The greeting card was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2003 by Marian Miklin, the wife of Beryl Miklin.
Small greeting card on rectangular photographic paper with an image of an ink drawing of a 3-masted sailing ship on jagged waves in the lower left. There is an image of modern, multistory buildings with a palm tree and a flag within a white circle in the upper right. The background is stippled gray. There is Hebrew text in the upper left and German text in the lower right.
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overall: Height: 2.375 inches (6.033 cm) | Width: 3.625 inches (9.208 cm)
Shana Tova (New Year's) card received by Ber and Mirka Miklin at Rosh Hashanah while they were living Neu Freimann displaced persons camp in Germany. The card has an image of a sailing ship and a building with palm tree. Ber and Mirka married in the DP camp on September 14, 1946. Rosh Hashanah was on September 26. Ber was from Latvia which was annexed by the Soviet Union in June 1940. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 deployed mobile killing units which, assisted by Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, slaughtered nearly all Latvian Jews. Those with skills useful to the Germans were put in work camps. Ber and his family were tailors and shoemakers, and they were imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto in Riga. In summer 1943, his father and two married sisters were sent to nearby Kaiserwald concentration camp and killed. Ber and his brothers Philip and Dawid were sent to Stuffhof where his brothers perished. Ber was transferred to Burggraben and then Lauenburg subcamp. He escaped when it was evacuated in January 1945 by death march. The war ended in May 1945 and Ber left Soviet controlled Warsaw for Germany. Mirka Kestenberg was from Nowa Slupia, Poland. She was sent to Starochowice labor camp with her two sisters in October 1942. In December 1944, she was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In February 1945, she escaped during a train transport to Mauthausen. Both her sisters survived, but the rest of her family were killed in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Ber, Mirka, and their two year old son left for America in November 1949.
Rosh Hashanah card with a sailing ship received by newlyweds in Neu Freimann dp camp