Brown leather belt with 2 sets of holes worn by a former labor camp inmate and Lithuanian refugee and aid worker postwar

Leather belt worn by 22 year old Hirsch Birman following his escape from Kedhanen labor camp in 1944. Hirsch was living in Kovno, (Kaunas) Lithuania, with his father Abel, when Germany occupied the city on June 22, 1941. On August 15, they were forced into a sealed ghetto. Hirsch was sent to labor camp Kedahnen in September 1942, and Abel arrived in spring 1943. During the camp's evacuation on July 9, 1944, due to approaching Russian forces, they escaped through holes that Hirsch cut with pliers in the barbed wire fences. They hid in the forest until local farmers told them it was safe to come out. They returned to Kovno, but conditions were very bad and they decided to leave. The war ended on May 7, 1945, and they were in Vienna, Austria, by September. From 1945-1948, Hirsch worked for Bricha (Berihah), a group that organized the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine, registering refugees at the Rothschild Hospital for displaced persons. He and Abel emigrated to the United States in 1952.