A valuable memory from Auschwitz? This keepsake from hell, now in a permenant home in Montreal, Canada

By Heidi Kingstone

In the indescribable hell of Auschwitz humanity existed, and almost more extraordinary than the horror was the unquenchable hope – the hope to live, to survive, to be free.

[When Fania Landau Fainer arrived, shoeless, in the death camp as a 18 and a half year old girl a man who recognized her from their home town of Byelestock sp??, they were both members of the Socialist Bund, told her she must do everything to stay alive.]

While thousands of Jews died daily, in the shadow of the smoking chimneys, Landau Fainer not only tried to stay alive, but found that others tried to help her and she tried to help them, something she attributes to her Bundist upbringing.

At the camp she worked at the control table in the munitions factory with a group of 16 young women, and while they monitored production, somehow, amidst the different languages – Polish, French, German, Hungarian, Czech – they managed to communicate.

One day Landau Fainer mentioned that on December 12th, 1944, she would be anold lady – it would be her 20th birthday.

On that day Zlatka Petluk gave her a plate. On it was an extra piece of bread, some margarine, and most profoundly a heart-shaped book made out of paper, a birthday gift from her fellow slave labor inmates.

“I didn’t make a fuss. Getting the heart was normal for me because we acted like human beings and we tried to help each other. What was important was that there were nice people in this hell. I was raised in an organization where you were taught to be nice to people.”

For years I remember Fania’s daughter Sandy talking about this extraordinary gift, which she played with as a child despite her mother’s insistence that she leave it alone. The 4-cm heart is covered in purple fabric. The fabric was cut from the shirt of her friend Zlatka, who lives in Argentina and with whom she is still in touch. When the Germans decided they didn’t want to pay for the stripped concentration camp uniforms – ‘pashaks’?? in Polish – they assigned the clothes of dead people to be worn by the inmates. The purple shirt was one such item.

The 8-sided heart is signed by the women with messages in all the different languages, including one in Hebrew from an Israeli, who had had the misfortune of being in Paris when she was arrested.

On the cover is an embroidered letter ‘F’, an inscription that opens the origami-like book. But for Fania Landau Fainer the most poignant birthday message is the one in Polish that says, ‘freedom, freedom, freedom’. Despite the passage of decades, amazingly enough, many of the messages have never been translated.

“The most important thing is that I’m alive, and normal,” says Landau Fainer, adding jokingly, “not 100 percent normal but normal enough to have raised normal children.”

What most perplexes Fainer is how the heart managed to survive the three months that she spent on the death march from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck. Without hair, shoes, pockets, with no food she cannot remember where or how she kept the heart. What she thinks is that it found a safe place burrowed in the hollow of her arm.

Somewhere on the march a girl who was going to die started screaming that she needed a piece of paper to record her name and that of her boyfriend’s.

Landau Fainer took out the little book where the girl wrote the names. She never saw her again.

After the war Landau Fainer moved to Toronto where she kept the heart in her underwear drawer.

About 12 years ago, Krisha Shtarker, the first director of the Montreal Holocaust Museum and an old family friend, was having dinner with the Fainers. Landau Fainer brought out the heart and Shtarker convinced her to donate it. Although one of the smallest artifacts in the exhibition, it is a major attraction.

The museum reopened in June having updated a 20-year old collection creating a modern museum.

Nothing remains of Fania Landau Fainer’s past life. She emerged at 20 from Auschwitz with not one single remaining family member, no photographs, no mementos. Only the heart. Which perhaps explains her nonchalant response to an item that proved beyond all shadow of a doubt that she was an extraordinarily well-loved woman. For her something too painful to acknowledge. The heart was nothing – and everything.