A Story Behind the Artifact
Survival of the Next Generation:
Hiding in Plain Sight
When the war began, you knew the Nazis would come for you. You were a Jew, how could they not, it isn’t as if you hide your religious beliefs. You weren’t ashamed of you were, and you aren’t going to allow the Nazis to make you feel ashamed now, but you won’t let them take you either.
For weeks now there have been rumors floating about your neighborhood, about the creation of ghettos in other countries, Poland, Germany and so many more. Rumors floating around about the deportation of Jews, how they didn’t come back, and were never heard from again. This you swore would not happen to you and your family.
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The Germans may have been successful in their invasion of Belgium but you and your family were successful in fleeing to France. But you could not stay, you forced back to Belgium. Thankfully, a relative with connections to the Belgian resistance helped you and the family make it back over the border safely.
But now you must hide. The Germans cannot find you or the family, or they will send you away, deport you forever. While your family finds places to hide, you must find somewhere to work.
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So you take a new name, and hide your faith. You work in a Christian hospital in Namur for roughly two years while your family continues to find new hiding places, so as to not get caught in one place.
The year is 1942, you are with your family, your husband, your three-year-old daughter and other members of your family, when you are all deported to the Piotrków ghetto.
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Here at the Piotrków ghetto starvation, disease and a brutal round-up of Jews was a daily part of life. Despite the harsh conditions in this ghetto your husband carved a wooden pendant designed to look like a book. He decorated this pendant with your initials and placed a photo of you inside. It was to be a present for you, something small to make you smile during the harsh times you were facing together.
As the ghetto began to face liquidation, the family was separated, and deported to different concentration camps. Your husband was taken to Buchenwald, while you and your daughter were taken to Ravensbruck. There you and your daughter were housed in a barrack with other women and children, your possessions were not taken from you.
But neither were you given prisoner clothing, instead an X was painted over your backs.
However, you and your daughter were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp and it is there that in the chaos of the disease ridden camp that you and your daughter waited to die. But the camp was liberated. And you were both free, and yet only one of you made it home.
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Your daughter, now six, armed with your possessions, was reunited with her grandmother and her father finding that he too had survived the camps. The three of them migrated to Israel, and your pendant was donated to the artifacts collection.
Image One depicts the back of the pendant carved by Gershon Henoch Kessel. The back of the pendant holds his wife, Frania's initials.
Image two, was made to look like a book, and hold a picture of his wife, Frania.
Image credit for both picutres: Yad Vashem
While working in the hospital, you ask the local silversmith to fashion to rings made from silver coins you had collected. One was for you and the other was to be for your mother. They would have your initials carved into them.
After you and your family survived the war and you had moved to Israel, your ring would be stolen. So you decide to donate your mother’s ring to preserve it in the artifacts collection.
Image one depicts Ruth and Netti Toporek in Belgium 1939.
Image two depicts Ruth in her nursing uniform while she's living under an assumed name.
Image three shows the ring Ruth had made for her mother.
Image Credit: All photos came from Yad Vashem