UNESCO 2014 Liberation Body Text
In the spring of 1945, as Allied forces moved from liberating territories to liberating camps, the survivors’ journey through the horrors of the Holocaust ended, and a new one began. The physical journey of survivors’ return home was often circuitous, difficult, and painful, and the emotional journey through the aftermath of the Holocaust was just beginning. This is recounted in the thousands of testimonies of the Visual History Archive, where survivors and witnesses reflect on their experiences and describe the challenges that they faced after living through such trauma.
Many of the members of the Allied armed forces started their journey through the Holocaust when they liberated the concentration camps. Howard Cwick, one of 362 liberators and liberation witnesses in the Visual History Archive, describes arriving at Buchenwald in bewildered terms. Directly confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust, the liberators also grappled with psychological trauma. Their experiences impacted the history of their communities, families, and friends. In their testimonies, they speak of life-changing implications of their experience, as Howard does here.
The moment of liberation was fraught with ambiguity and anticipation for survivors. Whether they survived in camps or in hiding, they dreaded returning home to find who or what may or may not await. After the horrors they had witnessed and experienced, they were not at all sure to find surviving members of their families. They were also mistrustful of their neighbors, and fearful of what the future might hold. They found their homes destroyed, or occupied by others. Clara Isaacman captures the ambiguity of this moment in her testimony.
For many who had fled prior to or during the war, the return home was equally ambiguous as it was for those who survived the camps. Vera Gissing was saved in the Kindertransport operations of the 1930s, and she lived in the United Kingdom throughout the war. Through these operations, an estimated 10,000 refugee children, most of them Jewish, were housed in the United Kingdom during the war. The Visual History Archive contains 659 testimonies that discuss Kinderstransport experiences. These children were able to avoid ghettoization and camp experiences; in many cases, they were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust. In 1945, Vera decided to return home to Prague, Czechoslovakia (today, Czech Republic). Her journey brought her back to a home she scarcely recognized, inhabited by another family.
Liberation brought with it new geographical movement and introduced a larger community to the horrors of the Holocaust. The legacy of the Holocaust started with liberation.