Biographies | Leo Lowy

IV. Displaced Person

After liberation I stayed on a kibbutz, which had been set-up on a German farm near Munich. It was run by a Zionist organization. There were about fifty people on the kibbutz, many of them from my home town in Carpathia. We tried to get to Israel in June 1945 but were arrested crossing the Alps from Austria into Italy. About two weeks later we were taken back to where we had started. Later, we made it to Italy, where we spent a short time in Rivoli, near Torino. From there we went to a displaced persons camp in Cremona, where Miriam and I stayed for about a year and one half.

I. Childhood in Berehovo

II. Auschwitz-Birkenau

IV. Displaced Person

VI. Becoming Canadian

Displaced Persons camps
Facilities established in Germany, France, Italy and Belgium, some located in former concentration camps, where stateless Jews were housed. Some refugees remained in these camps for several years while they waited for permission to immigrate.

Kibbutz
A collective farm where the members own all property in common. Social Zionist organizations promoted this form of collective agriculture. After the Holocaust, kibbutzim were formed in Europe to provide agricultural training to survivors, in the hope of relocating the kibbutzim and their members to Palestine.