This photo from our collection showing a group of teenage girls and young women gives us a chance to remember the connections formed by women during the Holocaust. While most names of these women are unknown, we know they stand together in Sosnowiec in 1940.

Sosnowiec, located in Poland, north of Auschwitz, had a pre-war Jewish population of 30,000 people. The Nazis deported 15,000 Jews from 1939 until establishing a ghetto in 1942. In 1943, the Nazis sent most inhabitants to Auschwitz.

The drawing on the right shows a rare portrait of one of these Sosnowiec Jewish women: Ida Knobler (later Frydman), created by artist Walter Spitzer (1927-2021), at Blechhamer, a forced labour camp. Ida married after the war, and the couple migrated to Australia in the early 1950s. They spent the next half-century together, both passing away in Melbourne in 2009.

We honour women survivors like Ida, and their strength in building a life after the Holocaust, as well as women like her friends, murdered by the Nazis.

Searching for family after the war

After the war ended, Melbourne-based Margit Klein made enquiries to locate her mother in Hungary. She received a letter (left) from our collection from the Jewish Community of Miskolc, Hungary, stating: “Sorry to say your mother, Ida Spiegler, was deported to Auschwitz and from there she didn’t return.” The second letter (right), received a few months later, signed by the Director of the Red Cross Bureau for Wounded and Missing & Prisoners of War, confirms her mother was deported from Hungary in 1944 – and there had been no word from her nor any news of her fate since.

Although deportations started after the Nazi invasion in March 1944, their increased scale and sustained efforts from May displaced 440,000 Hungarian Jews over an eight week period. Estimates state around half a million Hungarian Jews died during the Holocaust.

To learn more about their experiences, watch Hungarian-born survivor Susanne Nozick’s testimony below.

Everyday items in ghettos

This Jewish Calendar from our collection was donated by our co-founder Bono Wiener.

The calendar was produced by the Judenraete, a Jewish council operating in ghettos to assist the implementation of Nazi orders and regulations. Dated 1943, the calendar originates from the Lodz ghetto. Bono lived in the ghetto with his family as a locksmith and leader in the Bundist underground movement until he was transported to Auschwitz in 1944.

Bono survived the Holocaust. After the war, he migrated to Australia, where he lived committed to Jewish life until his death in 1995.