The inscription inside the shoe belonging to a boy named Amos Steinberg was discovered during conservation work.
According to the museum, Amos Steinberg was born on 26 June 1938 and lived in Prague. On 10 August 1942, he was incarcerated along with his parents Ida and Ludvík in the Theresienstadt Ghetto near Prague. All three were then deported to Auschwitz.
“From surviving documents, it follows that the mother and her son were deported to Auschwitz in the same transport on 4 October 1944. It is likely that they were both murdered in the gas chamber after selection”, said Hanna Kubik, an employee of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, which preserves the site of the former Nazi death camp.
In total, over 46,000 Jews from the Theresienstadt Ghetto were transferred to Auschwitz.
In another shoe, the museum’s employees found documents in Hungarian, which contained information about Hungarian Jews who got sent to the camp.
Kubik said the museum had found documents hidden in shoes before, but these have been “mainly newspapers” used as insoles or for extra insulation.
“This find is precious and interesting because the documents have been preserved in good condition and they contain dates, names of the persons concerned and handwritten captions”, she added.
“Some of them are official documents; there's also a piece of brochure and a piece of paper with a name. The names Ackermann, Bravermann and Beinhorn appear.”
“These people were probably deported to Auschwitz in the spring or summer of 1944 during the extermination of Hungarian Jews”, Kubik said.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp operated in German-occupied southern Poland between May 1940 and January 1945.
It was the largest of the German Nazi concentration and death camps.
More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, as well as Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and people of many other nationalities, perished at the camp before it was liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945.
(jh/mk)
Source: auschwitz.org