considered to be the first formal gathering of Holocaust survivors (Hilliard chapter 1). Documents in the YIVO Institute files attest to a wide variety of organizations at the Landsberg camp, including landsmanshaftn (organizations of survivors from towns in Eastern Europe, which frequently held memorial meetings), sports clubs, and chess clubs. A historical commission undertook a folklore survey of camp inhabitants, and parties were held on Hanukkah and other occasions.14 I have no idea which, if any, of these events and activities Eli might have participated in. In later years, although he joined various organizations, he was not an especially active member. He had little interest in team sports, and only discovered the Sports section in the New York Times during the 1972 Bobby Fischer/Boris Spassky world championship chess competition. Had he still been at the camp, he might have enjoyed the “First Jewish Chess Olympiad,” a competition among representatives of sixteen DP camps in the American Zone, held in September 1946, but that was three months after he left for the United States.15 (The opening ceremonies for this event, too, featured a concert by the St. Ottilien orchestra.) Eli did not live in camp housing but rather in a private boarding house. However, if there is no evidence that he participated in group activities other than medical, the letters he saved from his time at Landsberg and after attest to close relationships with colleagues and others.
Figure 42. Program of closing events for a public conference at Landsberg, underlining presumably by Eli Rochelson. Family collection. The translation (of the transliterated Yiddish) by Rivka Schiller reads as follows:
Sanitation and Health Office at the Jewish Center Landsberg
Invitation
The Sanitation and Health Office has the honor of inviting you to the festive closing of the propaganda month for the cleanliness and hygiene that will take place Wednesday, March the 27th of this year, in the theater hall, at promptly 7:00 o’clock in the evening, according to the following program:
Lecture from Dr. Nabriski on the subject “Abortion as a Social Problem.”
Lecture from Dr. Rochelson on the subject “Sexual Diseases, Their Rise and Prevention” (with photographic slides).
Distribution of awards for the winner of the contests for the best picture and for the best schoolwork [i.e., essays].
Distribution of awards for the cleanliest rooms and corridors.
Closing word.
Orchestra from St. Ottilien and their repertoire.
Sanitation and Health Office
In Landsberg Eli had what he always described as a platonic relationship with a teenaged girl, Masha, but it was clear that the friendship was tinged with romance. He was very open about this friendship, and our family albums included photos of Masha as a lovely young woman, one of which is inscribed on the back in Yiddish, “As a sign of good friendship I give you my picture. For you, Ilija. Your handed-over [ibergegebeneh] Masha.” The inscription is dated Landsberg, 26-VII [July]-46, more than seven weeks after Eli left for America, and it seems to have been written with humor and affection (figure 43).16 However, a letter dated June 6, from Regina Keller, who rented rooms to both Eli and Dr. Nabriski, suggests a difficult parting when my father left Landsberg. Regina writes of Masha, “I’m sure she will answer your three letters and two telegrams which I brought to her,” and adds that, as Eli had asked her to do, she gave Masha “a beautiful bouquet of roses and carnations together with your business card. Her happiness was really huge.”17
When our family traveled to Israel in 1968, we visited Masha, her husband, and her children. I still remember the extraordinary cakes she baked for us, and Eli’s and Masha’s delight at seeing one another again. Recently, as I began working on this book and Burt and I combed through our father’s papers that were among our recently deceased mother’s belongings, we decided to try to find Masha again. We located her via the internet, and visited, separately, with her and her family in the winter and summer of 2013. Masha told Burt of how our father had taken her to a movie theater outside the camp to see Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire in The Enchanted Cottage—dubbed in German and titled Mit den Aügen der Liebe (With the Eyes of Love)—a romantic film about two damaged people transformed by their love for each other. When I spoke with her, Masha reminisced about how the DP camp, to its younger inhabitants, was a remarkable liberation after wartime life, and how they laughed at but enjoyed the mismatched shoes and oddly sized clothing (so criticized by camp inspectors) that came to their barracks.18
Dad never mentioned another woman from Landsberg, whom Burt discovered when he asked a German-speaking friend, Roland Pabst, to translate some letters and a small hardbound notebook containing a handwritten diary. We have been able to reconstruct that she was a German woman who worked as a nurse at Landsberg and lived at the monastery of St. Ottilien, which, as noted, had also been converted to a hospital for Jewish displaced persons. She wrote to Eli at breaks in her workday and while on the night shift, and it is clear that their relationship was sexual. Atina Grossmann has written that “relations between Jewish men and German women remained a troubling and contentious issue for survivors” (228). Yet while such relationships were often resented by Jewish women and used by young men as a way to gain sexual experience, there were cases, as Grossmann reports from a male survivor, “of ‘deep reciprocal feelings’ in which ‘the answer would simply have to be that a man and woman met and fell in love” (230). From the evidence we have (and it is all from the woman’s perspective), this was the case with Eli and the nurse. As he prepared to leave for the United States, his lover acknowledged the temporary yet instrumental quality of their relationship. In a letter dated April 15, 1946, she wrote,
The bridge which I built you is done. You’re standing at the big change in your life, you have to build bridges again and you have to walk over those bridges and it will take years like this year. You have to go through your life, believe in it, trust in it and from time to time, just a little bit, think about me.19
She asked Eli to write to her from time to time; whether he did or not is unknown.
