The scrapbook of Margaret Gruenbaum, who with her two children was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Photo / Evelyn Hockstein, The Washington Post.
The scrapbook of Margaret Gruenbaum, who with her two children was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Photo / Evelyn Hockstein, The Washington Post.
Guta Strykowski's terrors would often come at night as she slept. She wouldn't wake up right away, but she would dream that she was back in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and her screams would disturb everybody in the little house on 28th St in San Francisco.
Her husband would rouse her. Frightened and shaking, she would be unable to go back to sleep.
So reported a psychiatrist on January 18, 1966, in a letter that resides in a tan folder on a shelf in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's new collections and conservation centre in Bowie, Maryland.
It is the only document in Strykowski's file - a 15-page, neatly typed glimpse into the horror of one woman's experience in the Holocaust.
It's one of the array of items that have just been moved into the $50 million facility that now houses the bulk of what the museum says is the most comprehensive Holocaust collection in the world.
The letter about Strykowski, a Polish Jew who was beaten, starved and brutalised in a string of ghettos and Nazi concentration camps during World War II, is one of millions of documents the centre has shelved in row upon row of grey archival boxes.
Some files, like Strykowski's, contain a single item. Others, like the papers of Robert M.W. Kempner, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, are voluminous, said Travis A. Roxlau, the museum's director of collection services.
The state-of-the-art, two-storey center on 3.6ha also houses objects, large and small.
• A white wedding dress made from a parachute for a young Jewish woman in a displaced persons camp in Germany after the war. At least a dozen other brides at the camp wore the same dress.
• An antiseptic-looking desk from a Nazi medical centre where mentally and physically disabled people were processed for extermination.
• The scrapbook of a woman who, with her two children, avoided being shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp by making teddy bears for German youngsters.
Many objects are "the items that people carried with them and saved that were very important to them", Roxlau said last week at the site, officially the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Centre.
"Behind every object is an individual with a unique story," he said.
The Holocaust was the systematic murder by the Nazis and their allies of more than 6 million European Jews and others before and during World War II.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington honours the victims and documents the catastrophe.
Since 1990, the museum's collections were stored in a leased warehouse in Linthicum, Maryland.
By 2010, museum officials realised they would soon be out of space, and their collections were likely to grow as Holocaust survivors aged and families sought a proper place to donate precious artefacts.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington honours the victims and documents the horrors they experienced.
"The witness generation is quickly passing away," Roxlau said.
The museum predicts that its collections will double in size within the next 10 to 15 years, so has room inside for growth, and space outside for expansion.
Ground was broken for the centre in early 2015, and the work was completed February 1.
The moving process began last September. The first truckload of artefacts - one of 23 tractor-trailer loads - arrived in February. The last arrived March 31.
'It all happened in a split second'
During a visit to the centre last week, Roxlau showed samples of the holdings.
In a document vault, he pulled a box from a shelf at random and opened the folder containing the Strykowski letter, which he had never seen before.
It was addressed to the German consulate in San Francisco, probably in the hopes of getting some kind of compensation, he said.
The daughter of a shoemaker, Strykowski was 17 when she was imprisoned with her parents and three siblings in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, Poland, wrote the psychiatrist, Peter F. Ostwald of the University of California Medical Centre in San Francisco.
There, her father had starved to death. She was forced to make shoes for German soldiers and suffered from malnutrition and sickness.
"In 1943 or 1944, the patient is not sure which year, the Jews were rounded up and put on trains for Auschwitz Concentration Camp," the psychiatrist wrote.
Once there, she was separated from her family and taken away with 500 other women.
"She describes this sudden separation as the most disturbing experience of her life," Ostwald wrote.
"It all happened in a split second," she told the doctor. "I never saw my mother again."
Strykowski said the Nazis shaved her head, and forced her and the other women to march nude before Nazi "doctors".
She was then sent to a labour camp in Hamburg, where she helped clean up rubble from Allied bombing raids. She was later moved among other camps, and wound up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was liberated by the British in 1945.
