A dress for a girl sewn in the Feldafing DP camp (Bavaria), c. 1945.
The dress is made from repurposed American jute fabric, sewn together with a floral fabric panel in a reversible manner, allowing it to be worn in two ways: with the plain jute fabric facing outward and the floral fabric inward, or with the jute fabric inward and the floral fabric facing outward.
Feldafing DP Camp, Bavaria, was the first Displaced Persons camp for liberated Jewish prisoners who survived the Holocaust and concentration camps. The camp was located in and around the premises of a school in the Höhenberg area of Feldafing. It was established by the United States Army on May 1, 1945, as an emergency shelter for Hungarian Jews and Jewish prisoners from Greece, who had been found in cattle cars on a train liberated near the Tutzing train station, alongside a German hospital train. Some of the first injured arrivals included survivors of the Poeing Massacre (an incident in Poeing, Bavaria, in April 1945, where German Luftwaffe soldiers shot about fifty Jewish prisoners attempting to escape a death train) and Allied pilots who had been captured.
In Feldafing DP Camp, social, educational, cultural, and religious activities thrived. A secular elementary school operated within the camp. The religious community established several schools, including Talmud Torahs, yeshivas, and seminaries, among them a Beit Midrash for Lithuanian Jews and another for Hungarian Jews.
In the first months after the war, there were very few children under the age of five in DP camps. Only 3% of Holocaust survivors were children and teenagers between the ages of 6-17. Most survivors had lost their entire families, and with feelings of loss and loneliness, the desire to establish their own families strengthened. Thus, immediately after liberation, there was a wave of marriages in the DP camps. Some camps even held group weddings, sometimes between survivors from different countries. Between 1946 and 1948, the birth rate in DP camps was the highest in the world. Many children living in Feldafing were housed in a kindergarten that accommodated 450 children and adolescents. Some organized themselves into kibbutzim with the goal of immigrating to Eretz Israel. Among them were the secular kibbutzim “Shayarat Zvi” and “Zerubavel”, and the religious kibbutzim “Hafetz Haim” and “Ohel Sarah”. By 1946, Feldafing housed approximately 4,000 Jews, but by Passover 1951, only 1,585 displaced Jews remained in the camp. The camp was transferred to German administration on December 1, 1951, and closed in March 1953.
Provenance: This was gifted to the depositor by Jan Żabiński during his visit to Israel in 1968 to participate in the planting of a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations in his honor at Yad Vashem. Jan and Antonina Żabiński, Righteous Among the Nations, saved dozens of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Jan Żabiński, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, hid dozens of ghetto children in hiding places he prepared in the animal enclosures and in his private home on zoo grounds during the war. He invested his personal funds in the effort and later received support from the Jewish Committee, headed by Adolf Berman. Over the course of the war, the Żabińskis saved close to 300 Jews. Most of them hid in their home briefly, while others stayed with the family until the war ended. In 2007, author Diane Ackerman published the book “The Zookeeper’s Wife”, a documentary-style work that commemorates the rescue efforts carried out by the Żabiński couple. (A confirmation from the consignor will be provided to the buyer upon request).
Height: 50 cm. Condition: Good.
