Saul Sorrin was interviewed as part of the Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust Interviews project. Sorrin, born in New York in 1919, applied in 1940 for a position with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). He worked with Holocaust survivors as a supply officer for UNRAA team 560 at the Displaced Persons camp Neu Freimann Siedlung in Germany and later, at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's recommendation, Sorrin became the Area Director of the International Refugee Organization based at the Wolfratshausen DP camp in Bad Kissingen.
When asked about this image, Sorrin revealed, "This is a photograph of a group of people leaving for the United States. The gentleman in the middle is Max Newman, who came from Syracuse or Rochester, New York, and he was the director of HIAS in Germany. The little boy to his left and the man with his coat under his arm are the Weinschenkers, a family of four who came from [Chernovitz?]. I found them in the DP camps. His brother was my father's business associate. These people are just praying they're going to Bremerhaven for movement to the United States. This is a United Nations transport here. What was interesting is that just a few days before, or perhaps a few weeks before, he had been called by the United Nations Commission on Partition, or subcommittee of that UN commission, to testify before them in the Neu Freimann DP Camp where he had been asked as part of their inquiry where he would like to go. And as an expression of Jewish unity over the establishment of the state, this is in the prestate days, probably early 1947 when he was asked where he was going, he said, 'In Erts Yisroel, vo ale Yidn faren,' which means 'To the land of Israel where all Jews will go.' Of course, when he said that he knew he had his visa to the United States in his pocket. But it was part of the expression of unity in support of the establishment of the state.
Mr. Weinschenker was lucky. He was in a work battalion in Romania. They came from [Chernovitz]. And he survived. The woman directly in the center is his wife and to her left is their daughter. A very cultivated family. They went to Chester, Pennsylvania, where he bought a luncheonette or a luncheonette was bought for him to operate. I do recall that the little boy somehow or other, and the girl also, had become musicians. The boy played the violin and the girl played the piano. I heard later on that they became quite gifted musicians and the girl married very successfully in Philadelphia."
Interview by Jean Loeb Lettofsky and David Mandel, March 3, 1980. |