The Life and Thought of Louis Lowy: Social Work Through the Holocaust

Afterword: Social Work with Refugees and Displaced Populations

167 Afterword Social Work with Refugees and Displaced Populations It is often the survivors who first raise awareness of a catastrophe to the outside world. We learned after the Holocaust that eyewitness testimonies may be our primary sources of knowledge for months, for years, or even for generations after the event, and if we are to serve refugees and displaced populations effectively, we must begin by listening to them. Jewish war refugees of the 1950s quickly learned not to talk about their pasts. Health and human services professionals, who rarely spoke the languages of the survivors, did not want to hear about their experiences during the war. In contrast to social workers of the postwar era, American social workers today are aware of genocide as a concept and as a reality, and we have better information about trauma, posttraumatic stress, resilience , and recovery. However, we are no more likely than our predecessors to speak a second language, let alone the particular languages of newly arriving populations, and we may be no better prepared to listen and to learn from the refugees and displaced populations whom we hope to serve. As a survivor of the Holocaust, Louis Lowy taught his students to follow the guiding principles and values that he attributed to the social work profession: respect for human dignity, worth, and self-determination; appreciation for the interdependence of generations; and commitment to social participation and learning for people of every age. In recording his oral narrative, Louis Lowy gave further guidance to social workers of the future, with particular implications for social work practice with refugees and displaced populations. His testimony suggests that we will gain an orienting knowledge of displaced communities by listening with empathy, by respecting the meaning of return, by supporting cultural and 168 | The Life and Thought of Louis Lowy educational activities, by empowering indigenous leaders, and by taking a critical and creative stance toward our profession. An Orienting Knowledge The need for an orienting knowledge was suggested to me by Maria Hirsch Rosenbloom, professor emerita of Hunter School of Social Work, who was one of the first social work educators to offer a course on the Holocaust.1 Maria Rosenbloom had survived the war by living under a false identity. After her liberation, she worked with refugees and displaced populations in Germany, where she was employed by UNRRA and later by the American Joint Distribution Committee, a combined Jewish philanthropy known as “the Joint.” As she remembered: I was assigned by the Joint to be the official escort of a shipment of refugees . I was to give every passenger ten dollars and get a receipt. I was told hundreds of times, I must get a receipt, and I got a receipt from everyone. It was September 21, 1947, around the Jewish holidays of 1947, and we celebrated Rosh Hashanah [the Jewish New Year] on the boat. It was a rickety boat, a military boat called the Ernie Pyle. It was a very miserable ride, seven days that you never forget. Many people got sick. One day, suddenly we heard a scream: “America!” And I can never say it without tears in my eyes. We suddenly saw land, and our sickness left us. The sight of America was an experience which sixty years later I cannot forget. It was the most meaningful experience of my life. It was true for all of us. The boat kept moving slowly towards the harbor and it circled or came in close distance of the Statue of Liberty. And this, too, I remember, how the most Orthodox Jews took off their hats–they don’t do it, usually—to greet our lady, the Statue of Liberty. And this was 1947 and now it is 2007. This makes it sixty years ago, and I still cry when I talk about it. And I’m sure this is true for many of the passengers on that boat. Another moment that stays with me, that stays with most of us, is the moment that the boat started moving away from the land in Bremerhaven in Germany. That also was a moment that I will never forget. Most of us also felt that we would never go back to Europe because of what we left in Europe. Some of us did go back as tourists; I went, too, but Europe Afterword | 169 was something that was terribly painful for us to have...