Category:Displaced Children, Italy (subject)

Displaced Children, Italy (see Holocaust Children Studies)

• Apulia DP camps -- Rome DP camp -- Selvino DP camp

Overview

Between the years 1945-1951, some 70,000 Jewish refugees and displaced persons lived on Italian soil. Approximately 50,000 of them went on to immigrate to Eretz Israel. During those years, there were some 35 DP camps in Italy. In some of the camps there were also non-Jewish refugees. Not all the camps operated over the entire period. There were small camps in which dozens of Jews lived, while others contained thousands of Jews. Yehuda Tobin, a soldier in the Jewish Brigade, wrote the following in June 1945, in a letter that he sent from Tarvisio, Italy:

Have you seen? … the faces of the survivors of the death camps? I have seen them with my own eyes… The hair of the young boys has started to grow; the heads full of stubble look so odd. The special look that I don’t have the power to describe, the facial expression. These boys… they were 10, 11, 12 when the war broke out. They “spent” most of the [last] 5-6 years in ghettos, concentration camps, forests, on the run… Fear grips me when I think about those young boys. What have they not endured? How did they manage to evade death? What kind of youth did they have?