Armband handstitched with a red cross and Star of David by a concentration camp inmate and nurse

Annie Rose and Benjamin Levine and their four children, 2 boys and 2 girls, were inhabitants of Sered, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia). Benjamin was a cantor for the synagogue. Annie worked as a nurse in a clinic that operated out of the basement of the synagogue. Although most of the people they treated were Jewish, the clinic offered health care to all who needed it. This region became very dependent on Nazi Germany after Czechoslovakia was broken apart by the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. In March 1942, Slovakia signed an agreement giving the Germans the authority to deport Slovak Jews. Labor and concentration camps were established in several Slovak cities, including Sered. In June 1942, the family was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. Anne and the girls were placed in block 10; Benjamin and the boys were in block 11. Annie occasionally saw her husband through the wire fence that separated the blocks. That September, Benjamin was caught reading the Kaddish over the beaten body of one of his bunk mates. He was tortured, his gold teeth were pulled out, and then he was beaten to death. The next day, their sons, along with other young boys, were told they were being sent to a factory to work; instead, they were sent to the gas chambers. In the spring of 1943, the German guards brought Jewish doctors out of the camps and put them to work in the camp hospitals, alongside their Polish and German colleagues. One of the doctors, Dr. Daniel (Weis?) remembered Annie from the clinic in Sered and asked that she be permitted to help. She began working in the hospital and a few months later, a German SS Rottenfuhrer [Section Leader], Herr Dobrow, made her his private nurse. He had been infected with typhus and required around the clock nursing. Annie was tattoed on the upper right back, instead of the wrists, in order to keep some of the SS men from realizing that they were being nursed by a Jew. Annie was separated from her daughters, Evey and Ruthie, and made to live in the office quarters. On her eighth day there, Herr Dobrow asked her to retrieve a paper from a small box under his bed. In that box, she found her husband’s wedding ring. In his memory, she stitched a Star of David and her initials inside her medical armband. Annie’s daughter, Ruthie, died of starvation in the camp in 1943, a few months after being separated from her mother. Annie and her daughter, Evey, survived Auschwitz and eventually emigrated to the United States.

The armband was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2008 by Barbara Dossey on behalf of the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health, which had received it as a donation in 2000 from the family of Annie Rose Levine.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Nightingale Intitiative for Global Health