The Lost Ring
by John Loftus


In the 1990's, the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg arranged for one of the few surviving Auschwitz boxcars to be shipped over for a permanent exhibit.  It is the only one in America that had not been repainted or cleaned up first by the Polish government. When our curators were setting it up, they found something awful, maybe something wonderful, hidden inside.

It was a little girls ring, well only part of it.  The setting was all that was left.  All four of the gems were gone.  From the silvermarks inside the band, we know that the ring probably existed in Europe at the time of the Holocaust.  We estimate from the size of the band that it would fit the hand of a 10-12 year old girl. That is all we know for sure.

But we suspect that the story of the lost ring is all too familiar to Holocaust survivors.
Here is what we think happened. Somewhere in Europe a brave little girl pullled the gems from her ring in an attempt to ransom her survival.  As she was riding in this very boxcar on her way to Auschwitz, something inside her must have made her realize, that for her there would be no survival.  All her gems were gone, no hope was left. She was on her way to die.

The unknown little girl must have decided that the little empty ring was still precious to her.   We think she slipped it off her finger, put it in a crack in the floorboards and hammered it in to the floor with her heel.  She was not going to let the Nazis have her little ring.  It was her small victory amidst the Holocaust.

By a small miracle, we picked that very boxcar a half century later to bring to the Florida Holocaust Museum.  The little girl's ring is mounted all alone in a special stand.  We tell the children, "Don't be sad that we don't know that little girl's name, or what really happend to her,... Don't be said that her story, like her gems, are lost. They aren't lost.  All of you children who learn about the Holocaust preserve the gems of Justice, of memory, of understanding.  You are the jewels.  Nothing is lost, if you remember."

(John Loftus was the first Irish Catholic President of the Florida Holocaust Museum)