Collection of handwritten letters from Zelda Thaler Lehrfeld, a Jewish inmate at the Internment Camp in Liebenau, Germany. 1943-44. Polish.
11 letters sent from the Liebenau Internment Camp to Krakow, Poland, from May 1943 through February 1944. Most are written on postcards (some belonging to the camp's "Interniertenpost" – prisoners' mail) and marked with the inked stamps of the camp and other institutions. One letter is written on an official prisoners' mail form.
The letters were written by Zelda Lehrfeld, a Jewish woman imprisoned at the Liebenau Camp in the years 1943-44. In January 1945, Lehrfeld was freed, whereupon she immigrated to the United States.
The Ilag V Liebenau internment camp was established in 1940 near the city of Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance in southern Germany, in what was once the local castle. The facility had previously housed the Liebenau Foundation, a nursing home and sanatorium run by nuns for people with special needs, specifically the mentally or physically handicapped, the elderly and the enfeebled. In the context of the Nazi program titled "T4 Euthanasia" – a campaign to cleanse the "Aryan Race" of those deemed "unfit" – from July 1940 and onward, some 510 patients were transferred from Liebenau and murdered at the Grafeneck and Hadamar camps. From then on, Liebenau was utilized as an internment camp for women from enemy countries; citizens of Great Britain, Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, and other countries were imprisoned there. Other parts of the castle were used to house other institutions, including a Wehrmacht infirmary (beginning in 1942) and a relocated department of the German Foreign Ministry.
Also enclosed are a number of additional letters written by Lehrfeld, including ones she sent from New York to Krakow in 1945, and a photograph, apparently of Lehrfeld and her daughters.
Total of 20 items, size and condition varies. Overall good-fair condition. Stains, creases, and tears (including open tears).