Online Class: Displaced Persons

Photograph above courtesy of Holocaust Museum LA archival collection.

At the conclusion of the film Schindler’s List, a Soviet officer arrives on horseback and tells the survivors that they are free to go. After a moment of confusion, the survivors shuffle through the gates of the labor camp when, through the magic of cinema, they are suddenly striding across the hills of Israel. But, where did the survivors go immediately after their liberation? What happened when their expectations that the world would embrace them were dashed? This class will explore the experiences of nearly 300,000 survivors who chose to await emigration from Europe as displaced persons (DPs) in occupied Germany. Brought together by their shared persecution, Jewish DPs forged a vibrant community. Asserting their dignity as Jews, they practiced Jewish rituals, created new families, embraced Zionism, agitated against British policies in Palestine, and tried to force Germans to acknowledge their responsibility for wartime crimes.

This class will be held Wednesdays, January 14, 21 and 28 at 4:00pm PDT on Zoom.

January 14: In the Land of the Perpetrators. This session will focus on liberation, the creation of displaced persons camps in occupied Germany, and pogroms in Eastern Europe that drove more survivors into Germany. We will also look at relations between Jewish survivors and Allied military government officials and between survivors and local Germans.

January 21: Building Community. We will examine how survivors created a rich religious and cultural life while awaiting emigration from Germany. Survivors created mourning traditions to honor their murdered loved ones, helping to create shared memories of the Holocaust and encouraging survivors to view a Jewish State as a living memorial. In DP theaters, survivors could imagine themselves as heroic partisans fighting the Nazis and could portray themselves in the present working toward a future in Israel.

January 28: Rage, Vengeance, and Reconciliation. Accepted wisdom is that Jewish survivors did not take revenge after the Shoah. In this session we will look at evidence suggesting that it all depends on what one means by “revenge.”

Margarete Myers Feinstein received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Davis. She is currently Clinical Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Jewish Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches courses on the psychology and history of the Holocaust & genocide, literature of the Holocaust, the history of antisemitism, and modern Jewish history. Interested in the legacies of Nazism, Feinstein is the author of State Symbols: The Quest for Legitimacy in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1959 (Brill, 2001) and Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her publications related to literature and representations of the Holocaust include articles on theater in the displaced persons camps, images of parenthood in Holocaust survivor narratives, and a reassessment of Jewish rage in the works of Elie Wiesel. Feinstein’s current book project uses survivor narratives to investigate retribution against Germans after the Holocaust. This work has received the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

Reserve your space in the class HERE. Tuition for this class is $36 for Museum members and $54 for non-members.

Not yet a member? Join HERE.