When German soldiers broke a chandelier in the Drohobycz ghetto, Abraham “Bumek” Gruber took some of the broken pieces and asked a jeweler to make him a ring. Bumek was later able to use the fake diamond ring to ensure his survival as well as the survival of two other Jews, a mother and her daughter, when they escaped from the ghetto.
A veteran of World War II, Dino Brugioni joined the CIA in 1948 and eventually worked in its National Photographic Interpretation Center. In the 1970s, he began to wonder what photographs the CIA might have of Auschwitz in 1944. Eventually he acquired a collection of aerial photographs taken of various camps during the war, which he donated to the Museum.
The Museum’s Teresa Pollin shares the story behind a baby jacket that a Holocaust survivor kept for almost 65 years until her death in 2007. Her two daughters found the jacket among their mother’s belongings after she passed away.
The story behind a teddy bear that helped Julius and Netty Butzke and their son, Hans, start a new life after they escaped Vienna in 1940. Hans’s son, Richard, and granddaughter, Eva, share their family history and explain why the bear is so special to them.
Leo Yeni was born into a family of Greek Jews in Milan, Italy, in 1920. In 1943, with the persecution of Jews in Italy continuing to worsen, he fled to Switzerland, where the authorities placed him in an internment camp. In this episode of Curators Corner, Kyra Schuster shares the artwork Leo created to document life in the camp with his fellow refugees.
From 1936 to 1941, Louis de Groot’s father, Meijer, used his eight-millimeter movie camera to record daily life with his young Jewish family in the Netherlands. Museum archivist Lindsay Zarwell shares the ordinary, personal moments Meijer captured—walking through the park, ice skating, visiting with friends—before the family went into hiding to escape Nazi persecution.
Catholics from Łódź, Poland, Wiesław Żyźniewski (later Wesley Zineski) and his mother, Janina, were arrested in 1942 for their resistance activities, imprisoned, and then sent to Auschwitz. In this episode of Curators Corner, the Museum’s Kyra Schuster shares the letters that Janina wrote to her own mother while she was a prisoner.
Born in Łódź, Poland, in 1911 to a family of professional musicians, Henry Baigelman was a violinist and saxophonist. After the war, he organized an ensemble, named the Happy Boys, and wrote and performed songs in displaced persons camps. In this episode of Curators Corner, the Museum’s Bret Werb shares what Henry’s music reveals about the longing survivors felt for a home after the Holocaust.
Chief Acquisitions Curator Judy Cohen explains how this collection of antisemitic materials, some around 500 years old, demonstrates that the stereotypes and images found in Nazi propaganda were not new but were already familiar to their intended audience.
On January 27, 1945, Primo Levi was among the prisoners who were liberated from Auschwitz by the Soviets. After returning to his native Turin, Italy, Levi began writing about his experiences. Hoping to have his work published, he sent a draft of his work to a cousin who had emigrated to the United States. This episode explores the significance of the typescript that Levi's American relatives recently donated to the Museum and the importance of his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz.