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This chapter discusses several historical commissions in Germany, Austria, and Italy, three countries where between 1945 and 1949 large numbers of eastern European Jews temporarily lived in Displaced Persons (DP) camps under Allied occupation. Diverse in educational, social, and national backgrounds, most commission activists had endured the Holocaust in German-occupied eastern Europe. Unlike their counterparts in France and Poland, they did not primarily document the destruction of local Jewish communities but looked eastward to their countries of origin, which they had left either by wartime displacement or postwar escape. As they waited to establish new lives overseas, documenting the recent past provided a way to endow their involuntary sojourn in the DP camps with meaning. They regarded the historical material they gathered as preparation for emigration and Jewish life outside Europe, preferably in a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine/Israel, not as a path to integration into the societies outside their camps.

This chapter focuses on how the physical and psychological ordeal of displacement informed and inspired music-related activities among Jewish DPs, from the creation of a sui generis repertoire of topical songs to the drive to collect ghetto and camp songs and the formation of touring performance ensembles. It examines the musical activity in the DP camps in Occupied Germany, particularly the musical repertoire that the DPs created and performed. Recovered from a range of sources–including archival collections, survivor testimonies, memoirs, printed and manuscript songbooks, as well as field and commercial recordings–these works reflect the frustrations and hopes of survivors as they attempt to envision the future and rebuild their lives. Emblematic of this repertoire is the Yiddish song “Vu ahin zol ikh geyn?”, generally regarded as the anthem of the surviving European Jewry. The trauma of dislocation motivated such repertoire, as well as the effort to collect ghetto and camp songs, and the formation of touring ensembles. These music ventures, many unexplored until now, offer insight into the DP experience and culture, and the ways in which DPs coped with the past, particularly the Holocaust and the loss of home through music in the immediate postwar period.

This chapter examines the path toward recovery of the Jewish community in the city of Munich after World War II. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of German Jews settled in larger cities outside the displaced persons camps. Against all odds, these Jews began to engage in the process of restoring Jewish communal structures in Germany. The chapter considers the process of restoring and rebuilding Jewish life in postwar Germany as well as the tensions between Jewish displaced persons, German Jews, and international Jewish organizations over the question of whether to remain or to leave. It suggests that the path toward recovery of the Jewish community in the Federal Republic of Germany was made possible by the emergence of a group identity among the so-called stayers and a change in mindset regarding Jewish life in Germany within the global Jewish community.

This chapter looks at the experience of survivors in displaced persons (DP) camps as a cultural anomaly, when Yiddish language and literature formed the basis for cultural continuity in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Jews in the DP camps produced a number of Yiddish publications whose aim was to renew Jewish cultural life. But even as the camp setting fostered the use of Yiddish as a lingua franca, survivors recognized that the role of the language and its culture was changing. Despite the efforts of Yiddishist writers and cultural activists to sustain it, Yiddish stood at a critical juncture: the debate over the adoption of a common language to unify Jewish civilization was not new, but in the DP camps it set the stage for the future development of Jewish culture. The chapter then explores the Yiddish DP camp publications to interpret the choices and loyalties that shaped the language practices of the time and the policies the intelligentsia of the camps articulated. It looks, first, at factors internal to the DP camps and, second, at external factors influencing language use, especially political and Zionist organizations and agencies.

The final chapter explores Jewish life in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps. Whilst the Nazis had plunged everything into the wholesale murder of every Jewish man, woman, and child in occupied Europe, they did not in the end succeed. Between 1945 and 1948 tens of thousands of Jews emerged from the concentration and labour camps, and from hiding. Whilst many were desperate to go home, a large number were forced to gather in the DP camps of Austria, Germany, and Italy, waiting for life to begin. Stranded in the primitive and often punitive half-world of the DP camps—somewhere between the lives they had left behind and the uncertainties of the future—many survivors were desperate to start families. For women, in particular, this meant a whole series of challenges.

This chapter examines the initiatives launched by social movements in Haiti to address ordinary people's housing problems in the post-earthquake era. More than a thousand displaced persons camps have cropped up in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake. These camps had become a stark reminder of social neglect. Hunger, illness, and sleep deprivation were the norm. Those living in the camps faced constant risks of violence and abuse, not to mention the health risks posed by rats, flies, and mosquitoes. This chapter looks at the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing, a coalition of camp committees, community groups, and nonprofits whose mission has been secure, quality homes for everyone. It also discusses the social movements' vision for a national housing policy that includes a law guaranteeing the right to housing, equal access to women in housing and land ownership, and public housing on state land.

This chapter focuses on Haiti's national elections held on November 28, 2010. Fraud was rampant during the elections. Local authorities intimidated, committed violence, stuffed voting urns, and faked ballots. Ballots wound up in toilets and canals, while gangs burned down stations entirely. The portion of the electorate who voted and had it counted was a mere 22.8 percent. People referred to the elections as “selections.” The campaign itself had been farcical. Among the presidential candidates were Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly. The electoral council barred Jean-Bertrand Aristide's political party, Lavalas Family (Fanmi Lavalas), and eliminated at least thirteen other candidates. This chapter discusses the rise in cholera incidence in displaced persons camps during the election period as well as the involvement of the international community in the elections, including the United States and the Organization of American States.