Rosenblum, Walter, 1919-2006

In the spring of 1946, the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) in Boston hired the American photographer Walter Rosenblum (b. 1919) to document its extensive refugee relief work in Europe. In France, Rosenblum visited the USC rest home at St. Goin (Aquitane); the Walter B. Cannon Memorial Hospital and recreation center in Toulouse; the Camp Clairac (Lot-et-Garonne) for underprivileged French and Spanish children; the Meillon Rest Home in Pau, which housed Spanish Nazi victims; and a summer camp and canteen in Les Andelys (Normandie). Starting in October, his photos began appearing regularly in the Unitarians’ monthly magazine, the Christian Register . Rosenblum had been a U.S. Army Signal Corp combat photographer, and took the first motion picture footage of the Dachau concentration camp. Born in 1919 into a poor Jewish immigrant family living on New York’s Lower East Side, in 1937 he joined the Film and Photo League, a Communist-associated popular front organization.

From the guide to the Walter Rosenblum Papers, 1946, (Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive)

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