Metal brooch with a cut-out design of the fence and Jewish quarters sign made in the Lodz ghetto

Elaborately designed cutout metal brooch made in the Lodz ghetto and recovered from the ghetto by Malwina (Inka) Gerson and her parents, Dora and Gustav. After the German occupation of Poland in 1939, 11 year old Inka and her family were forced into the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. All ghetto inhabitants over the age of 10 had to work and Inka worked in a hat-making workshop. The Germans destroyed the ghetto in July 1944 and Inka's family was part of the work detail kept to clean up and salvage materials from the ghetto and to dig mass graves. The Allen family avoided the subsequent deportations to concentration camps and were still living in the ghetto when the city was liberated by the Russian Army in early 1945. The family left Poland for Bolivia in 1945.