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]
Biography
Greta Fischer grew up in Czechoslovakia, but fled to England at the beginning of the war in 1939. Her parents, who remained in Czechoslovakia, perished in Theresienstadt. Greta spent the war years working in British nurseries. Immediately after the liberation she joined UNRRA and was assigned to Relief Team 182 that established the Kloster Indersdorf DP children's center. Greta left in 1948 to accompany a group of hard-to-place older children traveling from Marseille, France to Toronto, Canada. She settled in Montreal, where she was as a social worker. She died in Israel. Her niece, Lilo Plaschkes, gave Fischer’s collection of materials from Kloster Indersdorf to the Museum in 1992.
