This archive report was first published on 22 September 2019.
On display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum since May 2018, the exhibition has drawn over 95,000 visitors, but it is set to close in January unless extended.
Dr. Schwartz's family story came to light after she visited the exhibition and shared her father's account with the curator, Dr. van Pelt. She still had the shofar, which her family had used for years.
Her father, a modest man, never revealed much about his experiences during the Holocaust, but Dr. Schwartz said that until his death in 1993, the shofar 'accompanied his wanderings.' He had a varied life, running a travel agency in Manhattan, managing uranium mines in Montana and South Dakota, and eventually moving back to Israel.
Born in 1903 in Bochnia, Poland, near Krakow, her father and his family fled to Germany during World War I. However, as Hitler rose to power, they sent their young children to safety on a Kindertransport to Belgium in 1939. Her father was later arrested and imprisoned in Buchenwald, where he was transported to Auschwitz III in 1942.
There, he learned that his wife, Bertha, and other family members had been caught and murdered in Auschwitz. In despair, he was restrained from killing himself on the camp's electrified wire. He was initially assigned to a construction detail, but as an older prisoner with experience, he was designated a block secretary, responsible for assigning work details.
By attaching names of the dead to some assignments, he was able to afford others relief in the sick bay, 'enabling him to save hundreds of Jewish prisoners,' Dr. Schwartz said. Around Rosh Hashana 1944, he arranged for some religious prisoners to be sent out to form a minyan, or quorum of 10 adults to conduct a prayer service.
