A bible belonging to a couple who were killed in the Holocaust was found in Germany in 1990 and was returned to their family earlier this month 30 years after it was found, The Washington Post has reported.
It all started in 1990 when a father and son were renovating their new house in Oberdorf, Bopfingen, Germany. As they worked on their home, they discovered a chest hidden behind a double wall in the attic and inside the chest they found a gilded Jewish bible.
The bible weighed about 10 kilos and was some 75 centimeters long and eight centimeters high. Embossed on the front were the words “Die Heilige Schrift der Israeliten” - The Holy Scripture of the Israelites. Inside were illustrations by Gustave Doré, a leading book illustrator of the late-19th century.
The son decided to sell the bible to an art historian on eBay in 2017, after holding onto it for almost 30 years. The historian, Gerhard Roese, saw the bible and realized that it must have historical significance, so he bought it and donated it to a synagogue nearby so it could be restored.
Meanwhile, a search began to find the bible’s owners.
AFTER A FOUR-YEAR search, word of the bible’s discovery reached Jo-Ellyn Decker, a research and reference librarian for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and she devoted herself to finding the bible’s rightful owners.
Decker told The Washington Post that it is common for the museum to research the stories of Holocaust victims, but that returning items to living descendants is “almost unheard of.” In this case, however, Decker got lucky as inside the bible was a postcard that identified the owner as Eduard Leiter.
Eduard and his wife, Ernestine, were a Jewish couple from Stuttgart and the Nazis evicted the Leiters from their home and forced them to move into a house with seven other families. The couple was then moved in 1942 to the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp near Prague.
The Leiters were eventually taken to the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland where they perished, leaving their son, Sali, as the lone survivor of the family.
Decker did not think she would find any of the Leiters’ relations.
“During the Holocaust, entire Jewish families were murdered,” she said. “So, the thought of finding someone alive today that would be related to someone who was killed in Treblinka... is pretty unusual.”
Eduard and Ernestine “must have thought to hide their precious few possessions hoping they would return for them, but they never came back.” Decker told the Times of Israel.
After an extensive search, however, Decker discovered that Sali had moved to the United States after the war and changed his name to Charles. Charles had a son named Max, who had died, and Max had a wife, two children and three grandchildren still living.
Decker soon tracked down one of Max’s grandchildren, Jacob, on LinkedIn and sent him a message recounting the story.
FOR FOUR months, Jacob and his grandmother, Susi Kasper Leiter, herself a Holocaust survivor, remained in contact with Decker and the caretakers of the bible. The two learned more about Eduard and Ernestine’s story, about which they had not known much previously.
The next hurdle was how to get the bible to the Leiters’ descendants. Sending it in the mail was too risky, so it had to be delivered in person. The problem was finding someone who would be traveling to the US and this was not easy due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eventually, staff from the German synagogue where the bible was being held found Steve Macdiarmid, who traveled to the US often for work, and he agreed to take the bible.
The Leiters received their bible on August 12 in Susi’s apartment in Manhattan. August 22 marked 79 years to the day that Eduard and Ernestine were sent to Theresienstadt.
Susi told The Washington Post that the bible made her think of her husband, Max, and how honored he would have been to have seen it.
“I just think that with all the terrible terror and inhumanities in this world, I cannot believe that I have such a pleasure and such magic that I should live to see something that remains of the Holocaust that is good - and that’s the bible,” she said. “There’s nothing else good to remain from there.”
Jacob told the Post that the whole process was meaningful to him but especially so because he went through it with his grandmother.
“I kept saying throughout the process how lucky I am that I have my grandmother to experience this with,” he said. “Just doing this in its entirety with her is something I’ll remember forever.”