Displaced Persons Camp Ambulance Drivers

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Displaced persons camp ambulance drivers standing on a UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) jeep. The man in the front, center, was a partisan during WWII; Germany. 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, "I think these fellows were our ambulance drivers, posing as a group. We had a very big population. People got sick. They drove ambulances but they also drove other vehicles. I remember this young man in his leather coat up front, and I wonder where this guy is. He was a young guy who'd seen it all. I remember him very clearly. He'd been a partisan. You can just tell by the tilt of that hat, you know, and the way he's standing there. He had a real sense of bravado. He used to say, 'Khaver Direktor, I could do anything.' He went out and got that leather coat some place in Germany. You can just tell, looking at him compared to the others that he--I don't remember his name, but these are a group of drivers in the motor pool of one of the DP camps." Interview by Jean Loeb Lettofsky and David Mandel, March 3, 1980.