Pocket watch with chain traded for food by a concentration camp inmate and recovered postwar

Pocket watch with chain traded for food by a concentration camp inmate and recovered postwar 

Pocket watch with chain traded for food by a concentration camp inmate and recovered postwar 

overall: | Diameter: 1.875 inches (4.763 cm) 

Gold pocket watch with chain and engraved floral design traded by Ana Waldner for more food in the munitions factory where she was a forced laborer from 1942-1945. It had belonged to her husband, Chaim, and Ana hid it in the lining of her coat before he was deported from Krakow, Poland. After the war, Hannah tracked down the factory manager to ask for the return of the watch. She believes that he returned it due to fear of being found out and tried as a collaborator by the Russians. Ana and her family were imprisoned in the Krakow ghetto following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, then deported to concentration camps in 1942. She and her husband were deported to Buchenwald, then Ana was sent to a labor camp. Her two sons, Beneck, 11, and Karpeck, 14, were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where they were killed because they were ttoo young to work. Ana was reunited after the war in Poland with her daughter, Dora, 19, who had been a forced laborer. Her husband was discovered in a hospital in East Germany where he died shortly after their reunion in late 1945.