Loaned by Magda Schaloum

Magda Schaloum is a Holocaust survivor. This framed piece includes a comb holder made by Magda Schaloum in 1945, during her imprisonment in Augsburg, a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp. She fashioned it from the rubber insulation of electric wire and thread pulled from her camp blanket. This holder protected the comb she had been given by a French inmate who had received it in a gift package. Mrs. Schaloum picked the flowers, now framed in their dried state, during a return visit to Dachau.

“They took us away from our home on April 1, 1944. We had to put on the yellow star. They put my father down in a coal mine. My mother, my brother, and myself were taken to another city.

“About the middle of June they put us in the cattle wagons to be taken away. We didn’t know where they are going. On the 21st of June, which was my brother’s 15th birthday, we arrived. We saw the name, Auschwitz. They took my brother away. My mother was so weak. She was sent to the left, and I was sent to the right, and so I tried to run after my mother, and they grabbed me back and they said, ‘Just go ahead, she will go take a shower, and we will meet.’ So I yelled out, ‘I love you mom and I'll see you later.’ That was the last I saw my mother.”