Auschwitz Museum employees discover notes in shoes of children
WARSAW (JTA) — Employees of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum discovered handwritten inscriptions in shoes belonging to children who were sent to the Nazi death camp in Poland.
The discoveries were made in the course of efforts to preserve the shoes on display at the museum.
One inscription identified a shoe as belonging to Amos Steinberg, who was born in Prague in 1938 and imprisoned with his parents in the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1942. He was later sent to Auschwitz.
A touching #discovery was made during conservation of shoes of child victims of the German Nazi #Auschwitz camp: a handwritten inscription with the name of Amos Steinberg deported from #Theresienstadt Ghetto with his mother & documents in Hungarian: https://t.co/lByKFNXfVc pic.twitter.com/EK3zoYtTYj
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) July 21, 2020
“We can guess that it was most likely his mother who made sure that her child’s shoe was signed,” Hanna Kubik of the museum’s collections department said in a statement Tuesday announcing the findings. “The father was deported in another transport. We know that on October 10, 1944, he was transferred from Auschwitz to the Dachau camp. He was liberated in the Kaufering sub-camp.”
In another shoe, employees found documents in Hungarian with several names: Ackermann, Brávermann and Beinhorn.
“These people were probably deported to Auschwitz in the spring or summer of 1944 during the extermination of Hungarian Jews,” Kubik said. “I hope that more detailed research will reveal details about each individual.”
Vast quantities of children’s shoes are on display at Auschwitz, and the museum has been engaged in an ongoing effort to preserve them. Many historical artifacts have been found in this process, including letters, newspaper fragments and bank notes, some of which were used as lining or padding.
About 230,000 children are estimated to have been imprisoned in Auschwitz, the vast majority of whom perished there.
The post Auschwitz museum employees discover identifying inscription in shoes of children sent to the camp appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO