Bluma Mekler
Bluma Mekler was born in Sandomierz, Poland, in 1934.
Everyone called her Blumele.
She was eleven when she was murdered.
Unfortunately, there is no known private photograph of Bluma Mekler.
The only photographs we have of her are those taken by the SS during the 'medical' experiments.
We have deliberately chosen not to repoduce them.
Bluma had two brothers and two sisters.
Her parents had a grocery store, and her father also taught religion in the cheder, a Jewish school for boys.
They had to live in the ghetto, and when Bluma was ten, she was taken with her parents and two of her siblings to Auschwitz concentration camp.
Then she was sent to Neuengamme with 19 other children.
Bluma's parents, Sara and Hershel (Hersh) Mekler, and two of her siblings died in Auschwitz.
Only two members of the family survived: Bluma's elder brother Alter and her younger sister Shifra. They were able to hide in the Sandomierz ghetto and later in a Polish village.
Shifra, her brother Alter, her uncle Juda Taitelbaum and his brother, were hidden on a farm outside Sandomierz by Polish farmers;
the Kuras family, whose descendants still live there today.
The Kuras family were their neighbours before the war. They risked their lives to save members of the Mekler family during the Shoah.
After the war, Shifra was sent to an orphanage near Lublin, Poland, and a year later to a German sanatorium. At the age of seven, she weighed 8 kg.
She was then taken to the British Mandate of Palestine via Marseille, France, and Alexandria, Egypt, and grew up in Kibbutz Mishmar haEmek, where she found her brother Alter again.
In Hamburg-Burgwedel, a day care centre is named after Bluma.