Of course, after the liberation Eli joined all the survivors in looking for their relatives, and this, too, was part of life in the DP camp. He placed ads in camp and survivor newspapers and wrote to the International Red Cross and American Jewish relief organizations. In an ad placed in a column of the first number of the Landsberger Cajtung titled Mir Zuchn Krojwim! (We Seek Relatives!) Eli mentioned that two weeks before the liberation his wife Sima had been seen in “lager Praust,” one of the work subcamps of Stutthof. In 1947 he contacted the World Jewish Congress about Borya, and Ruth Saffron, of their Child Care Division, wrote to the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Europe, noting that, while most of the 130 children in his transport had perished, some survived; “Perhaps this unfortunate child is among those who are alive.”20 The Central Committee returned disappointing news. Even as late as 1950—when his second wife, my mother, was pregnant with me—Eli wrote letters inquiring about his first wife and son. I suspect that, in some sense, he never stopped believing he might find them again.21 Others were searching, as well. The digitized files of the International Tracing Service, accessible at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, show multiple requests by Eli’s cousin Genya Lubovsky, and by Erich Arendt of Goettingen, Germany, searching for every family member by name. Albert Arendt, Chaye Rochelson’s husband, would have been in Uruguay by that time. I suspect he asked a brother or other relative, living closer to the tracing bureaus, to look for all the members of his late wife’s family, and Erich seems, from the existing record, to have searched devotedly. A document from the British Red Cross, dated June 11, 1947, indicated that they were not able to find any of the people he was searching for, including “Elias.”22 Whether Erich ever located Eli, I do not know.
Eli’s own searches would continue for years, but, in fact, he received information early on about his wife’s and son’s fates:
About my wife, people were coming to Landsberg-am-Lech from all places, and there, women told me that she—my brother’s wife and child, Sarah, [were] in different places [in Stutthof]. My wife got dysentery. My wife was free—no, she wasn’t free. They had a march.23 The Germans took them to another place, and while this she got dysentery, and weak, and she died from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. My brother’s wife had the same fate from Stutthof, in a different section, where they told me that she also got dysentery. And she was on a march with the Germans; she died from starvation, disease, and exhaustion. And when she died, and a witness told me, that her daughter Sarah—she was then thirteen or fourteen years old—so she saw her mother died, she just lost her consciousness and she died at the same time.
There were, in fact, numerous forced marches out of Stutthof, beginning in January 1945 and going through April. In some of them, prisoners were forced into the sea and shot or allowed to drown (USHMM, “Stutthof”). Since Eli heard that Serafima had been seen two weeks prior to liberation, he must have assumed that she died late in the war. In his inquiries to the ITS he indicated her date of death as March 28, 1945.24
When Eli was in Dachau, he received what he believed to be reliable news about his son from prisoners who had been transferred from Auschwitz before its liberation:
I was very happy when in November the Hungarians came from Auschwitz, and they looked for me, and I said, how do you know to look for me? They said your son sent regards and he asked us to look for you. That he is fine. . . . I got a geruss [regards] . . . that he is OK, and everything is fine, . . . he’s playing chess with the other boys, and nothing wrong. . . .
But he received very different information after the war. In the NYPL interview Eli explains that “After the liberation I met people who were in Auschwitz and I confronted them . . . young boys, fifteen, sixteen, and I asked them what happened to my boy. Many didn’t know. One knew and he says, look . . . I tell you the truth . . . I cannot . . . it’s hard to tell me . . . but he’s gone” (Rochelson, NYPL interview 32), and this survivor told Eli that his son was murdered after contracting measles. In the interview with Burt, Eli describes that moment:
I couldn’t believe it. I was hysterical, I was crying. I said, it doesn’t matter, give it up. Then I talked to others, they were concerned. I had to face reality; that’s that. I said, they told me in November he is alive. He says, look—As a matter of fact he had a brick with him to stand up to look taller. He knew what it is to be a little shorter. He was a tall fellow, anyway, and he was able to escape the fate until he got the measles. Came the measles, came into the doctor, the doctor needs to give an order. That was the terrible tragedy.
The transfers of prisoners to Dachau in November were a prelude to the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. The Hungarians may have been trying to spare Eli’s feelings, or keep his spirits up—or, in fact, his son may have survived the selections at Auschwitz and had measles sometime later, as Eli seems to have assumed. I discuss these possibilities in the epilogue to this book, “Searching for Borya.” I never stopped searching for him, either.
1. This may be the same Mr. Baikovich I met once at our home, when I was a child or teenager.
2. This article was published in the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung (later titled the Landsberger Jidisze Cajtung), the newspaper of the Jews in the Landsberg DP camp. Eli saved a large collection of these papers, which now crumble at the touch. I have so far had no success in finding the article, which he mentioned often, either in his collection, online, or in microfilms at the YIVO library.
