Reserve your Visit
Online Store
Support Us
After Liberation, A Child in a Prisoner’s Uniform Eating His First Meal, Dachau, Germany
Yad Vashem Archives, 1771/13
From the Testimony of Uri Hanoch:
“So what would we do? We would steal the bread even if we didn’t need it. [..] There wasn’t one [prisoner] who didn’t have half a loaf of bread under their pillow. This wasn’t just because they wouldn’t give us any – bread meant security. Only bread, by the way. Not a potato, not an apple and not a pear. That wasn’t security. Security was bread. We’re talking about bread. There wasn’t one [prisoner] who didn’t have bread with in their bed. Only bread. This is a story of bread.”
(Testimony of Uri Hanoch on Yom Hashoah, 1996, Yad Vashem Archives.)
In the photograph we see a young boy, who is a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. He is holding a large bowl of soup, and eating his first meal. Notice the look on the child’s face and his skinny fingers. His forehead is knotted like that of an old man, and the boy looks years older than his real age. What special difficulties do you think this boy might have experienced as a child in a concentration camp?
In Uri Hanoch’s testimony, he speaks about the sense of security that bread provided prisoners and survivors after the war. What kind of security do you think bread could provide a young boy who has just been released from a camp?