Jewish families across occupied Europe hid valuables in the walls of their homes, in cellars, in gardens, in synagogue floors, in the ground itself. The hiding was for survival. They believed, or hoped, that they would come back. The valuables were money for the journey home, gold to bribe officials at the next checkpoint, jewellery to convert to food and lodging, family heirlooms whose loss would have been one more break with the past on top of all the others. Most of the families never came back. The hidden valuables remained where they had been hidden. Some are still there. Most have been found, by the people who took the houses after the war, or by relic hunters, or by the construction workers who in the last thirty years have been turning over the foundations of the destroyed Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin, Pinsk, Vilna, Salonika and a hundred other places.
The pattern was widely understood. The Germans understood it too. The SS and the Wehrmacht ran extensive recovery operations on the Jewish housing in the ghettos as the deportations emptied them. Polish municipal records from 1942, 1943 show systematic German searches of the abandoned ghetto buildings in Warsaw, Lublin, Białystok and elsewhere, with German engineers tearing up floorboards, breaking up cellar walls, draining cisterns and digging in gardens. The German recovery effort took the larger, more obvious caches. What remained was what the Germans had missed, and what the surviving Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian neighbours had not yet got to.
The Warsaw Ghetto, after the uprising of April 1943 and its destruction, was a vast brick rubble field that the Germans had razed deliberately as punishment. The rubble field, in the centre of the city, sat there until late 1945. Polish private treasure hunting in the rubble began almost immediately after liberation. The poet Czesław Miłosz’s Campo dei Fiori, written in Warsaw in 1943, recorded the sight of the merry-go-round on Krasinski Square turning while the ghetto burned a few hundred metres away. The same square in 1945 was full of men with shovels.
The hidden valuables that surfaced were sometimes returned to surviving family members. Many were not. Some Polish families took possession of the houses of deported Jewish families and found, on opening up the walls in the next years, the cash and gold the original owners had hidden. Cases of returning Jewish survivors who knocked on the doors of their old homes and asked for the cellar to be examined, only to be told by the new occupants that there was nothing there, are documented across Poland. Some of those cases ended in the survivor’s murder. The Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946, in which Polish neighbours killed forty two returning Jewish survivors, was driven, among other things, by the fear that the survivors had come back to claim houses and hidden valuables.
The Oneg Shabbat archive, the most famous of the Warsaw ghetto’s hidden caches, was buried by Emanuel Ringelblum and his collaborators in milk cans and metal containers under the buildings on Nowolipki Street and Swietojerska Street between 1942 and 1943. Two of the three caches were recovered after the war: the first in September 1946, the second in December 1950. The third has never been found. It may be under what is now the Chinese embassy in Warsaw. The recovered material, around twenty five thousand pages of testimony, photographs, German posters, ration cards, letters, school exercises, even sweet-wrappers, is the largest single body of contemporaneous Jewish documentation of the catastrophe. The archive is held now at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and on permanent loan to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
Other hidden caches of a more personal kind have continued to surface. Construction work at the former Theresienstadt camp in 1996 uncovered a hoard of children’s drawings hidden by a teacher in 1944. Excavation at the Sobibor death camp site between 2007 and 2014 produced more than thirty thousand small personal artefacts, including the engagement ring of Annie Kapper, a thirty three year old Dutch Jewish woman murdered at the camp on 9 July 1943, identifiable by the inscription on the inner band that the archaeologists matched to the Westerbork transport records. The shoe of Eddie de Wind, a survivor who had hidden it as a token of the wife he believed he had lost, was found at Auschwitz in 2017 and matched to the survivor’s son. The catalogue continues. Most of the hidden objects do not have names attached to them.
The valuables have monetary value. The historical value is greater. Each item is a small material trace of a planned future that did not happen. The mother who hid her wedding ring in the wall expected to come back and put it on her finger again. The father who buried the deeds to the bakery expected to reopen the bakery. The daughter who hid her grandfather’s prayer book in the cellar expected to give it to her own son. The catastrophe is in the gap between what was hidden and what was retrieved.
See also
- The Jews of Salonika
- Kielce 1946
- The Kanada Warehouses at Auschwitz
- Hair Gold Teeth and Industrial Looting
- The Arrival Process and Selection
- The Numbers, How Six Million is Calculated
- Fuhrermuseum Project
Sources
- Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
- Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, Oneg Shabbat archive catalogue
- Ivar Schute, Wojciech Mazurek and Yoram Haimi, From the Inside: Archaeological Excavations at the Sobibor Death Camp, Journal of Conflict Archaeology, 2018
- Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, Random House, 2006, on returning survivors and the Kielce pogrom
- Marcin Zaremba, The Great Fear: Poland 1944, 1947, Routledge, 2018
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, archaeological inventory