Displaced Persons

May 1945, a Polish Jew, Pavel Mandl, recently liberated from a concentration camp, searches for his surviving family in the Allied Zones of a crushed Germany. Trading on the black market while hoping for a visa to America, he meets a refugee woman named Fela and a teenaged boy named Chaim, and the three of them set up a makeshift family near the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. Fifteen years later Pavel and Fela are married and living in Queens with their children. Chaim and his wife, Sima, recently emigrated from Israel, are raising a daughter and living nearby. But the war and the horrible experiences that they still carry with them are considered private, even shameful, so it is the everyday momentstaking children to the municipal pool or shopping for liquorthat these humble immigrants use to cope with their pasts. And it is these small interactions that truly illuminate their struggle to adjust to American life. But life throws them yet another curveball after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the 1990s. The now aging characters must attempt to confront the legacy of their experiences in a culture that has unexpectedly embraced the Holocaust as a commodity that needs to be explored and understood. Yet these peoplesurviviors of atrocities almost impossible to fathromare reticent to reopen wounds that resonate through their lives every day. Displaced Persons beautifully documents changing cultural understandings of trauma and memory through a naturalistic portrayal of immigrants shaped by their histories, ordinary men and women who happen to have lived through cataclysmic times.