How Holocaust survivors built an orphanage for starving Jewish children — and the world’s first permanent Holocaust Museum

Kloster Indersdorf lies in the Bavarian countryside between Dachau and Augsburg. Founded in the twelfth century, the Augustinian monastery spent nearly eight hundred years as a place of enclosure: prayer, silence, and the education of girls.

In the summer of 1946, it became something else entirely.

Members of the Dror youth movement — a Jewish socialist-Zionist youth organization founded in Poland in 1915, many of whose members fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and later helped organize survivor children’s homes, illegal immigration, and kibbutzim in pre-state Israel — took over the monastery and turned it into a Jewish children’s home.

It was, in effect, a survivor-run orphanage.

“The children who arrived there had marched out of hell.”

The children who arrived at Kloster Indersdorf were Holocaust survivors. Many had been driven out of Flossenbürg concentration camp in the final weeks of the war, forced onto death marches as Nazi Germany collapsed. They were already skeletal from years of starvation. They marched for days without food, collapsing by the roadside, watching others shot or left to die.

Some were liberated by American troops while still on the roads. Others wandered on after liberation, too weak to know where to go.

When they reached Indersdorf, they were literally starving. Their clothes hung from their bodies. Many had infected wounds and untreated illnesses. Some could not remember their own names. Some had been hidden as Christians for so long that they........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)