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 no longer knew they were Jewish. Almost all were orphans.

More than three hundred young survivors would pass through the monastery.

This was not a place designed for mourning. It was a place designed for survival after survival.

Dror — Hebrew for “freedom” — did not understand rescue as an end point. The movement’s aim was to rebuild Jewish life in collective form. At Indersdorf, the children were organized into groups, each with its own name and counselors. One group was called Eitan — “strong.” Hebrew was taught. Work was assigned. Fields were planted.

The children were prepared not for pity, but for life.

A children’s kibbutz was not a summer camp. It was a total environment, organized along communal lines: shared meals, collective labor, language, discipline, and purpose. For children who had been hunted and starved, structure itself became an act of restoration. The group became the family. The kibbutz became the homeland.

The counselors — the madrichim — became something between teachers, older siblings, and parents.

Two of those counselors were Yakov Szurek and Benjamin Anolik.

Their shared path toward the same kibbutz is one of the countless postwar stories that were lived intensely and rarely written down. I know this one because Yakov Szurek was my mother-in-law’s brother. Little Edna’s War exists because he kept his sister alive.

“Structure itself became an act of restoration.”

“Structure itself became an act of restoration.”

Yakov Szurek was born at Mila 18 in Warsaw. As a boy in the ghetto, he belonged to the shmuglers — children who slipped through gaps in the walls to smuggle food from the Aryan side. A doctor once told him, “You will survive, because you can live on both sides of the wall.”

Yakov survived on false papers, tending pigs in a Polish village, singing in a church choir, answering a priest’s catechism questions so convincingly that the villagers embraced him. His mother starved to death in the ghetto. His father was murdered at Flossenbürg.

After the war, Yakov joined efforts to move Jewish children out of Poland, through Germany, toward Palestine. He escorted children from Bielawa to Germany, from Germany to Cyprus, and from Cyprus to Israel.

Somewhere along that route, he passed through a Bavarian monastery that had become a survivor-run orphanage.

Moshe Kupferman, born in 1926 in Jarosław, survived the war in Soviet labor camps in the Urals and Kazakhstan. Both of his parents died. His sister returned with him to Poland — and then died as well. Kupferman joined Dror and, in 1947, still in Germany, began to draw again for the first time since before the war.

In 1949, he was among the founders of Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot in the Western Galilee.

On the sixth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in April 1949, the kibbutz’s founders laid a cornerstone on a hill between Acre and Nahariya, on the site of an abandoned British Army base. Among them were Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin. Among them were Szurek, Anolik, and Kupferman.

That same day, they laid the foundations for something else.

They built the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum — the first permanent Holocaust museum in the world, created by survivors themselves, years before Yad Vashem would open its doors.

Memory did not begin with the state. It began with survivors who refused silence.

“Memory did not begin with the state. It began with survivors.”

“Memory did not begin with the state. It began with survivors.”

Today, an amphitheater carved into the hillside at Lohamei HaGeta’ot hosts Israel’s official closing ceremony for Yom HaShoah. Where once 159 survivors built a settlement, some fifteen thousand people now gather. Survivors light torches. Their grandchildren read names.

A twelfth-century Bavarian monastery became an orphanage for starving Jewish children. That orphanage became a kibbutz. And that kibbutz became the first place in the world dedicated to remembering what had been done to them.

Yakov Szurek helped build all of it — a boy from Mila 18 who smuggled food through ghetto walls, survived on false papers, and walked into a monastery that had become a survivor-run orphanage, and helped keep it alive.

Later, he went back to England to search for the sisters he had lost.

Both survived. One of them, Miriam, died by suicide in 1978.

Survival was not the end of the story. It was only its beginning.

Janet Bond Brill, PhD is the author of the Holocaust memoir Little Edna’s War, the story of her mother-in-law Edna Stefania Brill, née Szurek, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, child smuggler, and the youngest decorated soldier in the Polish Home Army — and sister of Yakov Szurek.

Little Edna’s War, was published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Order Now

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)