On July 10, a special ceremony took place at the Ravensbrück Memorial: a ring that once belonged to Halina Kucharczyk, a Polish victim of Nazi persecution who survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, was returned to her granddaughters Sylwia and Anna Kucharczyk. One of our #StolenMemory volunteers had succeeded in tracking down Halina’s family.

Watches and wedding rings, letters and photographs – the Nazis stripped concentration camp inmates of all their personal possessions. The Arolsen Archives still keep approximately 2,000 personal objects – so-called effects, which they strive to give back to the descendants of their owners, aided by volunteers. Some of these objects were taken from former prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp and kept by the SS in the personal effects storage room of the camp, Halina Kucharczyk’s ring was one of them.

Halina Łątkiewicz (later Kucharczyk) was born in Warsaw on February 6, 1924, and lived there with her mother. In the summer of 1944, the German occupiers arrested Halina within the context of the Warsaw Uprising and initially deported her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. It is likely that she was imprisoned in one of the numerous sub-camps of the Neuengamme concentration camps later as is suggested by the envelope in which the ring was kept in Bad Arolsen. On May 2, 1945, Halina was eventually liberated by the US army. Shortly after that, she married Stanislaw Kucharczyk, a Polish compatriot, in a camp for displaced persons in Schleswig-Holstein. They returned to Poland together in December 1945. Halina died there in June 1999.

A special keepsake

In the spring of 2025, Manuela Golc, one of our volunteers, managed to make contact with Halina’s family via the office of the local cemetery in Radom. The family visited the Ravensbrück Memorial for the first time for the return ceremony.

Sylwia Kucharczyk was deeply moved and told us: “My grandmother never spoke about her imprisonment. Early this year our father died. Only two months later, I received the news that a ring belonging to my grandmother was kept at the Arolsen Archives. It felt like an act of providence.” The granddaughters had long planned to visit the memorial. When they received the news about their grandmother’s ring, they started looking at her history of persecution in greater detail. For the return ceremony, they brought photographs of Halina and documents from the family archives, copies of which they handed to the Ravensbrück Memorial and to the Arolsen Archives.

The #StolenMemory traveling exhibition stopped at the Ravensbrück Memorial in the summer of 2023, but this is the first time personal objects have been returned to a family at the memorial site.