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Home > Virtual Museum > CHGS Exhibitions : Displaced

Maxine Rude

Displaced Europe 1945-1946
Photographs and Remembrances

Enter the Exhibition

Additional Information on the Norman Weaver Archive

From: Emma Crocker (Mrs)
Curator
Photograph Archive
Imperial War Museum
Lambeth Road
London
SE1 6HZ
Phone: 020 7416 5332
Fax: 020 7416 5355
E-mail: ecrocker@iwm.org.uk

I am pleased to confirm that I have now finished cataloguing our collection of Norman Weaver photos, and the originals have been returned to Sarah Starsmore.

Although not available to view online, visitors to the Photograph Archive can view the reference prints we have made (114 in all). If any of your students or enquirers which to contact us about these photographs, they are very welcome to e-mail us at photos@iwm.org.uk.

News Coverage

Westby Native Brings the World's Historical Events Home on Film - Bonnie Sterling

Vernon County Broadcaster, September 28, 2000:

Westby native Maxine Lean Rude has seen and photographed some of the most historic events of the last century in her fascinating and adventuresome life.

The list of places and people she's photographed includes Hitler's enclave in Berschtesgarden, Germany, Nazis Josef Mengele and Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Nuremberg Trials, Brasilia, the drug war in Columbia and the clash in Tiananmen Square in China.

Last weekend as part of conference, "New Perspectives on the Shoah and the Third Reich" at the UW-La Crosse, 75 of Rude's photographs appeared at the Odin Gallery in La Crosse.

While working for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1945, Rude took photos for public information.  They were used to present positive and negative images to the public as well as the extent of the relief attempt for the agency.

The photos are not a part of collection of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota

Most of these deal with camps and lives of the "displaced persons".

In the latter stages of WWII, it was realized that an estimated 21 million people would need assistance returning to their homelands and finding their splintered families.

These displaced persons, or DPs as they were called, became the aftermath of the Nazi Final Solution.  Millions of people in Europe fled or were removed from their homes and/or country.  These people were survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor battalions and death marches.

The UNRRA's efforts to take care of these people and to arrange repatriation for them was recorded by Rude.  The irony is that the DP camps were former concentration camps, such as Belsen and Auschwitz or the infamous Wermacht barracks in Widlflecken.

Rude recalls in her book "Remembrances" that "Displaced persons were merely survivors – stateless and homeless; their families had been slaughtered in experimentation camps, lost in concentration camps, or, if lucky, were survivors and were now in other displaced persons camps.  All their possessions had been confiscated or destroyed."

"At the end of the war they were rounded up and temprorarily put into camps… Inside the camps, there was domestic activity of all kinds.  The people's cultures often came out in what they made and what they did."

The camps were over-crowded and living conditions were poor, although for the first time in many years there was enough food to eat.

Rude's photo collection allows the viewer "to dwell on a 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 of life by the victims of the Nazis."

Rude said she didn't take her negatives with her when she left Europe.  But in 1997 she found out they were in the Holocaust Museum.  She traveled to Washington, D.C. in hopes she would be able to "shed more light on what has happened to Jews during and after the war."
How did Rude get from Westby to the holocaust?

Maxine Rude grew up in Westby and married Leonard Rude in 1940.  She learned photography from her husband who had a studio on Main Street in Viroqua in the building that is now Langhus Pharmacy.

Rude, who now lives in Arizona, said the couple's first job was photographing a roast pig, and the second job was photographing a child who had passed away.

The direction of their photography took a turn in 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the couple headed for Washington, D.C.

As Rude wrote, " There was a rush all over the United States to become part of the coming war effort… A flood of Americans headed for the capitol…"

Rude held several jobs but finally found her niche when she was asked to photograph the UNRRA's efforts with displaced persons in Germany and Poland.

On the way to Germany in 1945, Rude remembers photographing the royal family in London the day the Allies declared victory in Japan.

Here's what she wrote of the devastation she encountered in Germany.

"What a shock to see the devastation!  Displaced people trudging along rubble-laden roads pulling baby carriages and wagons filled with their remaining belongs.  Some were probing in rubble looking for missing family members."

While in Germany, Rude had a chance to attend the Nuremberg Trials.  She remembers seeing Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering staring as if in a stupor, paying no attention to what was going on in court.

"I realized he was staring at me.  Later it was explained that I looked like his first wife, a Scandinavian," recalled Rude.  She also wrote that Goering committed suicide two days later in Spandau Prison.

