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.
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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.
“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.
Hope that if identify survivors or their descendants/relatives the items can be “returned.”
Here comes the holocaust again.
We never seem to be able to stop agonizing over it.
For some Jews it has, unfortunately (for lack of true Torah centered Jewish identity), become an identity badge.
There is one huge problem here; the holocaust is always treated as a Jewish issue.
It is not!
It is a Christian issue!
Yes, I know, six million innocent men women and children (including members of my family) were brutally murdered in cold blood.
But that is not the real issue.
The real issue is that each and every one of these inhuman murderers was a Christian.
Born and baptized as a Christian, educated in a Christian educational system, brought up in a Christian society. Almost all denominations were represented. And in those days, most people took their Christianity seriously.
Instead of remembering the victims we should be asking what it is about Christianity that turned so many normal human beings into vicious animals.
If we really want it to happen “never again” we should concern ourselves with what made it happen in the first place.