Jewish Displaced Persons In Camp Bergen-Belsen 1945-1950: The Unique Photo Album Of Zippy Orlin (Samuel and Althea Stroum Book)

In 1986, fifty-one year-old Chaim Orlin visited the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, visibly exhausted from lugging a large, heavy photograph album. Orlin explained that he had intended to entrust this photograph collection to a historic archive for some time. The impressive thirty-three pound album had been composed by his sister Cecila "Zippy" Orlin from photographs taken during the period when the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was used as a Displaced Persons camp for Jewish survivors of the Nazi atrocities. Containing over one thousand photographs, the album provides a detailed reflection of daily life at the DP camp in the years following the end of World War II. Zippy Orlin had been a volunteer for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee at the DP camp Bergen-Belsen. The history of Bergen-Belsen camp includes two extremes: death and survival. During the final months that Bergen-Belsen was used as a concentration camp under the Nazis, it was plagued by death. Upon liberating the camp on April 15, 1945, British troops found over 60,000 emaciated, desperate survivors of various nationalities, and until 1950, Bergen-Belsen, which was in the British Zone of Occupation in Germany, was one of Europe’s largest internally autonomous communities of Holocaust survivors.

The album of Zippy Orlin features illustrative and often compelling scenes depicting the tentative efforts of the survivors to recover and resume normal lives after the horrors of the Holocaust. The photographs are organized by theme and reveal all aspects of everyday life, from leisure, education, and work, to weddings and the care of the many orphans. As a volunteer, Zippy Orlin was primarily responsible for the very youngest children. It was the goal of the camp administration and the counselors for those children to have faith and look forward to a different, better future.

More than anything else in the world, the camp population longed to immigrate to Israel, the nascent Jewish state. In addition to portraying life in the DP camp, the album also includes pictures of the few transports of the DPs authorized by the Allies in 1947, as well as a remarkable series of photos relating to the Exodus 47 affair, depicting the forced disembarkation and the internment of the Exodus passengers.

Accompanying the extraordinary photos, Jewish Displaced Persons in Camp Bergen-Belsen 1945–1950 includes Zippy’s own fascinating, personal accounts of what it was like to live and work in Camp Bergen-Belsen as well as interviews with her relatives and contributions by leading researchers and writers who have written articles about displaced persons from 1945-1950 and the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen.