Imy (Irma) Nemenoff-Gellert, a Holocaust survivor, has donated to a Montreal museum a jacket she wore while imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Ms. Nemenoff-Gellert donated the rare jacket Monday, her 97th birthday.HO/The Canadian Press
A Holocaust survivor has given a Montreal museum a jacket she was forced to wear while imprisoned, over six decades ago, at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Imy (Irma) Nemenoff-Gellert donated the rare item on Monday, her 97th birthday, in the hope it might serve as a reminder of that dark period in history.
"It was time," Nemenoff-Gellert said of her decision to part with the item.
"It's good for people who come to visit the museum to know what happened during the Holocaust — youngsters, especially."
The Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre hailed the item as a rare find because, after the Holocaust, most prisoners destroyed the clothing that was forced upon them.
The item most closely resembles a thick shirt, but she refers to it as her jacket. It is striped grey and blue, with dark buttons, has no pockets and it carries a tag marked U-609 on the front — the U signifying that she was Hungarian.
She decided to donate the jacket nearly a year ago, but it took months before she and her family could bring themselves to drop it off.
It was a possession she turned to when she wanted to rekindle memories — as painful as they might be.
Nemenoff-Gellert and her first husband were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 in German Nazi-occupied Poland. He was immediately killed while she was selected to work.
Nemenoff-Gellert has told relatives that she believes she survived for two reasons.
First, she spoke several languages and was used as a translator at the camp. Also, she had no children at the time. She told relatives that young mothers were quickly killed off.
Nemenoff-Gellert was moved to Mauthausen, a camp in Austria, from where she was liberated. Nemenoff-Gellert then worked for the U.S. government and the United Nations before coming to Canada in 1946.
Her daughter, Michelle Nemenoff, said her mother kept the article of clothing all this time for deeply personal reasons.
The shirt was the only proof that she'd been in the camp.
"She was (among) the last deportation of Hungarians in 1944 and they were in such a rush that they didn't tattoo any of their prisoners, so this was tangible proof of this horrific event," Nemenoff said. "Not to the world, but to herself."
The shirt also served as a constant reminder that life can always be harder.
"Every time she got blue she'd look at it and she'd know that things had been worse," Nemenoff said.
Nemenoff-Gellert has lived most of her post-war life in Canada in Montreal, after initially arriving in Toronto under a program to bring domestic workers here.
It was Nemenoff-Gellert who hand-picked the Montreal institution to receive the jacket after the family agreed that donating it was the best thing to do.
"It's an awesome responsibility (to hold on to) — it has an essence of its own," said the younger Nemenoff.
"One of my daughters said it's always been hidden and it would have so much more value in a museum."
Julie Guinard, curator at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, says the article of clothing is a rare find because most survivors destroyed their prison garb.
"I was really shocked because that's not something you usually see," Guinard said.
"Photographs, postcards, letters, identification papers, those are much more common in my job as a curator."
The blue and grey striped jacket has, like a shirt, a collar and buttons down the front. The fabric is either a wool or wool-cotton blend and it remains in remarkably good shape.
The jacket didn't have any pockets — not even the secret ones some prisoners fashioned out of bits of fabric. Guinard said Nemenoff-Gellert didn't have anything to put in a pocket in any case.
"I look at our collection, which is about 30 years old, and we only had three (pieces of clothing from that era) before today, so it's still pretty rare," Guinard said.
"Textiles in any collection are very, very fragile and you have to imagine the conditions in which these prisoners were."
Guinard said that parting with the jacket was emotional for the family so it took several months for them to drop it off, which they did Monday.
"She still needed to convince herself this was the right thing and that it did not belong just to her family but to the public to see."