A lifetime of memories, horror, and faith—all inside her drawstring purse

It was a simple cotton drawstring purse made of three scraps of material carefully sewn together with small, neat, even stitches. The rope-like band was made of a discarded piece of hemp.

My sister-in-law Jenti smiled as she showed it to me. “I have no idea how I found the fabric,” she told me. She'd been very fortunate to have acquired a needle, but there was no thread. So she had carefully pulled out some strings from her blanket, one of her few possessions. She shook her head.

“Can you imagine?” She pointed to the bag, which measured about 15 inches in length and five inches in width. “Everything I owned, all my possessions — and not only mine, but everything my sister Miriam owned as well — everything was in this bag. And even then, the bag wasn’t half full.”

I'd been Jenti’s sister-in-law for 60 years, yet I'd never seen this bag. We had a close relationship, but there were many things about Jenti I didn’t know. This visit was unusual. I'd come from New York with Michael Scwartz, a videographer who'd come to interview Jenti for Passage to Sweden, a documentary about the events that took place in Scandinavia during World War II.

Gently, carefully, Jenti removed the few items from the bag and placed them on her dining room table. There was a neatly folded German Deutschmark. “That was the only money I had when we left Germany,” she said. “Of course, I held onto it, perhaps I would need it at some point. It gave me assurance that I would continue to live.”

Then there was a small ordinary comb. Jenti held it up, and said with a rather sad smile, “I don’t even know why it was so important for me at that time to own a comb. I always had a very full head of hair, thick and curly, so I always needed to brush it. But when I came to Auschwitz my hair was cut off, so there was no need for a comb. But you know,” she concluded, “I just had such strong bitachon, I just knew there would come a time when life would be different. I always believed I would somehow survive.”

I noticed something that looked like a dog tag. “What is that?” I asked, surprised. Jenti rolled up her sleeves. “Look,” she said, “they didn’t give us numbers. We were brought to Auschwitz Shavuos time in 1944. Everything happened very rapidly. Would you believe that we celebrated Pesach that year in our own home, like always? It’s almost impossible to understand that in Marmarosh [the region where Sieghet and Satmar were located, which was then in Hungary] we were unaware of the gas chambers, of the destruction of thousands of Jews from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and so many other countries. We just didn’t know that this was happening all around us. Soon after that Pesach we were placed in a crowded ghetto with ten thousand people, and after Shavuos the deportations began. Daily transports were brought to concentration camps.

“We were so unbelievably unaware, so innocent, when we left our beautiful home, that we dressed in beautiful Shabbos clothes for the trip. [We] even brought damask linen and bedding, and of course bags filled with food for the journey. When we arrived in Auschwitz my father read the sign Arbeit Macht Frei and said he wasn’t afraid of work. He had owned a big business in Hungary and even had business partners here [in Auschwitz] from whom he purchased wood shavings for his oil manufacturing.

“We exited the train, and on the platform, I remember Joseph Mengele with his white glove directing us to separate left and right. That was the last time I saw my parents and closest family members.

“Would you believe,” she added, “that I saw my sister Miriam on the left line, and I just walked over to pull her across to my line? I just wanted someone from the family to be with me.” I was speechless. My sister-in-law was always a very law-abiding citizen, always paying taxes and bills, never getting traffic tickets.