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Members of the Betar Zionist youth movement demonstrate against British policy in Palestine at the tomb of Theodor Herzl in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 32170
Members of the Betar Zionist youth movement demonstrate against British policy in Palestine at the tomb of Theodor Herzl in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna. The demonstration was timed to coincide with the visit of the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine to Vienna.

Members of the Betar Zionist youth movement demonstrate against British policy in Palestine at the tomb of Theodor Herzl in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna.

The demonstration was timed to coincide with the visit of the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine to Vienna.

Photographer
George Birman
Date
1947 December 07
Locale
Vienna, Austria
Variant Locale
Wien
Photo Designation
DISPLACED PERSONS/RETURN TO LIFE -- DP Camps/Postwar Communities -- Austria -- Vienna
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of George Birman

About This Photograph

Biography
George (originally Hirsch) Birman was born in 1922 in the German city of Konigsberg and grew up near the Baltic port of Klaipeda, in Lithuania. His father, Abel Birman, gave him a Voigtlander camera as a present for his tenth birthday, which he used to document pre-war, wartime and postwar Jewish life in Europe. In 1941 Hirsch was relocated to the Kovno ghetto. From there, he was sent to a number of labor camps in the area. He managed throughout his incarceration to keep his camera and photographs with him. On the night of July 9, 1944, before escaping from the Kedainiai labor camp near Kovno, Hirsch handed over his passport, birth certificate and approximately 150 photographs and negatives to his father, who was then working as the camp cook. Abel wrapped the documents and photographs in waxed paper and buried them in a canister under the kitchen. Using a pair of pliers, Hirsch cut a hole in the barbed wire fence surrounding the camp and escaped, along with his father and another companion. The three crawled through a drainage ditch and hid in a rye field before fleeing to the forest. One month later, after the German retreat, Hirsch returned to Kedainiai and dug up his photographs, which he found undamaged. He then proceeded to photograph the former labor camp. Hirsch eventually settled in Vienna, where he studied engineering and worked for the Bricha, the underground Zionist organization that assisted Jewish DPs in migrating to the West and immigrating to Palestine. He lived off and on at the Rothschild Hospital for four years registering DPs while his father helped in the management of the camp's supplies. In 1952 Hirsch immigrated to the United States.

Keywords and Subjects

Rights and Restrictions

Photo Source
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Provenance: George Birman
 
Record last modified: 2019-12-19 00:00:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1109790