Abraham Klausner

The 116th Evacuation Hospital arrived at Dachau, which was 10 miles northwest of Munich, in May 1945, three weeks after the camp had been liberated on April 29, 1945.

In the several weeks that the 116th Evacuation Hospital was stationed at Dachau, Rabbi Klausner worked to find the 32,000 survivors bedding and food, including kosher provisions.

[citation needed] When Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and U.S. representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, arrived in Germany in July 1945 to investigate conditions in the DP camps—on an assignment from Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew and, through Grew's efforts, carrying a letter of interest and support from President Truman[3]—Klausner met with him in Dachau, and served as his guide in visits to the camps at Landsberg, Feldafing, St. Ottilien, and elsewhere, making sure that Harrison became acquainted with representatives of the Jewish DPs, and observed first-hand the actual conditions.

[4][5] (The small group with whom Harrison worked together, including Joseph J. Schwartz, European director of the JDC, toured all together about thirty DP camps.

[6]) Harrison’s report to President Truman maintained that the living conditions of the DPs under the supervision of the United States’ Army were not much better than they had been under the Nazis.

Harrison also recommended that the Jewish survivors should be sent to Palestine rather than sending them back to their countries of origin, an idea Klausner actively supported.

[citation needed] Klausner's work on behalf of Holocaust survivors has been included in all major historical records of the period.

Rabbi Klausner wrote several books, including Weddings: A Complete Guide to All Religious and Interfaith Marriage Services, which provides texts of Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Russian Orthodox and Muslim wedding services, and suggestions for combining texts of different faiths; A Child’s Prayer Book; and his memoir, A Letter to My Children: From the Edge of the Holocaust.

He was also featured in the 1997 Academy Award-winning documentary The Long Way Home, about Holocaust survivors in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps.