Tin Pail Made by a Prisoner in a Forced Labor Camp

Shmuel Rabinovitz was only eleven years old in the summer of 1941, when German forces invaded Lithuania and forced Jews in his home city of Kovno into a ghetto. Three years later, Nazi authorities in Kovno deported him to the forced labor camp of Kaufering,¹ one of over 160 subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp.² An older prisoner who was a metalworker in the camp allowed Rabinovitz to work as his apprentice. Sometime between July 1944 and April 1945, the metalworker fashioned this pail for him out of metal scraps.

A pail, bowl, cup, or other vessel was central to a camp prisoner’s survival. Typically made of metal or pottery, such vessels were usually among their only possessions.³ A prisoner’s bowl was essential, remembered one survivor, because it “served intake, output, washing, [and] drinking.”⁴ Rabinovitz’s pail could hold much more than most bowls used by camp prisoners.⁵ It is about seven inches tall and six inches in diameter—roughly the size of a small flower pot. The pail’s larger volume would have made it easier for Rabinovitz to get more food at mealtimes in the camp.

Meals were a central activity in a camp prisoner’s life. Thin soup and a hunk of bread was provided at noon for those assigned to a work detail in Kaufering. Meals were the day’s only break from the grueling work of building German fighter planes or constructing underground bunkers. They also gave prisoners an opportunity to talk to one another and build relationships that could improve their chances of survival. Prisoners often relied on one another to exchange food and other goods. The bonds created while eating could help them to sustain the will to carry on amid the hunger, misery, and danger of life in the Nazi camp system.⁶

Older prisoners sometimes helped teenagers like Rabinovitz. They could teach the rules and routines of prisoner life, and they could impart the skills needed to carry out tasks in camp workshops. Small gestures of generosity could help young prisoners avoid starvation. This pail shows how objects—and personal relationships—could impact a prisoner’s day-to-day experiences and odds of survival.

Shmuel Rabinovitz survived a death march out of Kaufering and was liberated by American troops on May 2, 1945.

Forced laborers at Kaufering built underground, bomb-proof bunkers for the manufacture of German fighter planes, and they also produced the fighter planes themselves. The camp was hastily opened in 1944 to exploit the labor of Jewish prisoners sent to Germany from occupied territories as the Allies advanced further toward Berlin. Few preparations were made to accommodate the prisoners, who were forced to live in earthen huts. For more details on forced labor under Nazism, see the related collection in Experiencing History, Experiences of Forced Labor in Wartime Europe.

From 1944 to 1945, the Dachau camp complex expanded rapidly as German policymakers increasingly exploited prisoners as forced laborers to support German war industries. For more on Dachau’s subcamps, see The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), 448–450.

For more on camp prisoners' possessions, see Noah Benninga, "The Bricolage of Death: Jewish Possessions and the Fashioning of the Prisoner Elite in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942–1945," in L. Auslander and T. Zahra, eds., Objects of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 189–220; Łukasz Posłuszny, "Memory in Relation to an Object in a Context of the Materially Deprived Total Institution of the Nazi Concentration Camp," in B. Törnquist-Plewa, N. Bernsand, M. La Rosa, eds., In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe (The Centre for European Studies, Lund Unversity, 2017), 125–133.

See the oral history interview with survivor Susan Cernyak-Spatz, tape 2 of 3, 11:22. See also Łukasz Posłuszny, "Memory in Relation to an Object in a Context of the Materially Deprived Total Institution of the Nazi Concentration Camp," in B. Törnquist-Plewa, N. Bernsand, M. La Rosa, eds., In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe (The Centre for European Studies, Lund University, 2017), 125–133.

See the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collections for other examples of concentration prisoners' bowls.

Rabinovitz may have benefited from the relatively strong communal ties preserved by Lithuanian Jews deported from Kovno to Kaufering. See The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Vol I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office, edited by Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 490. See also Shamai Davidson, "Human Reciprocity Among The Jewish Prisoners In The Nazi Concentration Camps," The Nazi Concentration Camps (Yad Vashem: Jerusalem, 1984), 555–572.

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