Zalman Grinberg

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Zalman Grinberg (born September 4, 1912 in Kaunas , Russian Empire ; died August 8, 1983 in Mineola (New York) ) was a Lithuanian - American doctor, survivor of the Holocaust and representative of the Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) in the American Zone in Germany and Austria .

Life

Zalman Grinberg studied medicine and specialized in radiology . After the German attack on the Soviet Union , Grinberg was imprisoned in the Kaunas ghetto in 1941 . When the ghetto was dissolved, he was deported with a group of Lithuanian Jews to the Dachau concentration camp . From 1944 he was a forced laborer in the Dachau-Kaufering camp . In April 1945, five hundred of the prisoners were loaded onto a freight train headed for Tyrol by the SS guards, which was stopped near Schwabhausen because of a low- flying attack. The SS guards fled and many prisoners died in the shelling or were injured. Grinberg arranged for the inmates and the injured to be billeted in the nearby Sankt Ottilien monastery and was able to make it clear to the German chief medical officer there that, after the imminent German surrender to denazification, it would speak for him if he took in the Jews now.

After the end of the war, Grinberg and concentration camp survivors built a DP camp, a hospital and a care station in Sankt Ottilien, initially for sick former concentration camp inmates and then for the large number of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. The hospital existed until November 1948. In the DP As early as May 27, 1945, Michael Hofmekler organized a concert with Yiddish and Hebrew songs with eight other survivors from the former Kovno forced ghetto orchestra in Sankt Ottilien camp.

At the end of May 1945, Grinberg sent an urgent request for humanitarian aid to the World Jewish Congress . Grinberg organized the contact between the individual Bavarian DP camps, whose representatives founded a central committee for self-administration in the Feldafing DP camp on July 1, 1945 , whose seat was in Munich and whose president Grinberg was elected. The organization was successively expanded to the entire American Zone and in January 1946 Grinberg became the first president of the "Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the US Zone". He spoke at their “First Congress of Liberated Jews in the US Zone” on January 27, 1946 in Munich City Hall : We regard our stay in Germany as a waiting time and we regard Germany as the waiting room for emigration to Palestine. Grinberg passed the presidency on to Dawid Treger in July 1946 and emigrated to Palestine , where he became director of the Beilinson hospital in Petach Tikwa .

Grinberg moved to the United States in 1955 and trained as a psychiatrist at the New York School of Psychiatry ( New York University ). He worked as a hospital doctor at Nassau County Medical Center in East Meadow .

Grinberg was married to Eva Klein, they had three children and lived in Seaford on Long Island .

Fonts (selection)

  • Presentation by Z. Grinberg, given on January 27, 1946 at the opening session of the Conference of Liberated Jews in the American Zone of Occupation in Munich . Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria. Herder printing works, Munich 1946
  • A former Dachau prisoner reports: idleness is demoralizing the displaced Jews: useful work will save them from disintegration . American ORT Federation, New York 1946 Typoscript, 6 pages

Film document

  • These are the people . Talks by David Ben Gurion, Zalman Grinberg, 1946. VHS at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

literature

  • Angelika Königseder, Juliane Wetzel : Courage in life in the waiting room. The Jewish DPs (Displaced Persons) in post-war Germany. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-10761-X .
  • Robert L. Hilliard: Surviving the Americans . Seven Stories Press, New York 1997
    • Robert L. Hilliard: Forgotten by the liberators: the struggle for survival of Jewish concentration camp prisoners under American occupation . Translation from English Andreas Simon. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 978-3-593-36397-4 .
  • Anna Holian: Between national socialism and Soviet communism: displaced persons in postwar Germany . Ann Arbor, Mich .: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-472-11780-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Angelika Königseder, Juliane Wetzel: Mutual courage in the waiting room , 1994, p. 82
  2. ↑ Michael Hofmekler in music and the holocaust
  3. ↑ Angelika Königseder, Juliane Wetzel: Lebensmut im Wartesaal , 1994, p. 83. The concert program is given by Hilliard with Mahler and Mendelssohn.
  4. ↑ Angelika Königseder, Juliane Wetzel: Lebensmut im Wartesaal , 1994, p. 61, fn. 4, p. 230
  5. ↑ Photo: Grosberg, Abraham Klausner , Samuel Gringauz , Isaac Ratner, Dawid Treger, Zalman Grinberg , David Ben-Gurion , Josef Leibowitz, Israel Jochelson and Marian Puczyc. In: Angelika Königseder, Juliane Wetzel: Mutual courage in the waiting room , 1994, p. 84
  6. ↑ Angelika Königseder, Juliane Wetzel: Mutual courage in the waiting room , 1994, p. 41; P. 127
  7. ^ Zalman Grinberg: Report January 27, 1946
  8. ↑ Hofmekler on a photo from 1947 in Israel, on which Grinberg (?) Is also shown as a musician, see: c: File: PresslerSalomon001.jpg
  9. ^ Ronny Loewy: These are the people. On Abraham J. Klausner's film about the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Zone , in: Fritz Bauer Institute (Ed.): Survived and on the move: Jewish Displaced Persons in post-war Germany . 1997 yearbook on the history and impact of the Holocaust. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt 1997, pp. 119–128
personal data
SURNAME Grinberg, Zalman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian-American doctor
DATE OF BIRTH September 4, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaunas , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1983
Place of death Mineola (New York)