A bracelet that was made by a prisoner in a Nazi Germany concentration camp has been unearthed and given to the family of the man who made it in St. Louis.
“It’s a small object with a large story,” said St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum Curator and Director of Education Dan Reich.
Holocaust survivor Ben Fainer was imprisoned at Blechhammer, a satellite camp of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where he worked in a metalworks factory.
He secretly fashion a small metal bracelet which he engraved with his name and mother’s maiden name, Hannah Urman. During the course of the Holocaust, Fainer lost his mother, along with three siblings and over 250 other relatives.
The camp was one of six that he was imprisoned in and the special bracelet was discarded in the woods near one of the camps. That's where it remained until it was found in the 1990s during an archeological excavation.
After liberation, Fainer moved to Ireland and eventually to St. Louis, where only after six decades, upon meeting with and becoming best friends with one of his liberators, he decided to tell his story to visitors to the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and through his book, “Silent for Sixty Years.”
Fainer was a popular speaker until his death in 2016.
In 2018, the person who unearthed the bracelet was cleaning out his office and saw a photo of the bracelet. He inquired of the Buchenwald Memorial about what happened to it. Only then, did the staff at the Memorial contact Berry, informing her of the bracelet’s existence for the first time. She flew to Germany to receive the bracelet.
On Thursday, she presented it to the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum for permanent display.
Reich noted that the bracelet is highly unusual because it was crafted by a prisoner and includes his name and ID number, as well as decorative elements.
Fainer’s daughter, Sharon Berry, received the bracelet in Germany and she knew it belonged at the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.
“It’s his identity in this piece of metal,” she said. “This is my father’s story, and it needs to be continued to be told. This is how it’s going to be told for generations.”
The unique artifact will be part of the permanent display in the Museum, which is undergoing an expansion that will quadruple the size of the Museum when it reopens in the summer of 2022.
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