Tag Archives: DP Camp

June 2, 2025 · 7:30 am

Displaced People

Milt Zolotow (z”l)

(with his daughter, Nina Zolotow)

Note from Nina: I want to tell you a bit about my father. He grew up in New York, the child of immigrants, with Yiddish as his first language and a fairly conventional Jewish upbringing, which meant he also learned Hebrew. During World War II, he served in the army and was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and ultimately occupied Germany, where his ability to speak Yiddish helped him understand German. Well, you can imagine that because of this background he had some interesting adventures in Europe. In his old age he outlined a memoir about his war years, which he never actually wrote. I cobbled together a one-sentence story years after his death about an experience he had in Germany. In it I use information and phrases from his outline, a kind of a posthumous collaboration, which you can read below.

During the occupation we were sent to a small German town near a camp for Displaced Persons, where all the DP’s were women, and someone had the bright idea of sending a truck down to invite any interested women to a dance we were giving—with musicians and food, too!— and when the truck filled with girls arrived, we brought out the schnapps and food, and soon there were couples making out in the bushes outside the cafe and everyone was as drunk as raw schnapps can make you, but then as I was drunkenly dancing with a pretty girl, I suddenly realized that I clearly understood every word she was saying because she was speaking to me in Yiddish, so after that I sobered up pretty quickly and listened as she explained to me that no one in the camp knew she was Jewish because she carried the identity papers of a Pole (she had jumped off the moving freight train carrying her to a death camp, found a young Polish woman who was roughly her size and coloring, and then she killed this woman, took her identity papers and lived as a Pole in a Nazi work camp) and that she had come to the dance to try some Yiddish phrases on everyone she danced with and finally succeeded in making contact with me (quite a miracle since there were only two Jews in my battalion and the other one was not at the dance), and all I could think to do was to take her back to my quarters and give her every bar of soap and carton of cigarettes I could find, however, that kind of backfired because when she returned to the DP camp laden with my gifts, she was immediately the center of hostile attention—no other girl had been so lavishly treated and suddenly suspicions rose: she was different, she was a Jew—and the officer running the camp saw the ruckus, knew she had to be separated, and phoned our HG to tell us what happened, so then I made some calls and found a quartermaster truck that was going south to a Mediterranean port, put the girl on it and got the GI driver to agree to put her on board a ship to Palestine, but later I learned that the British turned back all the Jewish refugees trying to get to Palestine, so I guessed she must have ended up stranded in some French waterfront town, and I still wonder if I did enough (I never heard another word about her because the very next day I was given a two-week pass for the French Riviera).

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

Milton Zolotow was born in New York City, the child of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Trained as a fine artist as well as a graphic designer, he enlisted in the US Army during World War II, hoping to join the map making division in New Jersey. Instead, he was assigned to a tank battalion and after training was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. Because of his drawing skills, he mainly did reconnaissance for his unit. But during the occupation of Germany, he was used as a German translator due to his knowledge of the Yiddish language, and his ability to speak Yiddish as well as some Hebrew and French also led him to have some interesting encounters with other Jewish people in Europe. After the war, he returned to New York City, where he created a body of war- and Holocaust-inspired artwork and where he met his future wife, Edith. After a couple of years of studying art in Mexico City, Milton and Edith settled down in Los Angeles, California, where they raised a family and Milton worked as a graphic designer and taught graphic design in art schools. In his retirement, he began to create black and white drawings that continued to explore imagery that evoked war and the Holocaust. 



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January 29, 2024 · 7:30 am

Unwelcome and Unwanted

by Esther Erman (Mountain View, CA)

These days, now that most of them are gone, Holocaust survivors are honored and revered. But, from my experience, this was not always the case. 

I remember hearing that the mother of a famous Jewish writer became angry upon seeing a newsreel about Jews in Nazi labor and death camps. To whom did she direct her anger? The Nazis perpetrating the crimes? Alas not. Her ire went against the Jews who were – what? dumb enough? unlucky enough? to get caught and thrown into those places. 

