Leather wallet with gold leaf monogram kept by a Jewish girl while living in hiding

Wallet kept by Lida Kleinman while she lived in hiding on her own from the ages of 12-14. The wallet belonged to her mother, Aniuta, and it held her photo ID card. Lida, her mother, and her father, Mendel, a physician, struggled to stay together after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. They fled to the Soviet controlled eastern sector and when the Soviets began to deport Jews, they moved to Turka nad Stryjem. Jewish persecution escalated with the sudden 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1942, Lida’s mother learned that all Jews were to be deported the next day. Since medical personnel were not being deported, she sent Lida to her father at the hospital. The nurses, who were Catholic nuns, hid Lida for a few weeks, then arranged a place for her at a Catholic orphanage. Lida was taught Catholic prayers, so she could pass as a Polish Catholic. She had to be moved repeatedly when suspicions arose that she was Jewish or when the convent run orphanages were threatened by attacks. She was reunited with her father on May 5, 1945, but her mother was denounced to the Gestapo and did not survive.