“Itka, my love… how I have missed you so… Ever since I got your letter, I have not felt hungry any more… I think about you all the time, I feel good and the days go by quickly… Everything I got from you has been so nice, I felt that you were near me.”
Pinhas Bornstein wrote these moving words to his wife Ita (née Koplovitch) in early January 1945. Yet he did not write them in any ordinary place. Placing his life in serious danger, he wrote surreptitiously and sent the letter from the Birkenau death camp to the laundry room of Auschwitz I.
Ita and Pinhas met before the war. Their families lived in Będzin and Sosnowiec respectively, the central cities of the Zagłębie region on Poland’s western border, which was named for the natural resources that were buried in the earth.
The Bornsteins and the Koplovitches were representative of the region’s prewar Jewish communities: the former did business in timber, and the latter in fabrics. Although religion was an important part of life for both families, the children received a modern education. Both families were urbanites; their children spoke fluent Polish, and they enjoyed the Jewish community’s flourishing spiritual and cultural life. The Jews of Zagłębie were politically and socially active within their communities on the one hand, and in local and state government on the other. These communities produced many Jewish scientists, industrialists and intellectuals.
The German army occupied Zagłębie in the first days of the war and the Jews immediately began to suffer: dozens were murdered in Będzin and Sosnowiec in the first days of the occupation, synagogues were set on fire, and various restrictive decrees were imposed on the Jews in the region. Shortly after the war broke out, Ita moved from Będzin to Sosnowiec, where she and Pinhas were married in 1941.
Later on, the Jewish community's freedom of movement in Zagłębie was restricted, they were frequently abducted and pressed into forced labor, and some were murdered at random by the Nazis.
A year later, the Nazis began gradually eliminating the Jews of Zagłębie. In the spring of 1943, after most of the Jews who had been found "unfit for work" were deported to Auschwitz, the ones who remained were locked in the ghettos. After a few months, the ghettos of Zagłębie were liquidated, and the last Jews were deported to Auschwitz. The train in which Ita and Pinhas traveled reached the camp on 17 December 1943. Out of 800 Jews from Zagłębie who were sent to Auschwitz on that transport, 92 men and 169 women were found "fit for work," including Ita and Pinhas, and were transferred to the labor camps. The other 539 were sent straight to their deaths in the gas chambers of Birkenau.
Before they were separated during the Selektion, Ita and Pinhas promised each other to stay alive and reunite in Sosnowiec when the war was over. Pinhas was sent to Birkenau, and Ita to Auschwitz I, where she started working in the laundry. With the help of a Polish driver who took the dirty clothes from Birkenau to the laundry, Ita and Pinhas managed to maintain contact and send each other food, clothes and letters. They destroyed almost all the letters; only the last letter that Pinhas wrote to Ita on 7 January 1945 has been kept to this very day.
A few days after he sent the last letter to his wife, Pinhas left Auschwitz on a death march that ended in Ludwigslust, Germany. He was in dire physical condition, so upon liberation he was transferred to an American field hospital. Ita stayed in Auschwitz for only a few more days, and after a short while in Ravensbrück she was deported to Leipzig, where she was liberated. She knew nothing about Pinhas’s fate, but she remembered their promise, so she decided to go to Sosnowiec and wait for her husband against all the odds. After several months in which hope turned to despair, a miracle happened – Pinhas returned. They went to Munich, where Pinhas found work in the offices of the JDC. Their daughter Helen was born in 1947, and she immigrated to Israel in 1968. It was Helen who recently gave the letter that sheds light on her parents’ survival in Auschwitz to Yad Vashem for safekeeping through its national “Gathering the Fragments” program.
“It was important for me to turn the letter over to Yad Vashem for safekeeping so it wouldn’t get lost after my death,I was afraid my children wouldn't be able to safeguard it properly, and this way my parents’ amazing story will be told for generations.”
Helen Lazar (née Bornstein)
Since the “Gathering the Fragments” campaign began in 2011, over 13,000 people have donated some 300,000 items, including 176,000 documents, 114,000 photographs, 5,200 artifacts, 755 works of art and 191 original films. Representatives of Yad Vashem visit Holocaust survivors or their family members in their homes, in addition to holding collection days in centers close to their place of residence, in order to gather Holocaust-era personal items. To schedule a meeting in Israel: +972-2-644-3888 or collect@yadvashem.org.il
Yad Vashem runs the “Gathering the Fragments” campaign with the support of Israel’s Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 91.
