Auschwitz survivor donates victims' gems
JERUSALEM - A 95-year-old Auschwitz survivor donated jewelry he took from the clothing of Jews who were gassed to death at the Nazi camp to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum yesterday.
Polish-born Meyer Hack, who now lives in Boston, found the gems while sorting the clothing of victims sent to die in the gas chambers, which was his job at the camp where his mother, brother, and two sisters perished.
He hid the eight rings, watches, and brooches of diamond and gold beneath his barracks.
Hack said he took the jewels with him stuffed in a sock on what was known as a winter "death march" from the camp in Poland to Dachau camp, near Munich, in January 1945. He escaped Dachau and hid until World War II ended.
As he handed over the jewelry to the museum, Hack told of his experiences at Auschwitz, where he survived for more than two years as hundreds of thousands of others died.
About 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Yehudit Shenhav, an official at Yad Vashem, said the museum has collected some 22,000 artifacts from survivors such as Hack, with many handing them over in later life as a way to record their ordeal.
"Hanging onto them was as though to say, I remember," she said of Hack's having kept the articles for so long. "Now he wants us to keep them for posterity." 