Metal Cup

"The cup was always with me ."

Metal cup issued to Irene Fleischer Klein at Ravensbrück concentration camp, December 22, 1944.

metal cup

women at ravensbrück

Women at forced labor in Ravensbrück, digging earth and pushing a hopper car along a track, 1940-1942.
sketch

"Getting Food" - a sketch by Aat Breur, member of the Dutch resistance, deported to Ravensbrück, 1943.

Story of the Artifact

"Every morning at 5 AM we had to line up for inspection, five in a row.  That is when gave us our food.   The Nazis called it soup.  I called it a different thing, it was like a dish-washing liquid.  Sometimes they filled up the cup, other times it was only half full.  Sometimes we got a little more at night after work.  I always hooked the cup onto my belt and carried it everywhere with me.

It was with me when I was liberated in Dresden.  By that time, I was very ill with tuberculosis and ended up in hospital.  I could not speak German but by using sign language.  I managed to make it clear that I wanted to keep the cup, that this cup was the only thing I had to have.

Afterwards, I went back to Hungary and found that two of my brothers had survived but my parents and my other two brothers had not.  It is very difficult to have these memories. One day I decided that I did not want to remember anymore.  That is when I decided to donate the cup to the Holocaust Education Centre."

Background

Ravensbrück was a concentration camp for women, located 90 km north of Berlin.  The majority of the prisoners were non-Jewish.  The aluminium cup is a rare example of the few meager necessities alloted inmates by the camp administrators.  Most prisoneres were permitted nothing more to sustain them than a cup or bowl, perhaps a spoon, shoes, and a uniform.  These otherwise ordinary objects were vital possessions, representing the difference between a prisoner's chance of survival and certain death.