Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

The motif of refugees was prominent in American social realist art of the 1930s and 1940s. Initially, artists turned to this subject to comment on the Spanish Civil War. Later it was also applied to the plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, many of whom sought (not always successfully) refuge in the United States or elsewhere. In 1945, Milwaukee-based artist Joseph Friebert created several works alluding to the Holocaust. The title of this painting links the otherwise non-specific image explicitly to the refugee crisis in postwar Europe when Holocaust survivors and others displaced by the redrawing of national borders after the war found themselves confined to displaced persons camps.