| 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.
In the following excerpt, Sorrin responds to questions about this image:
SS: This has to be some time in late 1947, maybe 1948. There was a deluge of pregnancies and marriages, and again it's a response to that period of broken lives. For six, seven years their lives had been interrupted, families had been destroyed, one of the partners killed. Children dead. And so there was a rush to recreate and of course it was across--usually in Europe you married somebody in your own town, in your own neighborhood, in your own shtetl. You made your choices pretty close to home. It was true in the United States, too. But being so fragmented, you had marriages now, you know, Hungarians and Poles and people from all different parts of Europe getting together. I had a very dear friend who now lives in Montreal and he was [from] Riga [Latvia], and he married this girl from Poland. I remember before he married her he would joke--you remember the old Galitsianer-Litvak thing--that he would never have anything to do with [a Latvian]--but they fell in love and they married and created a family. So these baby carriages are really symbolic, really one of the major elements in this whole thing, the rebirth. That's what I would call that--rebirth. That's a fantastic picture, I didn't realize I had it. Now, where they got these fancy little baby carriages I don't know. We didn't issue them.
DM: Judging from other photographs I've seen from the period, those carriages were typical.
SS: Yes, I'm sure that there must have been a store or something which had them or a warehouse which had them stacked up and the people. These people had such resourcefulness about finding things and getting things. Just incredible.
Interview by Jean Loeb Lettofsky and David Mandel, March 3, 1980. |
