Hebrew: “Remember what Amalek did to you”
In 1942, German authorities established a forced labor camp in the city of Peterswaldau (now Pieszyce, Poland).1 Two years later, Jewish women from Auschwitz were sent to the camp to work in a munitions factory there. Ida Katie Frankfurter was one of these women.2 In Peterswaldau, Frankfurter, like her fellow prisoners, was forced to make detonators for bombs.3
This silver-plated metal cup was made by Jewish forced laborers in Peterswaldau. Frankfurter believed that the cup was part of a bomb made in the factory, designed to kill or maim unsuspecting people. Another forced laborer at the camp recalls the pain of working on bombs that she believed would be used by the German military against the Allies.4
Conditions in Peterswaldau were harsh.5 Frankfurter recalls receiving very little food, often feeling lightheaded from hunger, and suffering a beating by a female SS guard. Prisoners worked long shifts almost every day, and were locked into the large room at night, without a bathroom. The women hid signs of illness or weakness, fearing deportation to Auschwitz during the frequent selections made in the camp.
Just before the camp's liberation, the camp's SS guards took Frankfurter and two other women into a part of the camp to destroy materials. When they finished, the female guards told the prisoners that they were free.6 Frankfurter took this cup from the camp when she was liberated on May 8, 1945.
In 1989, Frankfurter and her husband, George Frankfurter, had the cup engraved with Katie’s history. Frankfurter’s prisoner number and her maiden name appear below the groove. Beneath her name is a list providing the places of her persecution under Nazism: her hometown, a ghetto, and camps. The date of her liberation appears at the bottom. The significance of Frankfurter's ordeal is also reflected in the biblical verse that her husband chose to have engraved on the cup in Hebrew because of its resonances for him with Nazi crimes: “Remember what Amalek did to you” (Deuteronomy 25:17). This famous verse relates the story of Amalek and his tribe’s attack on the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt, targeting those who lagged behind—women, children, the elderly, and the sick. For some Jews, the figure of Amalek has come to signify the idea of evil.7
The engravings on this cup turn this part of a bomb made by forced laborers in the Nazi munitions program into a different kind of object. While it remains a symbol of imprisonment, it is also a commemoration of liberation. In addition, because of the Hebrew inscription, the material, the polished state, and the dimensions of the cup, it resembles a kiddush cup.8 Kiddush cups are ceremonial objects that are common in Jewish homes. They are meant to hold wine over which a blessing is said on the sabbath.
How does this cup place the experience of forced labor and the Holocaust within a religious Jewish context?9 In what ways does the cup express the Frankurters' memory and understanding of the Holocaust four decades after the persecution?