Helenuchka Szyrgik's Bracelet

Prof. Irène Tieder donated a bracelet that had belonged to her cousin, Helene (Helenuchka) Szyrgik, to Yad Vashem. The bracelet is engraved with Helenuchka's date of birth 20/1/1940. In the summer of 1942, when she was two-and-a-half years old, Helenuchka and her mother Katya were sent to Auschwitz where both were murdered.

Irène's mother's eldest sister Mindel née Bakowiecyki was Katya's mother. Katya and Wolf Szyrgik moved from Lutsk in Poland to Paris before the war; their daughter Helenuchka was born there in 1940. Katya and Helenuchka were murdered in Auschwitz in the summer of 1942.

Irène was born in Paris in 1933. Her parents, Joseph and Mindel, hid with her in the home of a non-Jewish secretary from her father's workplace, thus escaping deportation. They later fled to the South of France and survived.

The bracelet was kept by Mindel; Irène doesn't know how she came by it.