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The photograph of Pessi's family
Paula (Pessi) Fried was born in Munkács in 1926, the second of five children. Following the German occupation in 1944, the family was forced into the ghetto and about a month later they were deported to Auschwitz. The entire family was murdered, apart from Pessi, who was assigned to sorting clothes in the ‘Canada Commando’. One day, an inmate who was assigned to sorting objects came to her with an envelope containing seven photographs of Pessi and her family, photographs that she had apparently taken with her and that had been removed from her during the selection.
Pessi wrapped the photographs in cellophane, smeared it with margarine and hid it between two slices of bread. In this way she kept the photographs through all the camps that she was incarcerated in until the liberation.
This photograph shows Pessi’s younger siblings, Moshe Aharon, Tsipi and Etty, outside their home in Munkács in 1941. All three were murdered.
When Pessi was asked why the photograph was torn, she replied that the second half of the picture included her neighbors. When she immigrated to Israel, she located her former neighbors in Petach Tikva, and tore the photograph in order to give them the part in which they appear.