Ring with a red heart and inmate numbers made from a spoon in a concentration camp

Ring with a red heart and inmate numbers made from a spoon in a concentration camp 

Ring with a red heart and inmate numbers made from a spoon in a concentration camp 

overall: | Diameter: 0.875 inches (2.223 cm) 

Silver-colored finger ring made from a spoon by Leib Krycberg in Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he was an inmate from 1942-45. It is engraved with the initials and prisoner numbers, of Leib and Miriam Litman, another prisoner with whom he had fallen in love. He made a duplicate ring for Miriam. In January 1945, both Leib and Miriam were deported from Auschwitz to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. After Mauthausen was liberated on May 5, 1945, Leib lived for three years in Arnstdorf displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany. During that time, he traveled to Italy to visit Miriam, who was staying at the DP camp Nonantola, near Modena. He proposed to her there, but she turned him down, not yet feeling mature enough to get married. After they said goodbye, he never saw her again. Leib gave the ring to Sol Goldstein, who had been a fellow inmate in Auschwitz, before immigrating to Palestine in 1948. Leib would later immigrate to a DP camp in Germany, before moving to Canada in 1957. Miriam married another man, and the couple immigrated to Palestine in 1946, where they had two children. Unlike Leib, Miriam kept her ring until 2005 when her children donated it to the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.