Starting Over: Reconstituted Families after the Holocaust

In the year 2000 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and its Second Generation Advisory Group hosted a conference entitled “Life Reborn: Jewish Displaced Persons, 1946–1951.”¹ It was the first such gathering to address the Jewish displaced persons (DP) experience as a legitimate topic for academic inquiry.² As its title “Life Reborn” suggests, an important theme framing the conference was how Holocaust survivors in the DP camps began the process of starting anew immediately after the war. Many noted how quickly the DPs married and began families. Indeed, scholars have documented the historically high birthrate in the DP camps