Table knife with an engraved swastika given to a Polish Jewish girl during forced labor farm service

Dinner knife with an engraved swastika given to 25 year old Raszka Galek by Karl Beck, an SS officer, on whose farm she worked as a non-Jewish Polish forced labor from June 1943-April 1945 in Krummhardt, Germany. As Allied troops neared the area, Karl gave Raszka his SS uniform to burn. After her liberation in April, Raszka told the Beck family that she was Jewish and Karl gave her the knife as a memento. In November 1940, a year after the German occupation of Poland in September 1939, Raszka (Rose), her parents Moshe and Fela, and her younger sisters Deana and Sala were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In April 1943, Raszka’s parents were shot as she watched and her sisters deported to a concentration camp and presumed killed. Raszka escaped and went into hiding. A resistance member, Jan Majewski, helped her obtain false papers as a Polish Catholic, Maria Kowalczyk. In June, she was sent as a forced laborer to a farm in Krummhardt, Germany. Raszka was liberated by US forces in April 1945. She moved to Stuttgart displaced persons camp and emigrated to the United States in 1947.