“Gathering the Fragments”

Israel Rescues Tens of Thousands of Personal Items from the Holocaust

Seventy years ago, Ilana Karniel’s brother gave her a gift for her tenth birthday. It was a hand-drawn map of the long road they had traveled from their home in Warsaw, through Siberia and Samarkand, then to Israel via Tehran.

Underneath the map, Emil had written birthday wishes in Polish to his little sister. “Learn Hebrew,” he advised her, “Hopefully we will see Mother again soon.”

But that was not to happen. Both parents died en route. Upon arrival in Palestine in 1943, Ilana and Emil joined a kibbutz. Six years later, while fighting with the Palmach — the strike-force of the early Israeli army — in the War of Independence, Emil was killed.

Ilana built a life in Israel, marrying and raising three children. Today she has nine grandchildren.

“That’s the good part of my life,” she told The Media Line with a smile.

Ilana donated the map to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center, which has opened an exhibition called “Gathering the Fragments: Behind the Scenes of the Campaign to Rescue Personal Items from the Holocaust.”

“For many years, the map was rolled up in a drawer in my house,” Ilana, 80, said. “But I decided that Yad Vashem could preserve it better than I could. I also wanted to share it with the world.”

The map is only one of some 71,000 artifacts that the documentation center has gathered over the past two years. The exhibit was launched as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and comes as the number of Holocaust survivors still alive is shrinking.

“This is an 11^th hour push because we know the clock is ticking,” said Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari. “Interest in the Holocaust is growing but the witnesses are leaving us.”

The exhibit also includes artwork and Jewish ritual objects, including tefillin (set of two leather boxes containing Jewish scripture that devout Jewish men wear on head and arm while praying) that belonged to Meir Muhlbaum, who today lives in the Israeli coastal town of Herzliya.

Muhlbaum celebrated his bar mitzvah in a secret service in the Westerbork transit camp in northeastern Holland where Dutch Jews waited to be sent to concentration and death camps. The next day, while some of the camp’s residents were being deported to places like Auschwitz, one of the prisoners put the set of tefillin in Muhlbaum’s hands, saying he did not need them anymore.

Muhlbaum never used the tefillin, but said he felt he had to keep them. Now he has donated them to Yad Vashem.

International Holocaust Memorial Day was commemorated around the world on January 27, which was chosen because it was the date that Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The United Nations marks the day as an international day of commemoration to remember the victims and urges member states to develop educational programs to spread information about the Holocaust.

“In the perspective of the almost 75 years that have passed since the Holocaust, what has not changed is the desire to annihilate the Jews. What has changed is the ability of the Jews to defend themselves,” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said in remarks to his cabinet.  “Anti-Semitism has not disappeared and to our regret, neither has the desire to destroy a considerable part of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. They exist and they are strong.”

There are an estimated 500,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide, 200,000 of whom live in Israel. At 80, Ilana Kargiel, is one of the younger ones. She was only six-years of age when Germany invaded Poland and her family fled.

“Soon, I won’t be here,” she said philosophically. “And it’s important for me to share what happened with as many people as possible.”