“Holocaust medals”

Seweryn Szperling was born in Częstochowa in March 1940. In 1941 a ghetto was founded in the city. When the boy was 2.5 years old, his parents Michał and Nehama nee Prybulska managed to get him out of the ghetto. They were killed during the liquidation of the small ghetto: they were shot at the Jewish cemetery. Seweryn Szperling was raised by his new parents – Anna and Stanisław Pociepny, friends of his family from before the Second World War.

The Pociepnys were childless. Stanisław dug a hole under their annex – a thick pipe supplied air to the room. The boy spent his childhood there. In the summer he stayed in a wooden barrel dug in the ground among raspberry bushes. He lived through the war there.

In 1970 Szperling emigrated to the US. Last year he wrote a book entitled „A Catalog of Holocaust Medals – A History Etched In Metal”.

The meeting was organized by the Warsaw Department of the Polish Numismatic Society in cooperation with the Częstochowa Museum. Szperling gathered a collection of medals devoted to Jewish martyrdom. His collection – biggest one of this type and famous throughout the world – amounts to over 300 medals, issued between 1945 and 2005 in 14 countries.

Among the most interesting elements of the collection are the medals devoted to Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the deportation of Jews and liberation of concentration camps. Even the biggest museums and Jewish institutes in New York or Israel don’t have such collections.