How Jewish Holocaust Survivors Celebrated Purim
Purim, a Jewish holiday observed for centuries, is a day for joyful celebrations and fun traditions such as sharing sweets, performing skits in costume, and reenacting the biblical story that Purim is based on. The villain of that story, Haman, had persuaded the king to wipe out the Jews of Persia. But the queen, Esther, intervened to save them from genocide — though that term was not coined until 1944.
After being liberated from the Nazis, many Holocaust survivors refused to return home, where their communities were gone and they would face further violence and antisemitism. The Allies housed more than 250,000 Jewish people in displaced persons camps. While the survivors initially lived in quite poor conditions, they eventually organized festivities and cultural diversions to help raise morale, and began to practice their religion again.
On the occasion of Purim, they were able to celebrate their own survival, resilience, and hope for the future. Some survivors drew parallels between that biblical story and the experiences they had just endured. Above, at the Landsberg displaced persons camp in Allied-occupied Germany in March 1946, Jewish displaced persons dressed up one of their own as Adolf Hitler for a Purim masquerade, substituting Hitler for Haman.
The children below participated in a Purim performance at the Cremona, Italy, displaced persons camp. One of the little girls, Masha Leikach (now Marsha Tishler), survived in hiding as a baby with a Christian couple in a Polish town before being reunited with her parents, traveling with them to Italy, and immigrating to the United States.
Seymour Kaftan (born Szepsel Kaftanski) took the photo below of a Purim ensemble, also at the Cremona camp. He was in his early 20s at the time. He and his family had been forced to move into the Vilna ghetto, but he also lived for a time in hiding with his mother and younger sister before the SS discovered them. He was forced to labor at an auto repair shop for the German army, but escaped and, after liberation, made his way to Italy. His parents and sister did not survive. Seymour immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Mickey and Magda Quittner, originally from Hungary, began their lives anew at the Pocking displaced persons camp in Germany. They had survived the Holocaust separately, in hiding. The back of the photograph below says, “the entire cast of the Purim play,” with Mickey and Magda circled. Their son George was born at Pocking in 1947 and the family immigrated to the United States in 1949.
Inge Gerson Berner donated the photo below of a Purim performance cast at the Wittenau camp in Berlin, where she returned at age 23 after surviving a series of prisons and concentration camps.
Inge later dedicated herself to preserving Holocaust history and making sure its lessons were accessible to future generations. She testified in a war crimes trial, recorded her oral testimony, and spoke at her grandson’s school.
“Everything can be taken away from you — your home, your possessions, even your family,” she said, recalling her message to students. “But what cannot be taken away from you is … your education, your knowledge.”
