New Yorkers donate family WWII artifacts to the US Holocaust Museum

JOSEFIN DOLSTEN/JTA

These are just a few of the 250 artifacts that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has collected recently through a drive launched last month.
A photo of three Polish young women wearing yellow stars
(photo credit: UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM/GIFT OF MARK GRINBERG VIA JTA)

NEW YORK — A hand-drawn portrait of a young man in a French internment camp. A photo of a Jewish girl who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a monastery. A letter detailing efforts to improve life for Jews in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp.

These are just a few of the 250 artifacts that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has collected recently through a drive launched last month — around the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — to collect Holocaust-era artifacts from New Yorkers.

Most of the objects, including photographs, letters, documents, drawings and books, were donated by families of Holocaust survivors.

Fred Wasserman, the acquisitions curator for the museum’s New York office, described collecting the materials as “a race against time,” since the population of Holocaust survivors is aging and many have already died.

“It really is a matter of rescuing the evidence while we still can so that we can preserve this for future generations,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The Washington, D.C.-based museum decided to focus on New York because the city and surrounding area is home to a large population of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The artifacts will join the museum’s vast collection and many will be digitized.

Here are nine standout artifacts collected through the project:
A hand-drawn portrait of a young man in an internment camp

A hand-drawn portrait of a young man in an internment camp (Credit: US Holocaust Memorial

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