Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem

Barcelona, Spain, Jewish immigrants boarding a ship bound for Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine), June 1945.

This group of Jewish immigrants consisted primarily of child survivors. They were moved after the war from France to Barcelona, Spain. The group sailed from Spain to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) in June 1945. The journey was partially sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee.

Cigarette box taken from Jews in La Risiera camp, before deportation to Auschwitz.

Personal items that were plundered from Jews in the La Risiera concentration camp in Trieste before they were deported to Auschwitz. The Germans labeled these possessions with their estimated value before sending them to Berlin by train. Five sacks of these items were eventually intercepted by Allied forces and turned over to the Italian Treasury Ministry. Fifty years later, the stolen property was restored to the Trieste Jewish Community.

Paul and Sara Neuwirth, with six of their seven children. Győr, Hungary, prewar. Only three members of the family survived the Holocaust.

On Friday evening, 9 June 1944, the rabbis of the two communities, Neolog Rabbi Emil Roth and Orthodox Rabbi Ben-Zion Snyders, held joint Sabbath prayers for thousands of the Győr ghetto’s Jews. The Germans cut the prayers short, and the next day they beat and abused the two rabbis as well as members of the ghetto’s Jewish Council. By mid-June 1944, approximately 5,000 Jews had been deported from the ghetto to Auschwitz in two major transports. This was part of the larger deportation of Hungarian Jewry between May and July 1944, where they were exterminated.

This family photograph was submitted to Yad Vashem by Chaim Zvi Neuwirth. Chaim Zvi was born in 1924 in Győr, Hungary, to Paul Pesach Neuwirth and Sheindel Sara née Eherenthal. Paul Pesach was a shoemaker who owned a store selling orthopedic shoes. Zvi had six brothers and sisters: Shlomo, Yehudit, Shoshana, Elizabeth, Marta and Margot. Zvi and Shlomo were recruited to forced labor battalions in 1942, and were liberated in Graz, Austria. Shoshana, Yehudit and Elizabeth were deported to Auschwitz. Shoshana survived and was liberated at a factory in Moravia, where she had been sent for forced labor. Yehudit and Elizabeth were murdered. Zvi's parents were deported to Auschwitz together with their two youngest daughters, Marta and Margot, and all four were murdered. After returning to the family home in Győr, Zvi and Shlomo were reunited with Shoshana.

"...I want you to know and never forget that in the worst time of our lives, when we met and suffered the worst inhumanities, we were also lucky to meet the best of humanity." - Jenni Schipper-Levin, a Holocaust survivor, about her rescuer Kurt Seligmann (pictured here).

Hermann Schipper was both a business associate and a close friend of Seligmann. When the persecution of Jews began, Seligmann did his best to support him, until Hermann was deported to Auschwitz in February 1943 alongside his daughter, Paula, and many other Berlin Jews. Following the deportation, Hermann’s wife, Rachela, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Jenni, turned to Seligmann for help. He arranged a hiding place for them and provided food and money throughout the war. After the war, Rachela and Jenni immigrated to the United States but remained in close contact with their rescuer.

On 8 June 2006, Yad Vashem recognized Kurt Seligmann as Righteous Among the Nations.

These three diaries survived. This family did not.

Before being deported from their home in Nabburg, Bavaria, the Bruckmann family hurriedly packed up their precious belongings – including three diaries - and left them with Christian friends. Years later, their son Werner came back for them.

Werner (Abraham) had been sent to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) in 1934 on the “Youth Aliya” program. During the war he served in the Jewish Brigade, returning to Europe as a soldier. When the war ended, he went to the home of the family’s friends, and they returned the diaries. Through these diary entries and letters, he started to piece together his family’s fate.

Following a surge in antisemitism, the Bruckmanns moved to Leipzig. In 1942, they were deported to Bełżyce, Poland. They managed to maintain contact with non-Jewish friends in Heidelberg through a Christian intermediary until that autumn, when all communication went silent.

In a letter from June 20, 1942, they wrote:
“Although it is June, the nights are very cold… We only have two blankets to cover the five of us… you would not recognize the little girl. She is quiet and sad. It hurts to see her small pale face. She often lies down because of hunger, weakness and cold. There is just not enough food…”

Sally and Gerta Bruckmann and their three children — Friedl, Guenther and Waltraut — were murdered in the Holocaust.

Gauting, Germany, an ORT sewing course for Holocaust survivors in Displaced Persons camp, postwar.

After the war ORT trained tens of thousands of survivors from Jewish communities throughout Europe. Vocational schools and training were set up wherever possible to help the survivors in their rehabilitation. The vocational schools equipped survivors with practical skills and, more importantly, the confidence to see a future where those skills mattered.

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Pierre and Arlette Landauer left Paris with their son Francis (b. 1939) when the war broke out. In order to earn a living, Pierre worked as a haberdasher, often trading his skills for basic food at a farm not far from Pau. There he met Pierre Magendie, a saddler, who lived with his wife Louise and their two children, Rosette and Andre (pictured here), in Monein (Pyrénées-Atlantiques).

In 1944, the area grew increasingly dangerous for Jews, and the Landauers decided it would be safer for Francis to go into hiding. Pierre and Louise took the little boy in and introduced him to their neighbors as their nephew.

Francis later recalled a day when he was playing with André, the Magendies’ young son. Suddenly, Pierre grabbed them both and hid them under a pile of leather in his shop, urging them to stay silent. Peering through a small hole, Francis watched as German soldiers moved into the village.

Pierre and Louise never asked for any compensation for their wartime acts, despite the great danger that sheltering the Jewish boy placed themselves and their two young children in. The two families stayed in touch after the war, and remain in contact today.

On 31 May 2010, Yad Vashem recognized Pierre and Louise Magendie as Righteous Among the Nations.

While he was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Dr. Philip Herman received news from his daughter Esther who had immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). She had given birth to her first child, a son, and named him Yoram. When Dr. Herman heard the news, he commissioned a ghetto artist to engrave a gift for his first grandson - one that captured his dream of visiting his family in Eretz Israel. But Dr. Herman never saw his grandson. He was put on the last deportation from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.