I arrived in the United States as an infant, the child of my survivor parents who had lost everything in their place of origin, Poland. To say that we were unwelcome and unwanted is putting the case mildly.

Each of my parents was the sole survivor from their family of origin. To the best of my knowledge, most of my family perished at either Treblinka or Auschwitz. Both of my parents survived ghettos, labor camps, and Auschwitz. My mother also survived the death march and Bergen-Belsen. Calling my parents traumatized is also putting the case mildly. Despite this extreme trauma, they had the resilience to meet and marry in their DP (displaced persons) camp in Germany and produce a child (moi), born eighteen months after my mother was liberated from Bergen-Belsen.

At the  DP camp, my father managed to connect with an uncle in the United States who sponsored us to emigrate. By the time the requisite paperwork arrived, my mother was too pregnant to get on a ship. We had to wait until I was born and then able to lift my head – around age three months. 

By the time we managed to leave Germany, it was March of 1947. We set sail from Bremen on the Ernie Pyle. The crossing was so bad that my mother was sure we’d die in the middle of the ocean. I think that the Ernie Pyle was not the most seaworthy vessel. It foundered in the middle of the Atlantic, and we were towed back to Plymouth, England. There, for the seven days it took to get another ship for us to transfer to, we were not allowed to set foot on British soil. I expect it was a long seven days. 

We arrived in the United States on April 1, 1947. The uncle who’d sponsored our journey left us to fend for ourselves. He was a miserly bachelor who kept our existence a secret from a large branch of the family in Chicago. Perhaps they might have been more generous than he in providing support for my traumatized parents and me? His motivation for all his behavior remains an unsolvable mystery. It’s only been in recent years that the folks in Chicago learned that anyone from the family in Poland had survived the war.

Soon after our arrival, we settled on the Lower East Side. It was not trendy then. Given the post-war housing shortage, a building on Suffolk Street that had been slated for demolition was removed from the demolition list. Our first home was a rat-infested firetrap that had my crazy clean mother weeping with frustration daily. My father worked two jobs and was so rarely home, I cried when I saw this stranger. When my mother first attempted to tell an American Jewish woman about her experience in Auschwitz, the response was: “We suffered here also. Sugar was rationed.” Any wonder that my mother became depressed?

As I’ve come to reflect on my family’s experience, I can’t help wondering what might have been if my parents had had some support – any support – in those early days. Might it have made a difference? Or were they just too traumatized for there to be any meaningful help for them? I know that regular Americans were not thrilled to welcome us refugees. I think many Jewish Americans – maybe insecure themselves, maybe not long enough distanced from their arrival in the United States – did not welcome this reminder of where they had come from. 

I think about this feeling of being unwelcome and unwanted – which stayed with us as we made “successful” lives in the United States – when I hear about the plight of current refugees. Even for those more fortunate in their settlement than we were – the stigma of being a refugee lingers long after the initial trauma might reach some degree of resolution.

Like Rebecca, the heroine of her novel (Rebecca of Salerno: a Novel of Rogue Crusaders, a Jewish Female Physician, and a Murder), Esther Erman was a refugee. As an old “white” woman who speaks good English, she realizes she doesn’t typify the usual image of a refugee — but, despite the passage of time, the scars remain.The daughter of two survivors of the Shoah from Poland, Esther was born in Germany. A naturalized citizen, she early developed a passion for language. After receiving her BA and MA in French from different divisions of Rutgers University, she returned there for her doctorate in language education. She wrote her dissertation about Yiddish, her first language, which she had abandoned at age five. A multi-published author still trying to settle on her next big project, Esther now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Lee. When they’re not traveling—especially to be with family in other parts of the United States and in England—she loves to bake, quilt, and add to her monumental book collection. Check her website for upcoming events: EstherErman.com.

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