Brown and yellow striped silk handkerchief found by a German Jewish teenage inmate at Birkenau

Brown silk handkerchief with yellow lines found by 14 year old Ruth Krautwirth in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she was held from April 1943 to November 1944. Ruth worked in the Kanada unit, sorting the inmates discarded belongings. It is likely that she found the kerchief there. She kept the handkerchief "as a reminder that once there was a world without gassings, without filthy latrines and flea infested straw cots, without electrically charged wire fences." Ruth, her parents Hanna and Isak, and brother Zev were deported from Frankfurt, Germany, to Birkenau in April 1943. Ruth and Hanna, separated from Isak and Zev, were together through Birkenau, Ravensbruck, and Malchow, and were liberated on a death march by US troops in May 1945. Zev survived Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, Gunskirchen, and Mauthausen, and then went to Palestine. Several of Ruth’s relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Her father Isak, age 46, was killed in Auschwitz on November 19, 1943. Her maternal grandfather and cousins also were killed. Ruth and Hannah left for America in 1947.