3. Dr. Nabriski and Eli were close personal friends as well as colleagues. Both Dr. Nabriski and Dr. Oleiski emigrated to Israel, where they continued their distinguished professional careers, Dr. Oleiski with ORT and Dr. Nabriski as head of gynecology at a hospital in Kfar Saba (Tory 386).
4. This and subsequent information appears in a typewritten page among his papers, a summary of information he provided to a medical certifying group.
5. YIVO file R294.2 MK.483.62 (hard copy and microform numbers) contains numerous examples of blank forms.
6. Ruth Gay, in Safe Among the Germans, includes a photograph of Föhrenwald, which eventually became the third largest DP camp in the American Zone (71–72). Landsberg was the second largest, after Feldafing.
7. Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent provides a context for less than perfect conditions, black market activities, and even attacks on former kapos in the DP camps. The horrifying conditions of concentration camps, discovered by the Allies at the time of liberation, could not be transcended overnight (78–93); however, what American and UN inspectors saw as anarchy and filth was mild and orderly in relation to much of what Lowe documents throughout postwar Europe, where refugees of many nationalities found themselves adrift.
8. Heymont disputed Srole’s allegations, saying they were either exaggerated or “founded on misinformation” (104). He conceded, however, that Srole wrote in good faith, and that his charges served their purpose of calling attention to disturbing conditions—adding that he hoped Srole would withdraw his resignation (107). I have found no evidence that Srole did so. Heymont refers to Srole as Leo, but the name on Srole’s typescript in the UNRRA archive is Lee.
9. Heymont often expressed frustration at the difficulties in obtaining such basics as brooms and toilet paper (27, 58, 71, and elsewhere). To this day, commentators criticize the US Army for the treatment of displaced persons in the camps; in 2015 Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times described displaced persons as “jailed by America.” Yet Atina Grossmann’s account reinforces the comment of one of Lichtblau’s interviewees that “[c]ompared with the Nazi camps, ‘it was heaven’” (Lichtblau; Grossman 181–82). Eli’s experience, too, suggests this more complex picture.
10. UNRRA file S-0436-42-6.
11. Heymont, writing about the first issue of the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung, notes, “We did not succeed in finding Yiddish type even though we scoured the whole American occupation zone” (42). Ruth Gay points out that in this case necessity may have been a virtue, since many of the young people in the DP camp spoke Yiddish but could not read it in Hebrew letters (72). The transliterations of Yiddish in these documents were made according to the Polish alphabet, not the German, as if the German language itself had become anathema. Eventually, but late in the camp’s existence, Yiddish type was found and used at Landsberg.
12. Atina Grossmann writes about the continuing need for abortions among survivor women even at a time when the birthrate among Jewish DPs was exceptionally high. The abortion rate was low, however, and Grossmann reports that “Jewish medical and religious authorities condemned abortion and encouraged births as part of the surviving remnant’s collective responsibility” (192). The doctors were also perhaps responding to the many abortions they had had to perform on Jewish women during the Holocaust, when pregnancy was punishable by death.
13. A film has been made about this orchestra, Creating Harmony: The Displaced Persons Orchestra at St. Ottilien (2007).
14. YIVO file R294.2 MK.483.62/861/507 contains an example of a memorial meeting announcement File R294.2 and microfilm rolls MK 483.61 and 62 include samples of posters and flyers advertising a variety of meetings, clubs, parties, and appeals.
15. See YIVO files R294.2 MK.483.61/834/239–42, 252.
16. Inscription translated by author, with help from Marsha Rozenblit.
17. Translation from German by Roland Pabst.
18. Interview with Burt Rochelson, January 2013; conversation with author, June 2013.
19. Translation by Roland Pabst.
20. Letter from Ruth Saffron and reply, Individual Documents Boris Rochelson, ITS Digital Archive items #84458147_0_1 and 84458149_0_1. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on January 23 and March 24, 2017.
21. The cover of Boris Rochelson’s ITS Correspondence file is item #91706475_0_1/ITS Digital Archive, Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on January 23, 2017. While cards on file show inquiries beginning at the end of the war, this cover sheet logs in all requests beginning in 1951. These extend through 1989 and 1990, when I contacted the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, as news spread that more records were becoming available. But inquiries were logged in, before that, as late as 1961. A copy of the letter from June 10, 1950, is in the family’s personal collection.
22. ITS Correspondence item #86498950_0_1/ITS Digital Archive, Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on January 23, 2017. English translation, item # 86498950_0_2.
23. When Eli told this story in the NYPL interview, he said that his wife died after the liberation: “Later on I heard that she died from starvation and colitis . . . after the liberation . . . she was liberated . . . she couldn’t take, it was the same way [with] my sister-in-law and her daughter” (Rochelson, NYPL interview 32; ellipsis as in transcription). That he corrects himself about this in the interview with Burt suggests that he may have heard two different accounts but believed that she died on the forced march.
24. Not knowing the exact date, he may have chosen the date of his brother Avraham’s death, which had been documented.
