The Rage to Live - The International D.P. Children's Center Kloster Indersdorf 1945-1948

This book documents two historical humanitarian efforts to help the youngest victims of National Socialism in postwar Germany:

After the liberation of the concentration and labor camps, from July 1945 to July 1946, a team of UNRRA pioneers provided 613 Jewish and gentile child survivors in Kloster Indersdorf (near Dachau) with the initial help they needed to pick up the pieces of their shattered existence and go on with their lives – either in their home country or in a completely different environment. Taking care of hundreds of young Holocaust survivors and other displaced children posed a challenge hitherto unknown.

The humanitarian workers focused on the children's individual needs and psychological responses to persecution and displacement. They listened attentively when the child survivors talked about their suffering and loss; they had to understand that these traumatized young people urgently needed to gain control over their haunting experiences.

From August 1946 – September 1948 in the Jewish Children's Center Kloster Indersdorf, the Zionist kibbutz movement Dror, along with the UNRRA, also had to meet the basic needs of hundreds of young Holocaust survivors from Poland, Hungary and Romania. The youth leaders offered schooling, games, sports, concerts and cultural activities. But as their primary aim was to prepare these child survivors for their future life on a kibbutz in Erez Israel, they also engaged them in helping with farm and household tasks, they practiced roll-calls and self-defense, and they taught them Zionist and socialist principles.

Sixty to seventy years later, the author interviewed more than a hundred survivors who were either in the International Children's Center or in the Jewish Children's Center Kloster Indersdorf. She paints a vivid picture of everyday life in both children's centers and creates portraits of many of these child survivors «then and now».