Black and white photo. A building with 2 or 3 floors is in the background. The street is crowded and on the front, to the right, is a car with people on top of it. Right in the middle is a man dressed up as Hitler making the arm salute.

Displaced Persons Camp Purim Carnival

Landsberg, Germany, 1946. Photograph

Photograph from a Purim carnival in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Purim is a joyous Jewish festival commemorating the survival of the Jews who were marked for death by their Persian rulers in the 5th century BCE. Through the years many customs have come to be associated with the festival, including a carnival atmosphere and dressing up in costumes. In this photo a Jewish Holocaust survivor has dressed as Hitler.

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Unless otherwise stated, all artifacts featured in the exhibition come from the YIVO's Archives and Library collections. Digitization of many of these materials has been made possible by the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project.

Disclaimer: for the reader’s ease of finding wartime locations on current-day maps, we have at times used the present-day names of those cities and streets as they may be found on modern maps.