Artifacts from the Holocaust

This wooden duck was used by the French underground to hide and smuggle documents. In the course of her activities in the French underground, Judith Geller (or as she was known by her pseudonym - Jacqueline Gauthier) received a hollow toy duck containing hidden documents. The duck was added to a collection of toys used by Judith under her assumed identity as a children’s social worker. 

Yehudit (Aufrichtig) Taube was born in Hungary in 1914 and immigrated to Amsterdam in 1938 where she worked as a nanny for a Jewish family. At the time of the German occupation, she was studying to be a beautician. In this capacity she met the wife of the Hungarian ambassador to the Netherlands, who supplied her with a false passport. Yehudit joined the resistance, distributing forged ration cards and food to Jewish families who were hiding on Dutch farms. Betrayed by a Dutch woman, she was deported in 1944 to Westerbork and then to Ravensbrück. There, she and her friends wrote "fantasy recipes".

This strip of cloth was left over from a Nazi flag, and was signed by women prisoners in Ravensbrück. One of the signatories is Hetty Voute. 

This Shofar was made in anticipation of Rosh Hashana 5704 (1943) by Moshe (Ben-Dov) Winterter from the city of Piotrkow, Poland. Winterter was an inmate in the Skarzysko-Kamienna camp, a brutal forced labor camp for Jews located in the Poland town of the same name. He worked in the metal workshop of the armaments factory at the camp.

This painting is by Raphael Uzan, who was born in 1922. It is entitled, “The German Entry into Nabeul, Tunisia, December 1942”, and was made with acrylic and inks on paper. The painting is part of a series depicting the Germans’ entry into North Africa, and the artist’s internment in the Menzel Temime labor camp. According to Mr. Uzan’s testimony, the occupation of his area lasted six months, during which time he was incarcerated in a labor camp for one week. 
The painting belongs to the Yad Vashem Art Collection, and was a gift of the artist.

This piece discusses some of the artifacts that survived the Holocaust in France. They were kept for many years by the mother of Zizi Lichtenstein. Zizi is interviewed in this article. In July 1942, Zizi Lichtenstein, aged 10 was attending school in Paris. He and all other Jews had been instructed to wear the yellow star. Zizi remembers the day well. He spoke about it in his interview.

With the German occupation in 1941, Bulgarian Jews were forced to wear yellow "Stars of David" similar to the artifact presented here. Sonia Koperwaser's uncle made her a pin from the button that she used to wear on her clothes. 

The town of Zakinthos is located on the island of the same name, the westernmost of the Greek islands. From 1482-1797, Zakinthos was under Venetian rule, then British, and since 1864, it has formed part of Greece. The presence of a Jewish community there is documented as far back as the Venetian period. From May 1941 through September 1943, the island was subject to Italian rule. When Italy surrendered to the Allies, the area was then taken over by the Nazis. The island was liberated in September 1944.A reign of terror ensued as soon as the Nazis took power. The mayor, Lucas Carrer, consistently...

“The first great tragedy. People are harnessed to bundles which they drag across the pavement. People fall, bundles scatter. Before me a woman bends under her bundle. From the bundle a thin string of rice keeps pouring over the street…I think of nothing: not what I am losing, not what I have just lost, not what is in store for me. I do not see the streets before me, the people passing by. I only feel that I am terribly weary, I feel that an insult, a hurt is burning inside me. Here is the ghetto gate. I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and...

IntroductionThis article focuses on the shoe and mittens of the toddler Hinda Cohen, deported to Auschwitz in a children’s aktion (action, or round-up) that occurred in the Kovno Ghetto, on March 27, 1944. Hinda was murdered in Auschwitz.When Hinda was taken from her bed to be deported to Auschwitz, her shoe was left behind. Upon finding it, her father etched the date on the shoe’s sole. Her parents, Dov and Zipora Cohen, survived the war. They kept their daughter’s shoe, the pair of mittens that Zipora had sewn for her from scraps of material, and her birth certificate,...

On the eve of the deportations to the death camps, a group of youths and their counselors participated in a ceremony. In this ceremony, their Hachshara (training camp) flag was cut into twelve pieces and distributed among the counselors. They swore to reunite in the land of Israel and remake the complete flag from its pieces. Ultimately, only three of the twelve leaders would survive the Holocaust, and of these only Anneliese Borinski managed to bring her piece of the flag to the land of Israel.
After the Nazi rise to power in Germany, the Zionist movements increased their efforts...

In this section we focus on artifacts, presented courtesy of the Artifacts Retrieval Department, that can inform us about a specific part of the Holocaust period. These items, which are part of the Yad Vashem collection, are unique: they characterize events that occurred during the Holocaust, and hold emotional value as well. The story of these artifacts is accompanied by points of reference and discussion to be used with students. This article was first published in Hebrew in our October, 2008 newsletter, then appeared in the English edition of Teaching the Legacy (March, 2009). The...