It's easy to make friends in a Displaced Persons camp.

An acquaintance of my Mom's reappears in several photos. She's usually wearing a fashionable, 1940s head wrap, scarf, or turban. She first appeared on the blog among friends during a walk in the park. She later popped in again during my Parent's wedding reception.

I will call her "Angele." Angele was closer in age to my Mom's Father, Jake; she probably was in her late forties when she fled Lithuania and arrived in the Displaced Persons camp. Her husband, like Jake, had been an officer in the Lithuanian Army. Both men knew that if they did not get out of Lithuania, then they would be deported to Siberia. Jake, in fact, had seen his name on the list of persons scheduled to be sent to the Gulag during the second round of Soviet deportations. Jake, like many members of the middle class, anticipated deportation with certainty.

My Mom and Angele met by chance in Seligenstadt, when they became neighbors in the camp established by the Americans in 1945. Displaced persons lived in a large space that formerly had served as a military barracks. There were no "rooms," and there was little privacy. People slept on bunk beds. DPs moved metal lockers between the beds to designate spaces occupied by different families. If lockers weren't available, then the DPs hung clothes lines and tossed sheets to create barriers. Despite the physical separations, everyone could hear what everyone else was said and did. The camp therefore evolved into something of a gossip den. Few secrets survived in the DP camp.

Angele and her husband lived in the barracks space next to my Mom and Jake. My Mom stayed in the Seligenstadt camp only for about a year before she moved to Erlangen to start medical school. Nonetheless, Mom returned to Seligenstadt to see Jake during holidays and vacations. During those visits, she usually intersected again with Angele.

Mom remembers that Angele was always extremely fashionable, despite the limited resources and difficult circumstances. Like other DPs, Angele stayed on top of the latest style trends and always looked chic.

Seligenstadt, Germany, 1945. Angele and my Mom at a window of the Displaced Persons barracks.
 

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Seligenstadt, Germany, 1945. Mom and Angele stand on the steps of the  DP camp's "Messing Kitchen and Magazine."