Andlauer The Rage to Live - The International D.P. Children's Center Kloster Indersdorf 1945-1948

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-8190-4753-4
Verlag: epubli
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 370 Seiten

This book documents two historical humanitarian efforts to help the youngest victims of National Socialism in postwar Germany: After the liberation of the concentration and labor camps, from July 1945 to July 1946, a team of UNRRA pioneers provided 613 Jewish and gentile child survivors in Kloster Indersdorf (near Dachau) with the initial help they needed to pick up the pieces of their shattered existence and go on with their lives - either in their home country or in a completely different environment. Taking care of hundreds of young Holocaust survivors and other displaced children posed a challenge hitherto unknown. The humanitarian workers focused on the children's individual needs and psychological responses to persecution and displacement. They listened attentively when the child survivors talked about their suffering and loss; they had to understand that these traumatized young people urgently needed to gain control over their haunting experiences. From August 1946 - September 1948 in the Jewish Children's Center Kloster Indersdorf, the Zionist kibbutz movement Dror, along with the UNRRA, also had to meet the basic needs of hundreds of young Holocaust survivors from Poland, Hungary and Romania. The youth leaders offered schooling, games, sports, concerts and cultural activities. But as their primary aim was to prepare these child survivors for their future life on a kibbutz in Erez Israel, they also engaged them in helping with farm and household tasks, they practiced roll-calls and self-defense, and they taught them Zionist and socialist principles. Sixty to seventy years later, the author interviewed more than a hundred survivors who were either in the International Children's Center or in the Jewish Children's Center Kloster Indersdorf. She paints a vivid picture of everyday life in both children's centers and creates portraits of many of these child survivors 'then and now'.

Anna Andlauer majored in English, sociology and art history. During her years as a high school teacher, she began guiding tour groups at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial, and this focus on contemporary history eventually found expression in exhibitions and newspaper articles on the history of the Dachau Camp. She is the author of Du, ich bin der Häftling mit der Nr. 1 about Claus Bastian, the first registered prisoner at the camp. Since 2008 she has researched postwar Kloster Indersdorf, tracing survivors now spread all over the world, who had been cared for here. She has interviewed them and invited them back to visit 'their cloister' to meet each other and local people, and to talk about their experiences.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Andlauer, Anna

