Category:DP Kloster Indersdorf (subject)

DP Kloster Indersdorf (see Holocaust Children Studies)

Overview

In 1943, the United Nations established the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to assist the refugees driven from their homeland either by force or necessity.

In April 1945, the first UNRRA team entered the American zone of Germany, where agency representatives would eventually register between 6,000 and 7,000 displaced children, teenagers, and young adults. Most of these young people lived among adults in Displaced Persons camps.

In July, not far from the Dachau death camp, 11 United Nations workers established a pilot project: the first international displaced persons camp devoted to children in the American zone of Germany. In a former monastery (Kloster) in the village of Markt Indersdorf, the Sisters of Mercy of Saint Vincent de Paul had operated an orphanage until the Nazis commandeered and closed the facility. The UNRRA charged its own Team 182 with reopening Kloster Indersdorf with the expectation that they could help 75-100 youth.

Within two months of operation, however, the team had already hosted double that number. Between 1945 and 1948, the International Displaced Person Children’s Center at Kloster Indersdorf as it was officially named, would become home to more than 1,000 child and adolescent refugees. Team 182’s methodology and level of care was so successful that Kloster Indersdorf served as a model center for at least five others like it in Europe, like the Children’s Health Home in Hamburg-Blankenese. The home was exclusively for Jewish orphans and unaccompanied children. For more see Erhard Roy Wiehn, ed., Cherries on the Elbe – The Jewish Children’s Home in Blankenese 1946-1948 (Konstanz, 2013). In addition, there were thirteen exclusively Jewish DP Children’s Centers.

Working at the center was 35-year-old Greta Fischer. The youngest of six children born to a Jewish Czech family, she escaped the Nazis by immigrating to London in May of 1939. Her parents, who wanted to stay in their native Czechoslovakia, were murdered in 1943. While in London, Fischer’s job as a social worker put her in touch with Anna Freud, daughter of the famous Austrian psychologist, who was in London to work with child survivors of the German Blitzkrieg. Freud provided a then-progressive type of therapy: listening to children’s stories. When Greta Fischer left London for Kloster Indersdorf in 1945, she brought Freud’s ideas with her.

In October 1945, the U.N. commissioned American photographer Charles Haacker to take a picture of each orphan holding a nameplate. UNRRA hoped its Central Tracing Bureau could use these photos to match children with family members throughout the world.

For some children, the quest was never answered. In August 1946, the UNRRA team moved from Markt Indersdorf to a larger space about 80 miles away in Prien on Chiemsee, and the slow work of repatriation continued. Meanwhile, the “International D.P. Children’s Center” became the “Jewish Children’s Center Kloster Indersdorf,” a home for Jewish children from Poland, Romania and Hungary.

In 1948, the International Refugee Organization, UNRRA’s successor, helped relocate the remaining child refugees at Kloster Indersdorf to the newly formed state of Israel.

Book : The Rage to Live by Anna Andlauer

In this book, Anna Andlauer describes the history of the UNRRA Children?s Center at Indersdorf. The story, however, encompasses far more than local historiography. From the start, the author was interested in the lives of the young camp survivors and their thorny paths back to ?normal? living. She began a systematic search for the ?Boys? of Indersdorf and discovered along the way far more than she had at first expected. Her meeting with them confronted her with history and narrative, trauma, hope, and survival. Research for this book made Anna Andlauer not merely an explorer, but a social worker, counselor and friend of the ?Boys,? now quite advanced in years. These roles have been decisive for both the structure and style of the book. The author is an empathetic listener and an equally empathetic writer. In dense descriptions Anna Andlauer repeatedly allows her emotions to emerge; she approaches the feelings and sensations of these youths, and this permits her to convincingly portray their former survivors? worlds. She reconstructs the individuality of these former teenagers, today?s eighty-year-olds. This constitutes the book?s humanizing achievement.

The Children

Erwin Farkas

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