The things we wear can say a lot about us – our personal style and preferences, our adherence to or deviance from cultural norms, and our access to resources, as just a few examples. They also bear our histories, in our memory, in their materiality, and, inextricably, in the intersection between the two.
In war and genocide, the human body becomes politicized, weaponized, and objectified – and clothing gains additional meaning. Concentration camp uniforms exemplify the objectification of the body, de-individualized and rendered a tool for labor and site for torture, mutilation, and murder. Coats could become beacons of hope for a family’s future, with gold coins sewn into the linings. Several garments recently donated by Gary Zelman, the son of two Holocaust survivors, bear particularly laden – and meaningful – stories, separate yet interwoven.
Featured on our Instagram in May, these earrings belonging to Chaja Holland (later Helen Zelman) are a particularly striking example.
These earrings are likely 14kt gold, with reflective cut glass forming a ring in the center. One was fragmented and twisted by a bullet.
Wearing these earrings on May 2, 1946, then-teenager Chaja had been attempting to reach Palestine via Czechoslovakia with her family. Chaja was born in Wyszków, Poland; following the German invasion in 1939, her family fled to the Soviet Union, likely to Siberia, where they remained throughout the war. After surviving they returned to their hometown, but did not stay long in Poland before deciding to emigrate, joining a bus of Jewish refugees bound for British Palestine.
Near Krościenko, a group of men belonging to the staunchly anti-Communist and often antisemitic partisan group called “Błyskawica,” under the command of Józef Kuraś (“Ognia”), opened fire on the group with automatic weapons. Eleven people were murdered, including Chaja’s mother, Fejge, and sister, Rachel; seven were injured, and eight fled. From the back, a bullet entered and exited Chaja’s blouse, shown here, skimming her shoulder and hitting her earring, sparing Chaja herself but for her hand.
The patches on the back of the blouse, sewn by Chaja in a DP camp, mark tears left by the bullet (possibly multiple bullets).
White blouse of Helen Holland, Poland. The Zelman Family in Memory of Helen and Morris Zelman, 2022.14.3
The earrings and blouse, wounded in place of Chaja, are a physical witness and reminder of the violence and tragedy she endured, as well as her resilience; she lived to pass down the stories of these garments and of her sister and mother, whose murders, and perhaps even their blood, are enmeshed in them. For when Chaja hid under her dead mother and sister until it was safe to leave, she may in the process have made contact with them via her garments.
The skirt Chaja wore that day was left unmarked, but, as she continued to wear it, she added fabric to the bottom, adding to it as she rebuilt her life.
The stories of several other victims and survivors of the massacre have been recorded, in medical documents – citing Chaja and her father Isaac – and in later scholarship.[1] This was not an isolated instance of hostility towards survivors in postwar Europe; particularly in Poland, survivors returning home often found themselves unwelcome, sometimes even met with violence.[2] The small Jewish community that remained in Poland after this period was largely exiled in 1968, when a series of political crises culminated in high-level Polish politicians recapitulating standard antisemitic tropes accusing Jews of disloyalty, purging the government of Jews, and encouraging – if not implicitly demanding – emigration.
Twenty-two years before, after surviving the massacre, Chaja Holland made her way to two DP camps – Deggendorf and Amberg – and, with help from her cousin, Helen Rosenberg (later Rothstein), also a survivor, immigrated to the United States.
Her cousin Helen Rosenberg was born February 28, 1928 in Wyszków, Poland, about 50 kilometers from Warsaw. In 1939, upon the German army’s invasion of Poland, the Rosenberg house was leveled by German bombs. Many residents went into hiding, including in caves. The Jews who did not do so were rounded up in the town’s synagogue, which was set on fire. Helen’s family eventually left the caves and were given shovels by Nazis; a Wehrmacht officer urged her family to flee. They went to Brzuza, about 20 kilometers away, where Jews could still live (though without rights), and were taken in by neighbors of Helen’s father’s business partner – the Mulskas – who had a farm.
Helen took the train frequently to trade vegetables her family had grown for clothing, which Helen sold in Brzuza to earn money for her family’s rent.
Helen’s father sent her to Warsaw to buy fake documents for her family when all Jews were ordered into the ghetto. In the process, she was kidnapped and beaten by two Polish teenagers. She was able to jump from the window and to get a baptism certificate for herself under the name of a non-Jewish Polish friend, Helena Mulska (no relation to the Mulskas with the farm), though she was unable to obtain papers for her family. Upon her return to Brzuza, she found out that her mother, Esther, and sister, Rivka, had been killed by Nazis as they tried to escape via a nearby river. Henich Mulska witnessed it all and buried them in his field. Helen’s father encouraged her to escape, and she reached Osrolinka, in Russian Poland, by train. Upon arrival she knocked on a door, pretending to be Catholic, and the family took her in as a maid, which she remained for two years. At the end of the war, she escaped to a DP camp in Graz, and then onto a DP camp in Grugliasco Torino. She stayed there for two years, eventually getting in touch with the Mulska family, who responded with addresses of relatives abroad, given by her father.
