Comforting blanket

Blanket given to Paul Drexler by his father Eugen. In 1944, the Gestapo arrested the Drexler family in their home in Spacince, Slovakia. Paul’s mother Helen tied two blankets to the suitcase she took with her. At the age of six, Paul used the blankets to keep warm in Sered labour and transit camp and on the five days’ journey by cattle train to Theresienstadt.

“He bought them for me when I was three years of age. They were cashmere, very soft and they had an interesting frieze going side to side which featured a man leading a camel in the desert. In the background was a palm tree and a pyramid.” Paul would stare at the frieze; to escape the horror of daily life in Theresienstadt, he would play games and imagine he was in an exotic land.

The Drexlers had avoided the first transportations of Slovakian Jews in 1942. Eugen Drexler, a wheat expert, received a two-year exemption as an essential industry worker. Then, from September 1944, the family spent months hiding in the attic of a farmhouse. Eventually their names were read on the local radio and anyone harbouring them threatened with execution. Forced to return home, they were arrested twenty-four hours later.

In Sered on one freezing night in December 1944, Paul saw his father for the last time. Eugen was one of the victims of the British bombing of Lübeck Bay, Germany on 3 May 1945. In what has been described as one of the world’s worst maritime disasters, RAF Typhoons destroyed ships containing not only SS officers but thousands of concentration camp prisoners who had been evacuated to the coast from liquidated camps. His father was one of over 7,000 prisoners killed.

Paul and his mother were liberated from Theresienstadt on 8 May 1945. Decades later in Sydney, Paul’s daughter Julie took this blanket to preschool when she was three years old. “This blanket is my only warm and spiritual connection to my father and to his granddaughter, who because of the tragedy of World War II, he never met.”