Bergen-Belsen DP camp focus of ‘Rebirth’ exhibit

This 1945 photo from the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp is part of the traveling exhibit ‘Rebirth After the Holocaust,’ now at Tucson’s Jewish History Museum.

SHEILA WILENSKY
Special to the AJP

In the aftermath of the Holocaust there’s a little-known positive story, and it’s being told at Tucson’s Jewish History Museum in “Rebirth after the Holocaust: The Bergen- Belsen Displaced Persons Camp, 1945-1950.” This photo-documentary exhibition, which takes viewers from a photograph of a mass grave, to the distribution of food and clothing to survivors, to the revival of Yiddish theatre, will be at the museum through June 6.
The exhibit — the first showing in the West — commemorates the 65th anniversary of the April 15, 1945, liberation of Bergen-Belsen, a wartime concentration camp that became a place for displaced persons to restart their lives.
The Bergen-Belsen exhibit is the second largest traveling Holocaust exhibit since “A Message of Hope: Anne Frank in the World” was displayed at the Tucson Jewish Community Center 15 years ago, says Eileen Warshaw, executive director of the Jewish History Museum.  The Bergen-Belsen exhibit was developed by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum and the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Associations in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 
Bergen-Belsen was the only concentration camp that had a negotiated liberation, which gave the Nazis time to destroy all records, says Warshaw.  “Bergen-Belsen wasn’t a killing camp. They didn’t gas people. They starved them to death, or they died from dysentery. They had crematoria for corpses fueled by the [inmates’] shoes.” Politicians, diplomats and influential people in other countries were held there as “bargaining chips,” she says.
Following its liberation, Bergen-Belsen was administered by the British, who burned down the original typhus-ridden camp and transformed the German officers’ compound into the displaced persons camp.  Within three days, Bergen-Belsen survivors had elected their own self-governing Jewish Committee, and developed a vibrant community with political, cultural, religious, educational and social activities. Within six weeks of liberation, the first Jewish school was established in Bergen-Belsen for the children who had survived the Holocaust. Inhabitants returned to conducting Jewish ritual; at least one wedding was performed daily, says Warshaw, and more than 2,000 children were born at the displaced persons’ camp during the five-year period.
Plus, “Zionism was bred there. This is the story of Israel. People aboard the Exodus ship left from Bergen-Belsen,” she says. In 1947, the camp served as a clandestine training center for the Haganah, the Jewish military force in Palestine. It also was the site of the first war crimes trials, predating Nuremberg.
“Talk about justice, renewal, building a new life, assimilation after tragedy. People in our community were there,” says Warshaw. “This is a good way to teach young people about the Holocaust, although no children under 10 are allowed” at the exhibit.
Long-time Tucson resident Allen Langer was born in Bergen-Belsen in 1948. “My parents found each other in the displaced persons camp and married [there] in 1945,” Langer told the AJP. “We came to the United States in 1949, when I was 18 months old.”
Even though Langer’s parents ­didn’t talk much about their experiences in Bergen-Belsen, the stories they did tell stayed with him. “My mother had a German-Gentile girlfriend she had given four pieces of gold jewelry [for safekeeping],” he says. “She later found my mother in the displaced persons camp and gave her back two pieces of the jewelry, a heavy gold bracelet and a ring, which my wife, Marianne, wears on the High Holidays.”
His mother’s friend also threw food hidden in napkins over barbed-wire fences to her during the war, says Langer, adding that the friend had to sell two pieces of his mother’s jewelry for food.
In addition to Langer, Tucson resident Danny Gasch’s parents were both at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Tucsonan Inga Schneider and her two sisters were liberated from the concentration camp; their mother perished there. 
At a recent showing of the exhibit for the local Holocaust survivors group, Schneider recognized a photo of Dr. Fritz Spanier, a Jewish physician at the camp who had tried to help her mother. “She kissed the photo,” says Warshaw.
Schneider and her family ended up at Bergen-Belsen after sailing in spring 1939 on the St. Louis from Hamburg, Germany. The ship’s 937 passengers, almost all Jews fleeing from the Third Reich, were denied entry to Havana, Cuba, and later the United States. They were forced to return to Europe, many to be murdered by the Nazis.
More than 125,000 people were held at the concentration camp during World War II. More than 25,000 names of occupants have been collected in two volumes by the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. When Warshaw recently discovered that Schneider’s mother and sisters had not been recorded, she contributed three more names.
Warshaw says the opportunity to host the Bergen-Belsen exhibit came about because she attended the National Association of Jewish Museums conference in Los Angeles in January, where the attendees voted the Tucson Jewish History Museum’s annual storytelling festival the most innovative new museum program of 2010. Last month, Hebrew Union College offered the exhibit to the Jewish History Museum. Warshaw jumped at the chance.
“People tell me they know all about the Holocaust,” says Warshaw. “I say, ‘No, you don’t.’ This is an entirely different story. It’s what happened afterward.”
For more information, or to arrange group or school tours, contact Eileen Warshaw  at 670-9073 or go to www.jewishhistorymuseum.org. Admission to the exhibit is free for members; $5 for nonmembers.