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Holocaust survivor Meyer Hack.
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JERUSALEM (EJP)---An Holocaust survivor from the US donated Monday personal items of victims of Auschwitz to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Institute in Jerusalem.
95-year-old Meyer Hack came especially from Massachusetts for the occasion.
Born in Ciechanow, Poland, Hack was deported in 1942 together with his mother, brother and two sisters, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. His mother and sisters were murdered on arrival and his brother was murdered later on.
Meyer was sent to forced labor hauling carts of personal effects and clothing between Birkenau and Auschwitz before their eventual transfer to Germany.
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Forced to work as a slave laborer in Auschwitz, in the “clothing chamber” “Bekleidungskammer”) that received the tattered clothing after its initial sorting in the “Kanada” storerooms, Meyer Hack had to mark the clothes with a red X, and redistribute them as prisoner clothing. On occasion, he found belongings that the deportees had hidden in the linings of the clothing, prior to their arrival in the camp.
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In 1944 Meyer was transferred to a work detail in the “Bekleidungskammer” where he found personal items during his forced labor. He safeguarded the items, hiding them in a hole that he dug behind his barrack.
In January 1945, before he was forced on a "death march" from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Dachau, he collected the items in a sock. He managed to keep them during a second "death march" in May 1945 from Dachau towards Munich, from which he escaped to the forests, until liberation.
For sixty years he kept the story close to his heart before taking the decision to donate the items to Yad Vashem’s Artifacts Collection, as a memorial to their original owners who were murdered.