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, Sara and Hershel, ran a grocery store, and Hershel also taught religion in the cheder (a Jewish school for boys).
They were forced to live in the ghetto, and when Bluma was ten years old, she was taken with her parents and two of her siblings to Auschwitz.
She was then sent to Neuengamme with 19 other children.
Bluma’s mother, father, and two of her siblings died in Auschwitz.
Only two members of the Mekler family survived: Bluma’s elder brother Alter, and her younger sister Shifra. They managed to hide in the Sandomierz ghetto, and then later in a Polish village.
Bluma’s siblings Shifra and Alter, as well as her uncle Juda Taitelbaum and his brother, were all hidden on a farm outside Sandomierz by the Kuras family, whose descendants still live there today.
Before the war, the Kuras family were neighbours with the Mekler’s.
During the Shoah, they honorably risked their lives to save the remaining Mekler members.
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 a mere 8 kg.
Shifra 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.