Gathering fragments

LINDA GRADSTEIN THE MEDIA LINE

Seventy years ago, Ilana Karniel’s brother, Emil, gave her a gift for her 10th birthday. It was a hand-drawn map of the long road they had traveled from their home in Warsaw, through Siberia and Samarkand, then to Israel via Tehran. Underneath the map, Emil had written birthday wishes in Polish to his little sister. “Learn Hebrew,” he advised her. “Hopefully, we will see Mother again soon.” But that was not to happen. Both parents died en route.

Upon arrival in Palestine in 1943, Ilana and Emil joined a kibbutz. Six years later, while fighting with the Palmach – the strike-force of the early Israeli army – in the War of Independence, Emil was killed. Ilana built a life in Israel, marrying and raising three children. Today, she has nine grandchildren. “That’s the good part of my life,” she said with a smile.

Ilana Karniel donated the map to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Centre, which has opened the exhibit Gathering the Fragments: Behind the Scenes of the Campaign to Rescue Personal Items from the Holocaust. “For many years, the map was rolled up in a drawer in my house,” she said. “But I decided that Yad Vashem could preserve it better than I could. I also wanted to share it with the world.”

The map is only one of some 71,000 artifacts that the documentation centre has gathered over the past two years. The exhibit was launched as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“This is an 11th-hour push because we know the clock is ticking,” said Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari. “Interest in the Holocaust is growing but the witnesses are leaving us.”

The exhibit also features artwork and Jewish ritual objects, including tefillin that belonged to Meir Muhlbaum, who today lives in the Israeli coastal town of Herzliyah. Muhlbaum celebrated his bar mitzvah in a secret service in the Westerbork transit camp in northeastern Holland, where Dutch Jews waited to be sent to concentration and death camps. The next day, while some of the camp’s residents were being deported, one of the prisoners put the set of tefillin in Muhlbaum’s hands, saying he did not need them anymore. Muhlbaum never used the tefillin but said he felt he had to keep them. Now, he has donated them to Yad Vashem.

International Holocaust Memorial Day was commemorated on Jan. 27, chosen because it was the date that Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The United Nations marks the day to remember victims and urges member states to develop educational programs to spread information about the Holocaust.

“In the perspective of the almost 75 years that have passed since the Holocaust, what has not changed is the desire to annihilate the Jews. What has changed is the ability of the Jews to defend themselves,” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said in remarks to his cabinet. “Antisemitism has not disappeared and, to our regret, neither has the desire to destroy a considerable part of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. They exist and they are strong.”

There are an estimated 500,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide, 200,000 of whom live in Israel. At 80, Ilana Karniel, is one of the younger ones. She was only six years of age when Germany invaded Poland and her family fled. “Soon, I won’t be here,” she said. “And it’s important for me to share what happened with as many people as possible.”

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