Mimi Lesser
Mimi Lesser (née Korach) (second from right) was volunteering at the Merchant Seaman’s Club in New York City, sketching portraits for servicemen, when she was approached about doing a sketching tour for the USO in European hospitals.
Lesser thought her family would have some reservations about their daughter going overseas, but her mother said, “That’s wonderful darling. Don’t get shot.”
The hospitals in which Lesser was working, were not only serving injured Allied soldiers, but also displaced Europeans from all over. Lesser said it was “fantastic babble with people of all nationalities: Russians, Poles, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, Slavs, and more, living in horribly crowded barracks.” One evacuee, was a woman from the village her father left as a child, the woman told Lesser that her Korach relatives were taken, presumably to concentration camps. Although she never found out what happened to her relatives, she stayed in contact with the woman for many years. Not all the evacuees were kind. Once a displaced person working in a mess hall used an anti-Semitic slur against Lesser. A Texas GI stood up in her defense saying “People don’t talk that way in the States.”
Lesser captured the likeness of 1,000 servicemen during her time in Europe and believed that although it was sometimes difficult to get wounded servicemen to smile for a flattering portrait, the work she did was valuable, and more importantly, appreciated.
Mimi Lesser Collection (AFC/2001/001/11904)
Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
