Amulet Created By Son For His Mother in Lodz Ghetto Recovered

Image by Shem Olam Institute

By JTA September 3, 2014

The existence of an amulet created in the Lodz Ghetto by a son for his mother was recently discovered.

“With love to Mom, from Avram. Lodz Ghetto. March, 1943,” reads the inscription on the amulet, made from two old coins. The son apparently created the amulet for his mother so she would not forget him if he was sent to the gas chambers.

The amulet, which also includes a drawing of the ghetto and the mother’s initials, was given this week to the Shem Olam Institute for Education, Documentation and Research on Faith and the Holocaust located in Kfar Haroeh in Israel, Ynet reported.

The amulet reportedly was found in the ruins of the ghetto by a Polish man. His heirs turned it over to the institute.

The institute told Ynet that the son and his mother were sent to a death camp the year after the amulet was created, and that other family members including a husband and father, and older brothers and sons were sent to a labor camp and then died in a death camp the year before the amulet was created.

“The exciting discovery tells of a love story between a son and his mother,” Rabbi Dr. Avraham Krieger, director of the Shem Olam Institute of Holocaust Studies, told Ynet. “More than anything, in the face of oppression and extermination, they wanted to remember each other from inside one of the most crowded and cruel ghettos in Poland.”

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