Leseproben

Babies need individual care
In fall 1945 the magazine UNRRA Review of the Month must have had especially the babies of forced laborers in mind when it reported from Indersdorf, “Of the total population nearly one-fifth are under two years of age and this group have in some ways suffered most of all. The babies of six months and under were at least half the normal size and bore acute signs of malnutrition. All of these infants have had their growth arrested by at least six months, in many cases even longer. Aid for these infants was urgent if they were to survive. Vitamin feeding was instituted and sunray treatment given. Within three days the infants could be induced to smile and the rashes on their faces were disappearing. Now, apart from their pathetic thinness of their limbs, which will take many months to fill out, the babies of Kloster Indersdorf are happy and healthy.”200 UNRRA photographers and correspondents, as well as American, French and English newspapers, came to Indersdorf. They photographed primarily the little ones and reported the UNRRA team’s work to readers all over the world in order to awaken people’s sense of charity and readiness to take in these children.201 Success stories, such as that of Team 182, might have inspired and encouraged other teams to achieve the same results working in their respective DP camps.
Sister Adelgunde Flierl with two-year-olds (November 29, 1945). Greta Fischer knew that intense devotion is required most urgently during the first years of life to ensure a healthy development of basic trust. Individual care for the smallest, to overcome developmental deficiencies and promote well-rounded growth, should therefore take place in small groups; continuous care by a single person was essential to “compensate for the lack of mother love” and allow the children with obvious developmental delays to catch up and become “emotionally alert.”202 Given the egregious lack of personnel, groups were formed with twelve to fifteen boys and girls divided according to stage of development and need for attention and care: infants were in one group; then came those who could already sit up by themselves, had begun to feed themselves, crawl and stand. In the third group that later became a sort of pre-nursery school class were those who could eat independently, almost dress themselves, go to the toilet and walk. For each group, Greta Fischer trained two or three DP assistants, teaching them childcare and therapy; each was accompanied by one of the nuns. They were expected to cultivate a personal relationship with the little ones who, by virtue of regular care and immediate response to their needs, would recuperate a measure of security and trust.
Greta Fischer and a young DP with babies. After only a few weeks, the smallest ones grew calmer, once they noticed how regularly and responsibly the same person took care of them, like, for instance, little Jean Pierre.203 In January 1946 Greta Fischer observed that at “20 months [he] had such absence of response that it was feared he was mentally defective, possibly autistic. ... After continued special care, however, he suddenly became more alert, his eyes began to focus with interest on the persons around him and the play material which was strung across his crib. He began to sit up, and today he is one of the most active members of the nursery school group, running gleefully after the children and just beginning to talk.”204
Also many boys loved to care for the babies. Fischer estimated that the youngest ones needed at least a year to make up for the starvation and neglect they had undergone. Plenty of patience, attention and personal care were needed before the first smile lit up a little face,205 a certain and wonderful sign of healing for body and soul. As this dedicated social worker remarked, “Seeing the first spontaneous smile on a child's face or his reaching out for contact are moments never to be forgotten.”206 The goal of Greta Fischer’s report was to convince her coworkers and the general public that these neglected children had developmental potential and that a permanent solution could be found for them.
Girls from Upper Silesia like Martha Cierpiol and Wanda Bunzol play godparents to the babies (May 1946). The UNRRA team and the Sisters of Mercy rejoiced at most of the small children’s rapid progress and saw their own priorities confirmed. Even the UNRRA investigation unit, in November 1945, was convinced not to send babies to another camp because they were impressed at how the nuns were giving them special, individual attention: “It is suggested that the group of infants remain in the center rather than be moved to Wartenberg, particularly in view of the capability of the sisters who are giving direct care.”207 In September 1945 American journalist Mary Heaton Vorse painted this picture: “Out in the courtyards the babies lie in their cribs. The two year olds in crimson rompers made on the premises went on their adventurous voyages of discoveries. … It was a fine sight to see a big boy feed a baby its bottle, or romp with the little ones, for the big children cannot keep away from the babies.”208 The considerable span in resident children’s ages at Indersdorf had one advantage: the older ones could help care for the younger. Many did this of their own free will, thereby creating a family-like atmosphere that was good not only for the babies, but for their caregivers as well. The UNRRA staff also found this arrangement “most salubrious”209 for the youths who played godparents to smaller children, feeding them, bathing them and playing with them. The task kept the teens from senseless boredom and afforded personal fulfillment. And many of the young Holocaust survivors mourned not only for younger siblings and cousins, but also in a sense for their infant selves: by caring for the little ones, memories awoke in them of their own childhoods before persecution and, for both girls and boys, brought back to life a tender, softer side they had not been permitted to express in the camps.210 For that reason the UNRRA staff in Indersdorf strove to contradict their superiors, who wanted separate children’s centers for various age groups;211 and they emphasized in their reports the recurrent opportunities in having the little ones, older children and teens living together. Easing the young people’s hearts
The newly arrived wanted above all else to talk about their unspeakable experiences. For days on end, entire groups followed and besieged the counselors on their daily rounds in order to tell them what they had suffered during the war years. Their one desire was to release all their bottled-up self-expression, and by a flood of talk to somehow cope with their memories of fear and horror. They forced UNRRA staff to sit down and listen, attentively and patiently. Of the first 192 residents, fully 125 needed immediate psychological counseling. Social workers suddenly found themselves confronted by teenagers who had been rounded up at gunpoint in Polish villages, transported and forced into slave labor in Germany, who had drudged in concentration camps and experienced up close the murder of their loved ones. Imagine the condition of people like, for instance, Sacher Israeler, who as a ten-year-old following a German “Aktion” in the ghetto found his mother and sister in the street, shot dead, and had to watch as his father, with a bullet in his jaw, bled to death?! Some of the Jewish boys had delivered corpses to the crematoria; they had to cut down those that had been hanged. Jakob Bulwa was only thirteen and Hermann Weinstock a tender seven when the persecution began for them.
Jewish teens reenact the beatings that they experienced in the concentration camps (1946). UNRRA volunteers had not been prepared to face survivors with such deep psychological wounds, who told what they knew in voices sometimes highly pitched and tense, sometimes monotone, but always about unimaginable cruelties. Some came across as emotionally numb, others as in a state of psychosis. The Sisters of Mercy felt a special empathy for one seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish boy whom they describe as “extraordinarily gentle and intelligent.” When in the concentration camp, he witnessed “his parents, in particular his mother being incinerated, he lost his sanity. He was often a pitiable sight when this kind young man spent half the night sitting on the stone staircase of the convent weeping and whimpering like a little child.”212 Kurt Klappholz, a Polish Jew, had endured fifteen different concentration camps and was the only member of his family to survive. He recalled the names of particularly sadistic SS guards and described how they carried out canings on prisoners’ exposed buttocks. Greta Fischer was amazed by the clarity with which he could recall the particular details of the different camps, along with the exact dates of his own imprisonment.213 Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse interviewed him several times and concluded sadly that his stories were not the most appalling she had heard from these survivors.214 The youngsters often had a whole trail of traumatic experiences behind them although the violent separation from their murdered parents had left the deepest wounds. Even the Allies’ psychological experts encouraged recognition of this phenomenon: “The...