Treasured items handed to Yad Vashem
OF ALL the documents presented to Yad Vashem from the belongings of Daisy Roessler-Rubin, it was her scrapbook which her daughter, Susan Herold, found most difficult to part with.
Last week, Mrs Herold, together with her uncle, Bob Rubin, handed over dozens of family papers to the museum for its Gathering the Fragments project of survivors’ testimonies and documents.
Mrs Herold said the scrapbook featured notes, poems and drawings by her late mother and her friends.
“My mother loved that book because most of those friends who wrote in it did not survive — this was her only link to the past. For me to give that book to Yad Vashem was very hard.
“I’m pleased I did. I knew I had to do it for the sake of future generations, because [in some cases, the scrapbook was] the only place you could find that these children actually existed.”
As a young girl, the then Daisy Rubin escaped Berlin via the Kindertransport. She lived in a Sunderland hostel for Jewish refugee girls established by Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld.
Weeks before the start of the war, Daisy’s parents, Samson and Ettel Rubin, together with her little brother Lion (Bob), also managed to flee Germany for England. They had received an exit visa from Frank Foley, later recognised as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for distributing more than
10,000 exit visas from the British embassy in Berlin to Jews desperate to escape the Nazi Reich.
Mr Rubin — who became a London black cab driver — told the handover ceremony in Israel that “if it wasn’t for these visas, we all certainly would have died in the Holocaust.
“I can’t know how hard it must have been for my parents to send their daughter away on the Kindertransport, not knowing if they would ever see her again. But we were the lucky ones. None of the other girls from Sunderland ever saw their parents again.”
Mrs Herold told the JC that “we originally had about 700 documents that my grandfather collected from 1911 [onwards] — he never threw anything away. My mother inherited all these documents and then in turn I inherited them.”
There were travel documents, correspondence and photographs of members of the extended family, most of whom were killed in the Holocaust, if not before.
Mrs Herold said a warning from a Nazi officer whom her grandfather had a relationship with had helped him escape the round-ups of Jews in Berlin on Kristallnacht.
But on the same night, “my great-grandfather was taken away from Vienna to Buchenwald. He died there and his ashes were sent back to his wife in an urn. She had to pay ten marks for the urn.
“In 1942, she was taken to Auschwitz from Vienna and died there. My grandfather never spoke about it. Ever. I only knew this from my mother.”
Her mother travelled “three or four times herself with her family to Poland before the war to meet her [maternal] grandparents”, Mrs Herold added.
“The last bits of information she got from them was in letters that they sent to her when she went to the hostel in Sunderland. She got many letters from her cousins and her grandparents — and they were all killed.” Her mother had recalled that in the Sunderland hostel, girls cried themselves to sleep at night. “And it got worse when the war started and they never received any letters from home.”
At the “beautiful” ceremony, Dr Chaim Gertner, director of Yad Vashem’s archives, spoke of the importance of the Gathering the Fragments project. “Yad Vashem is in a race against time,” he said. “We collect over a thousand survivor testimonies annually to help people learn about the Holocaust, not just as a historical event but as something people lived through. “The Nazis not only murdered. They wanted to wipe out the memories. We work to restore the memories, to honour the Jewish people and to teach the coming generations about what happened.”
Mrs Herold urged others to donate “all memorabilia they have of the Holocaust to any museum wherever they live. We must do this before it’s too late.” Her mother, who passed away in 2011, could not bear to part with the items during her lifetime. But she had wanted them donated after her death. “She knew that [at Yad Vashem] they would be looked after for future generations. Six million died. We don’t know all their names. But we know they existed through things like photographs, things like my mother’s scrapbook. The names were there. It’s proof.”