The discovery in central Poland of hundreds of objects that were most likely hidden by their Jewish owners during World War II provided a rare and precious find, officials said Wednesday.
Around 400 items, including silver-plated menorahs, hanukkiahs, tableware and daily use items were uncovered in the city of Lodz last month during the renovation of a house and yard.
“Those residents who buried these items did so most likely thinking that they would one day return for them, that they would be able to retrieve them,” Lodz Deputy Mayor Adam Pustelnik said.
“Most likely, these people lost their lives” in the Holocaust, Pustelnik said. “Such stories are truly rare and precious and also are a great lesson for us all.”
The items were packed in a wooden box and wrapped up in newspapers, said Krzysztof Hejmanowski, a building inspector with the Warbud construction company, whose crew came across the stashed trove.
Officials said the recovered objects will be transferred to the city’s Archaeology Museum. Experts think the box was hidden early on in the war.
The address where the objects were found, at 23 Polnocna Street, was located just outside the perimeter of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. The occupying Nazi Germans established the Jewish quarter in Lodz in February 1940, and until August 1944 and it held about 200,000 Jews from across Europe. Most died there or in concentration camps.
A Municipal Investment Administration official, Małgorzata Loeffler, said the items and their history stir “emotion and deep thought about the fact that we are not alone, that we leave something behind.”
(AP)
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4 Responses
The New York Times would like to see it happen here too.
I get the chills staring at these items. It makes the whole holocaust imagining that the woman who lit the leichter was a real person who was put to death for no other reason than that she was a jew. Same for the man and family members who lit the menorah and used the bechers. There was a real human family that passed around those small bechers after kiddush and these real people were killed because….. they were Jewish. השנאה מקלקלת את השורה. Scary and sad.
Most likely returning home the Poles refused and murdered them on site. The filth of Hitler exists in gentile race today and in Israel
The Nazi ideology was all wrong. They used to value a Human Being based on what ancestors he came from. That’s wrong. The value and beauty of a Human Being is based solely on his own behavior. We don’t care whether his mother was, this ethnicity or that ethnicity.