One day, shortly after the liberation of Auschwitz, my great-aunt Olga arrived in Munkács, Hungary.1 The same trains that had transported Jews to concentration camps were now returning survivors to their homelands. It was January 1945 when she disembarked from the train. Still in her concentration camp uniform, Olga had a singular motivation. She had come home for her mother’s fur coat. Instead, she found her Persian rug.
I first learned of the rug when I began reading my grandfather’s unpublished memoirs. In them, he told how the rug was a wedding present from their mother to Olga and her husband, Jansci. When Olga returned to Munkács, she found the rug still inside the family home, wrapped up and seemingly untouched. Olga took it with her from Munkács to Košice, Czechoslovakia, where she and Jansci awaited their U.S. visas. After the 1948 communist coup, she fled with the rug to Paris. From there, she hauled it to New York, where it adorned her apartment hallway until her death in 2010 at the age of 94.
Similar in design to the rug owned by the author’s great-aunt Olga. Unfortunately no family photos exist, or could be found, of the rug. (Wikimedia Commons)
As I researched my family history, I often contemplated the parallel between Olga, the lone survivor of Auschwitz in my grandfather’s family, and her rug, the last token of their family home. I wondered about the other Holocaust survivors who had returned to their homelands for their belongings. Were there other “rug stories” among them?
I turned to the oral history archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There I found that Persian rugs were commonly mentioned in survivor testimonies. Vibrantly-colored and intricate in design, the rugs were a fixture in Jewish homes across Europe. For many Jewish families, including my own, the rugs were a status symbol. They were so valuable to some families that they decided to ship them ahead to the United States despite not yet having permission to leave, as in the case of Marianne Berg’s family.2
Others that awaited transport decided to hide their rugs. Zuzana Růžičková, who grew up in an assimilated Czech family in Plzeň, remembered the difficult decision of what to bring and what to leave behind. “Just imagine—we were allowed 50 kilos for everybody. What to leave? What to pack? What to take with you?… Some of the things we thought the Gestapo didn’t know about we tried to hide with our friends—some Persian rugs; some gold and porcelain.”3
Persian rugs and carpets, 2018 (Wikimedia Commons)
The rugs were perceived as important not only to Jewish families, but also to Nazi occupiers. Rita Gopstein, who told her grandfather’s memory of the German occupation of Simferopol in Crimea, relayed how the Jewish population was “required to deliver all Persian rugs to the disposal of the German command.”4 Lisa Tyre described how her family’s Persian rugs were rolled up and seized by the Gestapo.5 It was also “nice Persian rugs,” recalled David Bayer in a chilling memory, that covered the fences at Birkenau, blocking the view of new arrivals so that “they could not see the inside of the camp from the loading dock.”6
To the survivors, the rugs seem to represent home, and in the case of many, the loss of community and culture. Most concentration camp survivors, or Jews that went into hiding, were unable or unwilling to return to their homelands because of the destruction of their communities and continued postwar antisemitism. By recounting the fates of their Persian rugs, the survivors remember and mourn what they lost.
Auschwitz permanently changed my great-aunt Olga. My grandfather said that she was perpetually anxious, clinging to him in public once they reunited in Prague. And yet, the story of the rug reveals her resilience and determination. Schlepping a large rug across war-torn Europe was no easy feat. Unlike other survivors, Olga was able to take with her more than just her memories of Munkács. The rug became her tangible connection to her lost family, home, and culture. Perhaps she was able to find some solace with this act of reclamation.
The provenance of a rug was not something I would have considered or learned about if not for my grandfather’s memoirs. I had assumed that it was lost to time, so I was surprised when I discovered that it had been underneath my feet all along. The rug now lies in the center of my grandparent’s living room. As a girl, I sat on it and picked at its fraying bits of wool while watching TV. I can still remember the itchy feeling it left on my skin. Now, the Persian rug has become the invisible thread that connects me to my heritage and to the ancestors I never met.
- Munkács was a part of Hungary until 1920, then belonged to Czechoslovakia until 1938, and returned to Hungary from 1938–1945. Now it is part of Ukraine.
- Ina Navazelskis, “Oral history interview with Marianne Berg,” video of oral history conducted 2015 by Ina Navazelskis, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, 2015. Marianne Berg (née Salomon) was born in 1932 in Frankfurt, Germany when Hitler came into power. She immigrated with her family to Des Moines, Iowa before Kristallnacht in 1938.
- Marie Winn, “Oral history interview with Zuzana Ružičková,” audio of oral history conducted 1991 by Marie Winn, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, 1991.
- “Oral history interview with Rita Gopstein,” video of oral history conducted 1992, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, 1992. Her interview covers the recollections of her grandfather, Yefsi Yefiinovich Gopstein, who was a Holocaust survivor from the former Soviet Union.
- “Oral history interview with Lisa Tyre,” audio of oral history conducted 1981, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive, 1981. Lisa Tyre (née Glaser) was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria into an assimilated Jewish family. After the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, she experienced the escalating effects of anti-Jewish measures on her family, particularly when her father was beaten by the Gestapo. Her family obtained exit visas to England with the help of a Nazi officer in 1938.
- Larry Papier, “Oral history interview with David Bayer,” video of oral history conducted 1992, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Larry Papier, 1992. David Bayer was born in 1922 in Kozienice, Poland. After the German occupation of his town, he worked on an irrigation project and then went into hiding. He was captured and eventually sent to Birkenau. He escaped the Auschwitz-Birkenau death march and was later found by Russian soldiers.
