Foreward
Displaced
Photographs from the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust
Maxine Rude, Photographer
More than sixty years have passed since the end of World War II and the opening of the concentration camps, when the reality of human suffering was revealed to the Allied soldiers and the public. It has been shown by recent historical research that the Allied governments knew about the mass murder of the Jews and other groups as early as June, 1941.The liberation of the camps for Russian troops who liberated Majdanek and Auschwitz and American, British and Canadian soldiers who witnessed the initial end of civilian incarceration at Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Flossenberg and other camps was, as historian Deborah Lipstadt has expressed, “beyond belief.” Some historians have even questioned the use of the word “liberation” to describe the relief of the camps by Allied forces. The war was not fought to liberate either concentration camps in general or Jews in particular.
In the aftermath of the German defeat followed the Nuremberg Trials of the top Nazi leadership, industrialists and doctors, as well as a “de-Nazification” program. As a modest form of justice was being carried out against the perpetrators of mass murder, the surviving victims, now called “Displaced Persons” (“DPs”), were trying to put their lives back together and find new homes. De-Nazification was halted because of the onset of the Cold War and the hardening of American-Soviet relations. The survivors of the Nazi camps, which included Jews, Poles, Russian slave laborers and others, returned to their countries of origin or became “displaced persons.” Slave laborers from France, Belgium and the Netherlands returned home quickly without becoming DP’s. Most Jews opted for the DP category, as their former homelands, especially in Eastern Europe, had often become graveyards or were even dangerous for returning Jews because of hostility from the local populations. In Buchenwald, for example, there were inmates from thirty-eight countries at the end of war, including the distressing category of “stateless.”
Maxine Rude, a photographer for the United States Army and then for the United Nation’ organization UNRRA, was a witness to these events in post-war Europe. Her photos allow viewers to dwell on the photographer’s vision of the general difficulties of the post-war period, the issue of the search for justice against perpetrators of genocide, and the return to life by victims of the Nazis. The viewer will also see portraits of political and military leaders who established the administration that ran the DP camps until the refugees were finally absorbed in other countries. Maxine Rude saw this process and as a photographer has tried not only to document, but to provide us with a vision of this period with a great deal of pathos.
In a world where genocide has continued in varied forms in places like Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, Kosovo and East Timor, these photos stand not only as reminders of the past, of the face and effects of ethnic cleansing, and also of continued ignorance of foreign events and places by bystanders. During the Holocaust, Jews and Gypsies were hunted all over Europe, from the Atlantic coast to the Volga River. Recent events of mass violence and genocide, however, reveal that the oft-repeated phrase, “never again,” appears to mean only “never again against the Jewish people.” Others, however, now have the opportunity to become victims, only this time with the world watching on television or being tuned in via the worldwide web and satellite photography.
Thus, these photographs, like the history of the Holocaust itself, are warnings that injustice can always rear it’s ugly head and that, as Primo Levi has written, “beyond the fence stand the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting.”
Maxine Rude is a native of Viroqua, Wisconsin and spent the last years of her life in Arizona.
Dr. Stephen Feinstein
Director, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies
University of Minnesota
Web Site for the Exhibition: www.chgs.umn.edu