Hundreds of pages with the names of Holocaust survivors relocated to Displaced Persons Camps in Austria and Germany have now been reprinted and digitized. The extensive lists have never been available together, and the original volumes exist in only a few libraries worldwide. Thanks to a collaboration of the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center in the UMass Amherst Libraries and Schoen Books of South Deerfield, Massachusetts, they are now available on the open web, enabling families of survivors, genealogists and researchers to have access to the vital information they contain.
The volumes were originally published in 1945 by the U. S. Government as a way to help survivors, the Sharit Ha-Platah or “the surviving remnant,” reach family members around the world.
Ken Schoen, of Schoen Books, discovered the five bound volumes buried in a library and was able to purchase them for his select publishing program of reprints. Schoen’s passion for “books with a past looking for a future” is the reason he dedicated time and effort to the project.
Located in the old firehouse in downtown South Deerfield, Schoen Books has specialized collecting and selling in out-of-print scholarly books concerning the Holocaust for the past 30 years. Most of Schoen’s family was able to escape from Nazi Germany, and Schoen grew up in a neighborhood with many survivor families.
Digitizing the five volumes was an extraordinary commitment, due to their fragility. The digitized searchable version is now in Credo, SCUA’s digital repository.
For historical background to the book, listen to Professor Avinoam Patt discussing the work of Rabbi Klausner in an interview with the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
For more information go to www.schoenbooks.com and click on reprints.
