Exhibition - After the Holocaust. Survivors and Refugees (1944-1947)
After the catastrophe, the Liberation of Europe and the end of the Second World War raised feelings of tremendous joy, hope and relief. But returning to normal life hardly seemed possible for the European Jews who survived the Nazis’ attempt to totally destroy them, abetted by their local accomplices. Despite everything, all the survivors aspired to being reunited with their loved ones, returning home or finding a safe haven, going back to work and imagining a future again, either in Europe or someplace else. But chaos and uncertainty reigned everywhere.
In Poland, half the refugees back from the USSR and the few Holocaust survivors fled again. In occupied Germany, over 250,000 Jews were parked, like others, in displaced person camps, waiting for a country to take them in. In France, officials set up repatriation and reinsertion programs for “racial” deportees, a minority among the total number of deportees. Specific persecution had targeted Jews, but their plight was just one problem among many others on the scale of the continent. Help therefore came from Jewish communities themselves, which managed to rebuild religious, cultural and political life. The post-Holocaust period was not just a time when Jews were assisted, but took their destiny back into their hands.
Exhibition
From January 27 to November 20, 2016
Mémorial de la Shoah
17 rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier
75004 Paris
Tel: +33 (0)1 42 77 44 72
Subway station: Saint-Paul or Hôtel-de-Ville
Opening times: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Saturday and until 10 p.m. on Thursday
Free admission