Helen reached New York via Florida after being sponsored by an aunt and uncle, moving in with her father’s sister in Coney Island, marrying her next-door neighbor Martin Rothstein, and raising four children with him.
As mentioned previously, Helen Rothstein helped her cousin Chaja, now Helen, Holland, immigrate to New York.
And in 1952, Helen Holland met her husband, Morris Zelman, also a survivor from Poland – with meaningful connections to war-worn clothing himself.
Before the war, Morris Zelman’s father was a shoe craftsman in Działoszyce, a small town in Poland. He purchased leather and made and sold shoes and boots. He worked from the family’s house and was very successful.
In September of 1942, almost all of the 1700 of the Jewish population of Działoszyce were liquidated; those who were not shot were sent to Belzec. The day before, Zelman’s immediate family had escaped to a surrounding village. They hid in various farmers’ homes, settling in one particular farm. They arrived in a town called Wodeslow, which was still safe for Jewish people. About four weeks later, that town was also liquidated, and the family all wound up in the Kraków Ghetto.
Several weeks later, Morris and his brother were taken by Nazis to a labor camp called Plaszów, and then to another concentration camp, Częstochowa. The brothers knew that their parents and sisters had been killed, possibly at Auschwitz or Treblinka – they had seen their clothing distributed at Plaszów, informing them that their family had perished in the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto.
But after liberation, with nowhere else to go, Morris and his brother returned to Działoszyce. Their home had been taken over by Polish families, and they were told in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome there. The Polish residents started beating up other Jewish survivors who had returned to their hometown after the war, even killing some.
One day, after returning home, the brothers saw a Polish civilian wearing a handmade three-piece suit – pictured here – that they recognized as their father’s. The wearer admitted to having taken it from a pile of clothes returned from an extermination camp, and agreed to sell it back to the Zelmans.
Three-piece suit belonging to Morris Zelman’s father, Działoszyce, Poland. The Zelman Family in Memory of Helen and Morris Zelman, 2022.14.1a-c
Morris was able to sneak into his childhood house and get some money that his father had left behind prior to the liquidation of their hometown; before the liquidation, Morris’ father, Alter Yaakov Zelmanowicz, knew that the future was unknown, and somehow, he realized that the family might get separated. He left some money and valuables hidden in their home. The brothers saw that no one else had returned home for his or her share, again suggesting their parents’ and sisters’ deaths, but the brothers took only their share. Morris knew that if someone else got back home and saw their portion gone, they would know that the brothers too had survived, and would then search for them.
With the money left for them by their father, Morris and his brother were able to travel through other towns in Poland and, in October 1945, made their way to West Germany. In Germany, Morris met some friends from his hometown and took a job as a jewelry apprentice. He worked for a friend, Max Wakshlag, who taught Morris how to make jewelry.
In April 1948, Morris left Europe on a ship called the “Marine Jumper.” He arrived in New York on April 17, 1948. At immigration, HIAS, an organization for Jewish immigrants, assigned him to a hotel on Broadway at 103rd street in Manhattan. He worked in factories and, by the end of that year, 1948, was considered a skilled craftsman, making beautiful jewelry.
He went to night school and made friends, mostly with other survivors. By 1951 he opened up a jewelry business of his own with a friend.
In 1952, he met Helen Holland, whom he married in 1954. They had two boys: Alan born in 1956, Gary in 1958. Helen died in 1982 in New York.
Helen Rothstein had remained close with the Zelmans, and in 1994 visited a monument to the victims killed near Krościenko, including Helen Holland’s mother and sister.
She also traveled back to the Mulskas’ farm to rebury her mother and sister, whom Henich Mulska had buried in a field when they had been killed by Nazis. She was able to bring the remains of her mother and sister back to Queens and rebury them at Beth David Cemetery.
Helen passed away on 2/23/2021 of COVID-19; Morris Zelman had passed away on January 13, 2020.
Fabric is often thought of as metaphor – families and stories are woven together, the threads of an individual’s life intertwined with those of another’s, their histories coming together. But fabric is not just a metaphor. In its materiality it is also a powerful – sometimes sole – witness to history, containing within its threads the physical and emotional trace of an individual and their story. We are honored to continue to share the stories held by these articles of clothing donated by the Zelman family.
Please contact us at collections@mjhnyc.org if you have any comments, or if you are interested in donating family artifacts.
[1] The story of Rae Nachbar, the daughter of two of the massacre’s victims, can be read here: https://www.holocaustcenter.org/my-story-rae-nachbar/. See also scholarship by Karolina Panz on Krościenko.
[2] For greater context, refer to https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/anti-jewish-violence-in-poland-after-liberation.html.