Photograph of Unaccompanied Children
John Michael Rock (born Maximillian von Rochlitz) was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1922. When John was 16, the Nazis annexed Austria into the German Reich. Distrustful of Nazi control and angry about the changes he noticed occurring in his country, John escaped to England in 1939. The following year John joined the British Army, and later joined the British Navy.
John’s mother and step-father were killed in Auschwitz. His brother escaped Jasenovac, a concentration camp in Yugoslavia, and joined a band of partisans – people who fought in small groups to resist the Nazis.
Just after World War II ended in 1946, John began to work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He became a director in the displaced persons (DP) program, administering five different DP camps near Kassel, Germany, including one for unaccompanied – mostly orphaned – children who had survived the Holocaust.
“Unaccompanied children, which was their official description…somehow got into our camps, or don’t know where their parents are. Some were there [when I arrived] and some came later… one group that came in when I was there…[was] very thin and undernourished. About eight to ten children, where the oldest child was 13, and they’d been in the woods for about a year or two, by themselves, and managed to survive.” –John Rock, in a 1996 HCH interview.
John collected many photographs from his time at the DP camps and arranged them in a homemade photo album. Throughout his life, John described his work with UNRRA at the DP camps as the most important work he ever did. He received many cards and letters of thanks and good wishes, all of which he kept until the day he died.
John immigrated to Canada in 1949, and then to the United States in 1951. He was a long-time resident of Seattle and donated the DP camp photo album to the Holocaust Center for Humanity. John passed away in 2004 at the age of 82.
