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The album that the other camp inmates made Yochit for her birthday
On 4 March 1944, the inmates of the Ober Altstadt labor camp in the Sudetenland (today in the Czech Republic) celebrated the birthday of the youngest girl in the camp. Eleven-year-old Yochit (Jadzia) Beitner was born in Katowice, Poland. She and her mother Bella were deported to Ober Altstadt in August 1943, where they worked in a factory until the war’s end.
For her birthday, the camp inmates gave her two albums that they had made and filled with messages from her friends in the camp. Yochit also received a portion of soup and a plate of potatoes and beets; the other girls insisted that she eat everything herself. In her memoirs she recalled the birthday party in the camp as “The most materially lacking but rich in spirit that I have ever had or am likely to have.”
In 1947 Yochit immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). Her husband and children gave Yad Vashem the albums that she had received as a birthday present in the camp, a testimony to the triumph of the spirit over the subjugation of the body.