She returned to Lodz hoping to find family members. None of them, nor any of her friends, had survived.
But there she met her husband, Abram, who had lost his first wife and a son in the Holocaust.
Together they moved to a displaced persons camp in Austria in 1946, had two children, and moved to San Francisco, where Abram had a brother, in 1950.
Twenty years after the war, she was still tormented by the memory of the camps.
"The dreams are terrible," she told the doctor. " It's always the same thing. Somebody is after me. They chase me, they want to beat me or kill me."
The doctor described Strykowski, who was then 44, as shy. She wore a pink dress and blue coat during the examination. She had a pronounced squint and an accent, he wrote.
Her prognosis was guarded, the psychiatrist concluded. "I do not expect any significant improvement in her symptoms or illness," he wrote.
But according to her obituary, she went on to survive the death of her husband in 1978, remarried in 1980, and died in 2006 at the age of 84.
Later that year, her daughter donated the psychiatrist's letter to the museum.
From parachute to wedding dress
Roxlau fetched the key and opened the door to a cabinet in the centre's pristine personal artefacts vault. He slid out a tray and there, under folds of opaque tissue, was a white wedding dress.
It had a white ribbon that could be tied in the back, and a story.
The dress was made after the war from a parachute acquired by Ludwig Frydman, 21, for his betrothed, Lili Lax, 22, in the displaced persons camp in Celle, Germany, near Bergen-Belsen. Lili had told Ludwig that she had always wanted a white wedding dress, so Ludwig traded nearly 1kg of coffee and cigarettes to a former German aviator for the parachute, according to the museum.
A wedding dress that was made from a parachute was worn by several women at a displaced persons camp near Bergen-Belsen in Germany. Photo / Evelyn Hockstein, The Washington Post.
Ludwig had lost his parents and seven siblings in the Holocaust. Lax's father and brothers were gassed at Auschwitz. The couple met in June 1945 and were married in the Celle synagogue on January 27, 1946.
More than a dozen other brides in the camp later wore Lax's dress. "It was used over and over and over, as couples married in the camp right after the war," Roxlau said. "It is a very awesome object."
The dress was donated by Lax, now Lili Friedman - in 1999.
Scrapbook of grim memories
The light from the northfacing windows was gentle, and easy on the old scrapbook that conservator Emily Olhoeft examined at her desk in the centre's high-tech paper conservation laboratory.
The lab was designed to have windows allowing in the less-damaging light from the north.
The scrapbook was created by Margaret Gruenbaum, a lawyer's wife from Prague, who was incarcerated at the Nazi's "propaganda" camp at Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia.
The Nazis would show Theresienstadt to visiting Red Cross officials and dignitaries to suggest that their camps were relatively benign. Visitors would be shown camp gardens and cultural events.
The scrapbook of Margaret Gruenbaum, who with her two children was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Photo / Evelyn Hockstein, The Washington Post.
In reality, it was a collection centre from which Jews were sent to ghettos and concentration camps like Auschwitz. Eighty percent of the Theresienstadt population was eventually killed.
And Gruenbaum, her son and daughter narrowly escaped that fate. (Her husband had already been executed by the Gestapo, according to the museum.)
In the camp, she had been forced to work in the toy shop, making teddy bears for German youngsters.
When she and her children were put on a train for Auschwitz, she argued that, if she was sent away, the teddy bears would not get finished. All three were taken off the train. Afterwards, there were no further transports from there to Auschwitz.
The museum said her scrapbook, compiled after the war, contains a striking collection of things: yellow Stars of David she wore that say "Jude"; her transit papers for Auschwitz; and samples of camp money that bore an image of Moses.
"It's heavy content," Olhoeft said of much of the grim material she cares for. "I found that if I get sucked in to reading [a] translation, it can be hard to come back out of that."
"It's tough," she said.
- Michael Ruane is a general assignment reporter who also covers Washington institutions and historical topics.
