Paris Peace Conference, 1946
The Conférence de la Paix was the second peace conference held in Paris from July 29 to October 15, 1946 at the Palais du Luxembourg which brought together 21 nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain and the USSR. It culminated in the signing of the treaties of Paris on February 10, 1947 with Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy and Romania. Boder sailed to Europe in late July aboard the USS Brazil, the ship contracted by the United States Government to convey delegates to the Paris Peace Conference, the duration of which, incidentally, nearly paralleled the nine weeks of Boder's expedition.
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.
Posing on a balcony in Paris with children, one woman smokes a cigarette. Bus: “Service Special. Conference de la Paix,” children posing in the window. Ornate facade of the Academie Nationale de Musique. Statue, CUs woman seen earlier, gentleman. The marquis for the Hotel Scribe. Women and children on the sidewalk. 01:07:54 Another shot of the Conference de la Paix bus.