Trading Bread for a Handkerchief

How does a handkerchief become more valuable than eating? Why would one trade a precious piece of bread for an almost useless piece of fabric; a handkerchief? Perhaps it somehow connected one to a life no longer imaginable and a time in which one had the luxury of wiping a tear or blowing one’s nose politely.

This green and white handkerchief can perhaps be thought of in this way. It accompanied an unknown owner to Auschwitz and was found by one of the inmates working in the laundry. It was purchased by an inmate, Frida Milder, for a slice of bread. Searching, bargaining, bartering – these were some of the unofficial activities that inmates engaged in during incarceration.

Frida Milder (nee Herman) was born 5 January 1924, in Bunkovce, Czechoslovakia. She was in Uzhorod ghetto, and survived Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, Malchow, and Taucha, a subcamp of Buchenwald, where she was liberated with her sister Alice. She married Emil Milder, a doctor, who was 22 years older, in July 1945. Their son Danny was born in 1947. They emigrated to Australia in 1950 with her sister Alice. In time, Emil was registered and opened a private practice in Kings Cross. When he died in 1993, Frida organised a plot next to him so that when it was her time, she would find peace together. She died in 2007.