A single UCLA collection inspires a book on post-war Holocaust memory in America

Field notebooks from 1946, correspondence, annotated manuscripts, trip documents and wire reels: these materials from a single UCLA Library collection were among those that set scholar and author Rachel Deblinger on a research odyssey that resulted in her newly published book, Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust (2025, Indiana University Press).

Before the genesis of her book, Deblinger had “only the vaguest research question about how Holocaust survivor voices were first heard in America.” But when, as a graduate student, she discovered the David Pablo Boder papers, 1938–1957(opens in a new tab) in UCLA Library Special Collections, her research crystallized.

Boder, a Latvian-American professor of psychology, self-funded a research trip to Europe in 1946 to record interviews with more than 100 witnesses from the Holocaust and Nazi crimes; he also kept written documentation from his trip.

The Boder collection gave Deblinger a sense that post-war Holocaust narratives were being left out of a broader history of Holocaust memory in America. “I wanted to dig into this idea—what were these initial stories, how did survivors talk about their experiences right after the war?”

And dig she did. In 2009, now a UCLA doctoral candidate in the Department of History, these questions were “already in my head,” when at the Center for Jewish History in New York she requested a mystery box titled “Miscellaneous.” “The archivist wasn’t sure what would be in it and as I opened the folder, there were brochures and organizational newsletters that talked about survivors, that called on American Jews to donate to support, help, aid, save the remaining Jews in Europe.”

This cache of ephemeral materials was foundational—“it set the course for the book,” she said. “It gave me a sense of where to look for these narratives and images that were circulating at the end
of the war.”

Deblinger, the director of the Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program, hopes her book is picked up for classes about American Jewish History and Holocaust memory. “One of my goals in writing this book was to give students not just an overview of the different ways that narratives about the Holocaust circulated in American Jewish life after the war, but also access to some of the narratives and primary sources that illuminate how the Holocaust was understood at that time.”