Author: JDC Archives

When I tell people here in Melbourne, Australia that I spent five years in a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp in Austria from the age of five to ten, the response is always ‘Gee, you’ve had a hard life haven’t you?” And I reply “I don’t remember life being hard.” And life in the DP camps wasn’t hard for a child thanks to the work of the American Joint Distribution Committee, known to us then as “the Joint.” It was involved in every aspect of life, from administering hospital, schools and summer camps, to distributing necessities like food and clothing....

  Following the Soviet liberation of Poland from July 1944-January 1945, the remnants of Polish Jewry began to reconstruct their lives in Poland after the shattering effects of the Holocaust. About 275,000 survivors, a mere fraction of the pre-war community of 3.5 million, returned to a country ravaged by war and torn by an internal political struggle between local communists and nationalists. In her M.A. thesis titled “The Role of the Joint Distribution Committee in Rehabilitation and Characterization of Jewish Community in Poland from 1945-1949,” researcher Batya Langer from Haifa University explores three main groups and ideologies within the...