David Pablo Boder was a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology who traveled in 1946 to Europe to record interviews with displaced persons. Arriving in Paris in late July, Boder would spend the next two months interviewing 130 displaced persons in nine languages and recording them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. The interviews were among the earliest (if not the earliest) audio recordings of Holocaust survivors. They are valuable not only for the testimonies of survivors and other DPs, but also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder recorded at various points during the expedition. Boder's itinerary included four countries—France, Switzerland, Italy, and German—and sixteen different interview sites. On most days he conducted between two and five interviews, with each interview lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours. As the weeks went by and Boder sensed his time drawing short, he stepped up the pace. Toward the end, he completed as many as nine in a single day (on September 21 in Munich). Most days total half that number; some days are unaccounted for. Boder left Europe in early October, having recorded over ninety hours of material and completely used up the two hundred spools of wire that he had brought with him. A very detailed biography is published at http://voices.iit.edu/david_boder and in Alan Rosen's The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
At the ORT school in Henonville, Boder recorded Gute Frank, a seamstress-in-training under the guidance of Madame Anna Blankenstein, singing a story of persecution in the song Undzer Shtetl Brent, “Our Village is Burning" She begins unwavering: “It’s burning, brothers, it’s burning! Oh, our poor village, brothers, burns...” “...Don’t stand there, brothers, looking on. With futile, folded arms. Don’t stand there, brothers, douse the fire—” At the end of the song, Gute strays from the standard text, altering the last line “while our village burn" to"while the Jewish nation burns" Guta Frank was born in Kalisz to the Lipszyc family. Her sisters had been in the Kalisz ghetto and Hasag Labor Camp in Czestoschowa.
Identification of Pola Stopnicki (nee Shejter) provided by her son, Roberto Stopnicki, via CoSe feedback form 11/23/2021.
Women working in a garden at Displaced Persons Camp near Paris in September 1946. Children smile and laugh, dance with young woman, Pola Stopnicki (nee Shechter/Schaechter). Pan, David Boder examines a bundle of crops with a group of DPs. Child holds up a freshly picked vegetable. CUs, DP families. Pan, group of men pose for the camera with a religious Jew reading from a book. CUs, women smile, one waves at camera, holding flowers, celebrating. Father with baby. 01:03:33 Sign above the Hénonville chateau doorway for ORT vocational training facility 65km NW of Paris: “Atelier d'Ébénisterie de l’O.R.T. Hénonville (...),” with a group of DPs posing and smiling on September 14, 1946. They pose with Boder (at far right with glasses at 01:04:07). Two women in fashionable dresses. 01:04:36 LS, car approaches the gate before a palatial building.
Displaced persons camp at Henonville