Most Holocaust-related courses and programs focus on the atrocities of the Shoah itself. Andrew Stein’s course instead shines a light on its aftermath.
Stein has taught adult education courses, often in Jewish history, for the past 25 years at Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, where he’s a longtime member.
His 15-week course, “The Legacy of Holocaust Refugees, Displaced Persons, and Survivors Post-1945 in the Jewish World,” examines how civilians of formerly Nazi-occupied countries rebuilt after what is considered the most destructive war in human history.
“Teaching this course, we have to immerse ourselves into the pre-Holocaust setting in Jewish Europe and the Holocaust itself to deal with the aftermath,” Stein said. “But a lot of recent research in the last five to 10 years has focused on [the fact] that the Holocaust didn’t end with the liberation of the camps, whether in terms of compensation or restitution or tracing to see who survived and who didn’t, or the legacy and impact on the Jewish world.”
He added that many contemporary researchers are interested in the spring 1945 liberation of the concentration camps and the process of tracking survivors.
“The Holocaust didn’t just end when they were liberated. It just started for them,” Stein said.
Stein’s course follows the “surviving remnant,” scattered across the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North and South America, and Holocaust survivors’ legacy over the past 80 years.
Week one covers the Soviet and Western Allies, the liberation of the camps and the experience of survivors and displaced persons in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Weeks two and three focus on the fate of stateless survivors from 1945 to 1955, followed by a session on preserving the cultural and religious heritage of destroyed communities.
Weeks five and six are dedicated to youth survivors, including “hidden children” and women’s experiences.
The following sessions cover survivors, DPs and refugees in the United States and Canada, British Palestine and Israel from 1935 to 1955 and after, and elsewhere throughout the world.
Stein referenced the works of author and Holocaust studies professor Avinoam Patt, who has written books about DPs in Germany from 1945 to 1953.
“Most people don’t realize the refugee crisis of ’33 to ’45, where a lot of people tried to flee the Nazis and couldn’t, because most doors were closed in the Western Hemisphere, other European countries, other parts of the world, the rejection of Jewish survivors,” Stein said.
By the fall of 1945, 8 million DPs were repatriated to Germany — voluntarily or involuntarily. But 1 million of them didn’t want to live under Stalin’s rule, “so they went everywhere else in the world, and then about a quarter million were Jewish refugees and survivors, and most people in the world didn’t want them up until the mid-’50s,” according to Stein.
The next session highlights Jewish refugees and Shoah survivors in the military. The final five classes discuss the memoirs written by survivors and refugees, the Holocaust memorials, museums, education and commemoration, literature by Holocaust survivors and survivors’ dedication to Jewish life, social causes and Israel.
Rabbi Michael Holzman of NVHC spoke to the importance of the way Stein approaches this history.
“The Shoah is often invoked in a vague, blanket-like way to describe the pattern of anti-Jew hatred and the eternal capacity for human evil,” Holzman wrote in a statement to Washington Jewish Week. “By looking at the stories of survivors, we get beneath the abstractions to see the creative and inspiring ways Jewish survival was lived out by real people in real time.”
Despite his vast knowledge of these topics, Stein is not a historian. Rather, the former federal employee holds a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees in addition to his own personal learning.
“I have read in this field for 40 years,” he said.
Stein also spent seven years as a college professor in Latin American studies and political science.
He became interested in Jewish history due to his personal connections to Holocaust survivors. Stein’s paternal uncle fought in World War II and married a woman who had fled Nazi Germany as a young teen and lost three dozen relatives in Treblinka and Auschwitz, the country’s two deadliest extermination camps.
Stein had a rabbi professor in college who was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He also befriended a former Ritchie Boy who escaped Nazi Germany at the age of 15.
Through his aunt, Stein knew many Kindertransport and Holocaust survivors, some of whom fought in the U.S. Army: “I knew a lot of people of that generation, born in the ’20s, mainly, and just felt like I wanted to give this course.”
The course is also of interest to members of the NVHC community, whose synagogue library holds hundreds of books on the Holocaust and its aftermath.
“Friends of mine in the congregation who are 20-plus years older than me — I’m 60, soon 61 — were adult children of refugees and survivors, so they have a special interest in [the subject],” Stein said.
In fact, among the 10 to 12 members enrolled in the course, two have parents who barely survived fleeing Germany, but lost many relatives.
“While it’s important to commemorate those who perished, it’s also just as important to know your history, how that affects where you are now and your view of the future,” Stein said.
