After World War II, the Allied armies created Displaced Persons camps, or DP camps, to assist those who had been made homeless by the war. They established these camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy, using former Axis military bases and concentration camps, apartment buildings, barns, convents, monasteries, and public buildings such as schools. At least one million refugees, most of whom would eventually immigrate to the United States or Palestine, passed through these camps during the latter half of the 1940s and the early 1950s. Roughly 200,000 of these refugees were Jews who were reluctant or unable to return to their homes because of the persecution they experienced there during or after the Holocaust. For six years, Paula and her mother lived in a DP camp in Foehrenwald, Germany. She received all of her schooling there while she waited for her visa to immigrate to the United States.
