Blanket made of Hair

This blanket which was donated by Olga Horak (nee Rosenberger) is one of the most remarkable artefacts in the Sydney Jewish Museum collection. It was woven from human hair and rags. Hair was routinely shorn from prisoners, usually upon arrival at the death camps. It not only humiliated prisoners but left a ‘distinguishing mark’ to deter escape. The prisoners’ hair was also used to support the German war effort to make fabrics and textile products for the car industry, army blankets, socks for U-boat crews, and gasket materials and seals. The blanket represents this ‘human recycling’.

Born in 1926 in Bratislava, Olga witnessed the Nazis turn Czechoslovakia into a 'puppet republic'. Anti-Jewish laws restricted their lives; they weren't allowed to go to school, be out after dark, go to the movies or sit on a park bench. In 1942, Olga's sister Judith was taken in a roundup of 16-year-old Jewish boys and girls to Auschwitz and never seen again.

Olga was 17 when she and her parents were deported first to Sered, then Auschwitz. Her father was sent immediately to the gas chambers; Olga and her mother survived Auschwitz, Kurzbach (a forced labour subcamp of Gross-Rosen), and a death march, eventually ending up in Bergen-Belsen. On 15 April 1945, they were liberated by British and Canadian troops. Inmates were registered as survivors, but just as her mother received her card, she collapsed and died. A day that was supposed to be celebratory turned out to be one of the saddest of Olga's life.

Olga took the blanket that was discarded by a Kapo, and used it to cover her skeleton-like body. It was all she had when she was sent to a hospital to recover and when she was repatriated to her home town.

The blanket underwent testing in 1997 at the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research in Sydney and is confirmed to have been made with a combination of animal and human hair.