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Group portrait of Zionist youth at the Kloster Indersdorf DP children's center.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 12685
Group portrait of Zionist youth at the Kloster Indersdorf DP children's center. Among those pictured are Michael Walter (far left), Michael Roth (waving flag, fourth from the left), Genia Edlerman (in the second to back row, wearing a white blouse) Szlama Weichsblatt (later Sol Wechsler, far left), Nina Krieger, Naftali Steinberg (behind the third person in he front row), Avram Leder, and Nechemia Edlerman (seated, fourth from left wearing a white hat.)

Group portrait of Zionist youth at the Kloster Indersdorf DP children's center.

Among those pictured are Michael Walter (far left), Michael Roth (waving flag, fourth from the left), Genia Edlerman (in the second to back row, wearing a white blouse) Szlama Weichsblatt (later Sol Wechsler, far left), Nina Krieger, Naftali Steinberg (behind the third person in he front row), Avram Leder, and Nechemia Edlerman (seated, fourth from left wearing a white hat.)

Date
1945 - 1948
Locale
Kloster Indersdorf, [Bavaria; Munich] Germany
Photo Designation
DISPLACED PERSONS/RETURN TO LIFE -- Orphans/Children's Homes/Summer Camps -- Germany -- Kloster Indersdorf -- General
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lilo, Jack and Micha Plaschkes

About This Photograph

Event History
The Kloster Indersdorf children's center was established by UNRRA to shelter and rehabilitate the thousands of non-German children who were left homeless after the war. With the aid of the American Army, UNRRA Team 182 secured a cloister, Kloster Indersdorf, to serve as a center for these orphaned children. The UNRRA workers were helped in setting up the center by local nuns, who had operated an orphanage at the cloister in the interwar period. Once it was established, Kloster Indersdorf maintained a population of some 350 children, representing over twenty nationalities. Many were children who had been kidnapped by the Nazis from their homes in eastern Europe and brought to the Reich for Aryanization or for forced labor. Many had had their names changed so that they no longer knew their real identities. Some of the older children had even been made to serve in the German home guard [Volkssturm] in the last year of the war. In addition to providing basic care and social rehabilitation for the orphans, the UNRRA team helped to trace the identities of the children and to arrange for their adoption, their return to their homelands, or their emigration to new countries of settlement. The UNRRA team was assisted in providing services by a local order of Catholic nuns. From 1945 until the summer of 1946, Kloster Indersdorf operated as an international children's center, with a Jewish population of between 40-70. Most of the Jewish male youth were concentration camp survivors, particularly from Flossenbuerg. In August 1946 the center became an exclusively Jewish children's home and work kibbutz and remained so until its closing in September 1948.

[Sources: Fischer, Greta. Oral testimony, USHMM Archives
Koenigseder, Angelika/ Wetzel, Juliane. Lebensmut im Wartesaal, Fischer Verlag, 1995, p.256.; email by German researcher Anna Andlauer]

Keywords and Subjects

Rights and Restrictions

Photo Source
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Provenance: Lilo, Jack and Micha Plaschkes
Source Record ID: Collections: 1993.23
 
Record last modified: 2013-01-14 00:00:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1073151