After World War II, Rude traveled to South America. Photographing for the World Health Organization.  There she encountered Joseph Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death", with the dictator president of Paraguay at the opera.

Despite her travels, the Rude family managed to maintain a homelife in Washington, D.C. where Leonard worked.

"We passed each other in Washington National Airport," reported Rude laughing.

Rude continued to pursue history with her camera following WWII, and has managed to be in the right place at the right time to record some of the most interesting happenings since that time.

She was in Bogota, Columbia, during the height of the American-led war on drugs, and had to leave the country quite quickly when that war took a sudden turn.

She also photographed the malaria-infested jungles of Panama and Surinam, and in 1989, she photographed the fight for democracy in Tianenmen Square in China.
"I have 600 photos taken in many provinces in China.  It was a test period of open democracy… Change was rampant… But this all evolved back to safer ways after the Tiananmen uprising," she wrote.

Now in her late 70s, Rude said, "Wobbly legs restrict me from the active photography I once treasured." However, her memories and stories are recorded on film for all to see.  Some of these "treasured" moments can be viewed at the Odin Gallery in La Crosse until Sept. 30, Wednesday through Saturday, 1-4pm.

The Stories of Persecuted Jews Must Be Told and Retold by Gayda Hollnagel

Tribune - Saturday, September 16, 2000:

The word Holocaust was missing from the title of a conference this week at the La Crosse Center on the mass genocide perpetrated against Jews and others by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The omission was deliberate said Greg Wegner, a University of Wisconsin La Crosse history professor and an organizer of "New Perspectives on the Shoah and the Third Reich."

Shoah, a Hebrew word which means "to rush over as in a storm, which leaves in its wake devastation, destruction and desolation," is a more appropriate term for what happened when Adolf Hitler's Third Reich swept through Europe leaving devastation, destruction and desolation behind, Wegner told conference participants Thursday night at the opening session.

"Holocaust, originally from he Greek, means burnt offering or sacrifice," which has a religious connotation, Wegner said. He said the violence perpetrated by the Nazis was not part of a religious ritual.

The conference, which ends at 2 p.m.. today, drew more than 100 paid participants, plus 300 or so college students from several communities whose participation was paid for through a grant.

Beyond that, activities connected to the conference touched the lives of at least a few other thousand people in the community, including 1,200 high school students who heard presentations by Shoah survivors Thursday at Central High School and another 1,400 middle school kids who heard similar presentations on Friday at the La Crosse Center. On Thursday, 800 students listened to survivors, while another 400 students heard from Solveig Sedlet, a former La Crosse resident who was a teen-ager in Denmark during the Nazi occupation there.

Sedlet, who is not Jewish, said that although her experiences don't compare with those of people who survived the concentration camps, life wasn't a whole lot of fun under the Nazis. For one thing, movement was pretty restricted and residents had to be off the streets and in their homes by 8:30 p.m. each day.

While survivor stories focus mostly on the horrors of the concentration camps, many survivors continued to live fragmented lives for years afterward in camps for displaced people throughout Europe.

A graphic reminder of thos days  is on display through the end of the month at the Odin Gallery, 505 Main St. The exhibit, "Displaced: Jewish Refugees and Other Displaced Persons, Europe 1945-1946" is a collection of 69 black and white photographs taken by Maxine Rude, a photographer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Admission is free, and the exhibit is open from from 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.

Of all the schools sending students to events, Lincoln Middle School likely can claim the most participants. Lincoln sent all 422 student to Friday's talk, With students walking to the La Crosse Center from their school.

The stories the kids heard about starvation, deprivation, dehumanization and unbelievable violence were not new to some of us or even new to some of the kids.

But as long as people continue to injure or kill one another, the stories will need to be told and retold.

Wegner said after the program that the need to study genocide and its causes is as relevant today as it was when the war ended 55 years ago because people are still killing each other in countries around the world.

Today's society prides. itself on its technological advances, he said. "But the one thing we haven't figured out is how to get along with one another."

Tribune reporter Gayda Hollnagel writes a weekly column for the Faith page. She can be reached at ghollnagel@lacrossetribune.com.

Related Document

Document issued by UNRRA in Austria re group of Jewish Displaced Persons on their way from Linz, Austria, to a Camp in Merano, Italy and a Red Cross Arm Band worn by the Group Leader.

Related Links

Additional photos of the DP Camp by Norman Weaver, colleague of Maxine Rude. Courtesy of Sarah Starsmore.