Charm Bracelet Tells The Tale Of Life Inside a Concentration Camp

Some 140,000 Jews—including numerous musicians, writers and artists—were held in the Theresienstadt ghetto labour camp. Greta Perlman, a young Czech Jew, was one of them. While there she assembled a charm bracelet that documents her four years surviving the Holocaust. Internees were sometimes able to make artworks clandestinely in the camp workshops, but a large group of charms like this is very rare. They were either given to Perlman as personal mementos or collected by her in exchange for food, when she worked in the camp kitchen. She may have gathered the pieces into a bracelet later, in the United States. 

The bracelet is currently on view as part of the newly installed permanent collection at the Jewish Museum of New York. 

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